Dec. 17, 2013 - Fullmetal Alchemist Edward and Kimblee

Took a side step from the traditional studies to do something a little more complete.  Gestures and forms and values are all very important aspects of art, but so to is line art and coloring, which I know very little about either of those haha.  I needed something to color and I just recently finished watching Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, so I figured why not start there?  So here's Ed!

I only used character reference for this one, I wanted to see how I could do on pose and proportion.  I like how it turned out, I do think the proportions are a bit off for the character, and the head might be a bit small, but overall not too bad.  I don't draw without reference very often, but it is a thing I need to learn.  A very interesting thing about reference that I heard from an art podcast a while back is that the more you use it, the less you need it.  It's like saving the images and concepts into your memory.  Recalling them, however seems to be another challenge on it's own.  It seems to be a delicate balance of studying from reference and putting  to use what you've learned and remember.  I can't say exactly how long this took, but I will be doing more colored work in the future, hopefully crammed along side my figure studies.

Next up is Kimblee!

Requested by my good friend shaunzy.  I wanted to push this pose a bit.  I didn't feel the first pose (the first image) really pushed anything and just played it a bit safe.  I tried a bit of twisting and such.  I dont know how well it payed off, but I really like the end result.  Again, I tried not to use reference on this one for the pose or figure.  I thiiiink i did a pretty good job on this one.  I did however really mess up the line work on this.  I wasnt sure exactly sure how to tackle this one and ended up using the line art as more of a sketch thing towards the end.  I also think the coloring job on this one (and perhaps as well as the first one) are flatter than a pancake.  Moreso on this one than the first because of his almost entirely white color scheme.


And because I like this kind of stuff, here are the original sketches.

I have no idea why kimblee was so much smaller in this, perhaps my zoom was off or something.

Line/ink layer.

 and because this made me laugh, here's the ink layer without the line.  Look at eds face.