Sketch Vomit

So I'm going to try to keep up with a blog finally starting with this drawing of Nariko from the Playstation 3 game Heavenly Sword. I had been in a real artistic slump for months and months now producing very little that I would consider acceptable let alone something good enough to put in my professional portfolio. I used to draw constantly with no real direction or intent. I'd just draw whatever random thing came to mind once I had already started to put pencil to paper. They were usually monsters or comic book heros but the point is my approach to drawing has completely changed.

I feel like I've gotten a little too much structure from school. A blank sheet of paper is intimidating now because I feel that whatever I do with it, it needs to be good and if it's going to be good it needs some direction. At least that's what goes through my mind. I know that's really a load of rubbish but I guess that just proves that I do have a feminine side. So I've recently started forcing myself to just sit and start drawing before I have time to think about what I'm doing.

One of my early teachers Marshal Vandruff had recommended that we keep an "I don't care" sketchbook. Something that we could draw in and not feel the need to make every sketch and drawing perfect, we don't need to fear all the crap that may flow from our implements of destruction after all, even the best artists have at least 10,000 bad drawings in them. "Better out than in" as they say. Hence the name, "Sketch Vomit."

So I started this drawing as a random female character portrait with no intentions of making a finished drawing. I was just sketching trying to get out some of those vomitus sketches out of me, but it started to take the shape of something good. I liked where I was heading and so I started to give myself some direction now that it was heading in the right direction for a more "finished" drawing. Just so you know, I've not taken any drawings to a level that I would consider "finished" in well over a year. I've been working on animation related stuff so I've been working roughly without any real detail. I was just getting the point or idea across and leaving out all the time consuming work that was unnecessary.

So my sketch is taking shape and I know that I want to take it somewhere at this point but don't know what exactly I should do with it. Being a portrait with minimal room for a figure it could become anybody I wanted and I could go back in and change whatever features I needed to in order to make her someone specific. So I thought about who I should turn her into. She could be a comic hero or villain but I haven't been reading comics much lately so no one came to mind. Then I remembered that I had a small list of characters and other "fan" related art that I wanted to get around to eventually and I remembered that I had always wanted to draw Nariko from one of my favorite games, Heavenly Sword.

The thing about Nariko that stood out to me was that when I had first seen images and video of her character in the game I believed that she was based almost entirely off of a real life actress or model. Everything about her seemed too perfect in it's imperfection to not be modeled after a living, breathing human, unlike a certain tomb raiding heroine who could put Barbie to shame. But aside from her motion performance based acting she was in fact entirely hand made and that fascinated me. She started life as an artists quick sketch and ended up being one of the most beautiful and believable (aside from her hair which seems to be self-aware and have a life of it's own) female characters in any game.

So I pulled up my reference images that I had saved for just such an occasion and started to define the character. It's been a long time since I have had this much fun drawing. Don't get me wrong, I love to draw but for me, this one was like riding Space Mountain, my favorite ride.

So after a good hour or so I ended up with this sketch.


At first my animators mind thought that I would leave out the pattern on the costume as it patterns are a lot of work to draw and such things would be avoided like ebola in even the most ambitious traditionally animated film but then I realized that I had no intention of animating this and I was having too much fun to leave it unfinished like that. Of course the other reason I considered leaving it out was the fact that the actual pattern used in the game was unavailable to me and so I would have to create something myself from scratch based on some early concept drawings. I used the basic curved shapes and pattern that had loosely been laid in on one concept image and built on that.

At this point I decided that I would clean up the line work and give better definition as to where the line really were in the image and to do that I would use a technique I had learned from Gnomon instructional DVD. I would first draw directly on top of my sketch with a regular pencil essentially putting black lines over the red lines of the rough sketch.

What I ended up with was this.


Now I would scan the image into the computer which had to be done in two parts as I was working on 11x17 inch printer paper and would put the two parts together in Photoshop. Then, continuing in Photoshop I went into the color channels settings where the three primary colors red green and blue are separated and I deleted the green and blue, leaving only the red information which basically eliminates all the red sketch lines leaving only the black pencil lines.


Now I can easily add color to my image but before I could do that I would need my color pallet to work from. I once again went to my resource images and selected colors from the official studio artwork to help me find my colors. My drawing is a lot more cartoony than the hyper real stuff of the game studio Ninja Theory so I only needed a handful of colors and I simply used the paint bucket tool to block in the base colors. I then used the pen tool to create shapes and paths that I could use to fill in the shadow areas as well as the little bit of highlights in the lips and eventually ended up with this.


I could have called it quits at this point but being one who is never fully satisfied with his work I felt that there was more I needed to do. First up is the background. While I was not too lazy to draw in the costume detail, I am too lazy to draw in background details so I just wanted to go with a simple flat color behind her but what I've got isn't working well enough. It's value is too light and too close to the value of Nariko's skin tone and costume colors so while it makes the deep red hair stand out, her skin and costume can blend in with it too much. I needed something that would make her whole figure stand out from the background. I ended up once again going back to my reference images looking for the colors used in those images and went with a darker brown that would not only make her hair pop out from it but the rest of her would stand out in great contrast from the background as well.

I also decided that I still wanted to incorporate my original sketch lines as a sketch has a certain vibrance and energy that is too often lost in the cleaned up image. So I opened up the scanned image with the black pencil lines and dropped it on top of the colors and set the layer to multiply. This not only returns much of the lost energy from the original sketch but it also adds a whole new level of depth to the image by adding texture.


In the end I'm very happy with the way this drawing came out, something I rarely feel and can say about my work however good it may really be. I also had a lot of fun making it. I hope you like it too and I hope you found this entry at least a little insightful or interesting. Shoot, I hope it made sense.