BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Yak

by on December 23, 2010 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Blog Entries

Once I had the general look of the Ciceron Yak down, I spent a little time refining it, especially the head. Again, I pretty much liked all of the designs to some degree, so it all just came down to which one I liked best. Interestingly, in these sketches and in some of the earlier pages of the actual story art, the yak always looked a bit weird to me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but they were just off somehow. And then I realized it…necks! I had been drawing them without necks! Once I figured that out, they started to look much better to me, but in the early pages, you can still see them looking weird.

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BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Yak

by on December 16, 2010 at 12:01 am
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The Ciceron yak were pretty fun to design since every sketch had something going for it. It’s pretty rare that I like something about every concept and then just have the luxury of picking the one I like the most. More often it’s, “Ugh, ugh, horrible, okay, ugh, that’s it!” The main thing with the yak was settling on something that looked big and bulky without looking too aggressive. Some of the designs ended up looking a bit more domesticated than others, so those are the ones I went with.

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BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Ciceron

by on December 9, 2010 at 12:01 am
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After ditching the idea of the multi-trunk trees, I tried to at least make some free-standing trees that looked a bit different and alien. I do like the diamond-shaped designs at the bottom, with the dense top canopies and sparser branches below that form the bottom halves of the diamonds. In the final art, I don’t think I ever really followed through and showed much of the trees.

On this page, I also did some other types of shrubs and growth on Ciceron, not that many of those made it into the final artwork either.

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BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Ciceron

by on December 2, 2010 at 12:01 am
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More sketches for the look of Ciceron. I really liked the look of the top-heavy mushroom-shaped rock formations, since they seemed very weird and alien to me. Now that I think about it, I never really drew any of the larger free-standing formations. Mostly the rock formations in the story are all of the bigger, mountainous variety. Bummer. Some free standing ones would have been cool to see.

I also did some sketches here for the Ciceron trees. I thought it would be interesting to have trees that develop supporting structures, given the snow loads they have to carry. But early on, I realized that it would be a real bear to try to draw those kinds of trees, especially in the foreground, since they would end up blocking too much of what’s behind them due to their oversized footprints.

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BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Ciceron

by on November 25, 2010 at 12:01 am
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It’s catch-up time!

The next few sketchbook pages are some of the earliest designs I did for the Snow Job story arc to try to settle on the look of the planet Ciceron itself. I knew I wanted the story to take place on a snowy planet, but I didn’t want it to look like Hoth. So I decided to give the planet some wooded and rocky areas instead of just having huge expanses of snow. Plus, for a story that had the crew tailing another group for a bit, I guess you kinda need stuff to hide behind.

This page was mostly about drawing real-life rock formations. As I mentioned in an earlier post, if I have a starting point in my head, I like to get it down on paper so that I can then go from there and either draw inspiration from it or deliberately try to make it different visually.

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