Beorn 5

Alright, I think I'm about done with the design stage of Beorn, which is great, because I'm also finished with this sketchbook. In the end, going back to the absolute basics of character design really helped figure out his body shape. Square = solidity. Duh.

The final design will probably incorporate elements from a lot of the drawings, which is what usually happens when I go through all this. I think these drawings are more a way of weeding out bad decisions rather than arriving at a final, concrete design.

Beorn 4

I sort of went off a little on these and just started doing strongman body structure. There are some fun ones in there. I think the last page, where the bodies themselves are bigger and thicker are the best of the lot. I used to love watching World's Strongest Man competitions on ESPN2 at like one in the afternoon. That sort of body type has always been interesting to me, where it's not the defined musculature that conveyed the enormous strength of those men, but their sheer size. I'm hoping to get to something like that with Beorn, but on a larger scale. He's what, fifteen feet tall? Twenty? Something ridiculous.

As some of you in the comments have hit on, Beorn IS a really simple character. He's big and he's strong and he's old and he lives alone. The origins of the character are obvious and singular -- Tolkien just wrote a berserker into the story. A giant man with a huge beard who builds long wooden houses and turns into a bear? And his name is Beorn? Alright.

Despite that, I really like the character. The giant bees that he keeps and his weird bipedal dogs that he talks to really seal the deal.

Beorn 3

So, Beorn's coming along. I'm on a better thought-train with these, though I'm still shaking a lot of the dust of a few weeks without much drawing. The checked images are what's workable here. I think there's one on each spread. I struggled through these drawings to make something better than the second drawing in the previous post, and I don't really think I succeeded. I think I'm onto something a little better for his face and something a little better for his attire, but I think these body structures are a step backwards, or at least a step sideways.

A part of me is just sort of burned out on drawing big burly guys with giant beards. I'm desperately trying to find some new ground there to tread.

I'll talk about Beorn's character a little more in the upcoming posts.

I just finished rescanning most of the work from my 2009-2010 sketchbooks in the hopes of compiling some drawings into something you can buy. I have about 150 or so spreads to cull images from, so the book that I put together will have a lot of content. I'm shooting for around 80 to 100 pages and I'm hoping to have it done and for sale in the next few months.

Beorn 2

The good news is that these aren't terrible. I think I'm coming closer to the right body shape; the more realized drawing on the second page is pretty good. I draw a lot of big burly guys, and varying their body shapes is becoming more and more important. I can't have Beorn just being a big dwarf, and I have to differentiate his body shape from the trolls as well.

I'd like to show him with that type of strength that comes from manual labor rather than weight-lifting, with a solid core and sinewy, corded muscles in the limbs. The first drawing on the left is too ape-like, too stupid. I like the one on the right. Let's see where it goes.

Beorn's long, low house is surrounded by hives filled with bees bigger than your thumb, which of course beings to mind one of the ultimate horrors of this world, the Japanese Hornet. Learn more about these living nightmares here. I don't know if the final piece will include them in any, but now's as good a time as ever to get good at drawing hornets.

Beorn 1

These are awful, but it's good to be back.

Beorn is a really simple design that is going to be really difficult to figure out. Big black hair and beard, wool tunic to the knees, bare arms and legs.

The next two pieces (this included) are two of my absolute favorite scenes in the book.

The Hobbit, part six

Surprise! I've been a day late before, may as well be a day early this time.

Ah, finally done.

This post was supposed to go up last month, but I need a little bit of extra time and figured I would save it until now. Instead of finishing it way ahead of schedule like I might have, I put way more work and time in than I wanted to. Ah, so it goes.

I wrote up a nice little post about this scene over at Picturebook Report, so head on over there if you're interested in that sort of thing.

I'm proud of this piece, though I'm not sure that I had fun doing it. Birds are agonizingly hard to draw and it seemed like the drawing and then the coloring just went on and on and on, way past the point of interest. Anyway! Because I put way too much detail in, here are a bunch of detail shots.

I'm not sure yet if I will do a process post for this, since you folks already know how I do things. Maybe I'll do something smaller and show just the myriad of drawings that I did before things ended up as they are.

As always, comments are more than appreciated.

Also, count it! I am officially halfway done with this project.

Eagles 2

Eagles are super hard to draw. I really like stretching them out and making them almost serpentine. Still have a lot of structural stuff to learn and there are a lot of crazy shapes under all those feathers.

Eagles 1

The eagles, like the wolves (wargs) in The Hobbit have always seemed weird to me. I don't know why, but even as a kid I wasn't really ready to believe that these were talking animals. For whatever reason, despite the elves and trolls and dragons, the things that kept sticking out to me were that the birds and dogs talked. It was weird.

By all accounts and purposes these are just regular eagles (and wolves), but bigger and they talk. Seems a little weird. I guess it just seemed really cartoonish, in a bad way. Like I was watching Winnie the Pooh with that talking owl.

I'm hoping to inject a little humanity into this design without anthropomorphizing it and without making it seem like a Disney movie. I originally planned on doing something like the bird people in Zelda, and that may still happen at some point in the design phase.

At this point, however, I'm just getting used to drawing birds. They are some weird things.

The Hobbit, part five: process

It seems strange to say that this was the most difficult installment so far, since I feel that way about every piece. This one was, though. Let's get right to it.A few pages of thumbnails down and I had nothing. Like, nothing nothing. Usually I figure out about what I want before too long after I start thumbnailing and that thread leads me to the final image fairly easily. Not the case! This one required more.
The second set of thumbnails went a lot better than the first, owing probably to the week or two I took off before approaching the image again. I was still really struggling trying to figure out what I needed to show and what I wanted to show. This chapter is about Bilbo and Gollum engaged in conversation with each other. It is about Bilbo being on his own and finding the unknown at the heart of the mountain. I still wanted to show Gollum, because he is interesting. However! Bilbo is more important than Gollum, and I began to realize where the focus needed to rest. The last few thumbnails on the last page are on to something.
I figured out a pose for Gollum that I was pretty happy with, and began trying to build the scene around him, starting with Bilbo. I like doing this digitally because I don't get caught up in the details as easily and can, of course, move things about with total freedom. This didn't work out really well, because I went about it in a stupid way. I went back to my heroes of composition (largely Golden Age illustrators [largely N.C. Wyeth]) and found a particular raised horizon line that I liked. I wanted to incorporate something like that into the image and went back to pencil and paper.
All right, here we are. After a few more hiccups, I had something that was pretty close to accurate there on the middle page. I took that into the computer and started blocking in the shapes, moving things and resizing them as necessary until I had the image on the right.
As with the previous Hobbit piece, I printed out the enlarged digital thumbnail and started drawing right on it. This is printed on four pages of copy-paper, comped together at full size (about 11.25x16.5"). The drawing of Bilbo is unbelievably hilarious to me. Terrible terrible terrible. Anyway!
I gathered some reference of caves and such and sketched out some rocks for the background. I was pretty sure most of those along the edges would be blacked out, but you never know, so I drew them all in anyway.
I'm using a few different Col-Erase pencils here, which I really like. It's nice to be able to work in layers on a single drawing. The sword I drew in Bilbo's hand is really terribly angled, and I wouldn't realize that until after I drew it on the final, and changed it immediately before scanning.
Yeah! Final drawing! I blacked out a few of the rocks in this that I knew were only going to be shown in silhouette. I had a pretty good time drawing Gollum's weird little body.
This is a little extra pencil texture to go in the background.
The flatting process. The basic flats layer is helpful for when I'm blocking in colors, and the more detailed layer is for making selections. I was playing around with a few different adjustment layers and cam across those two color examples on the bottom, which I thought were pretty neat. Neither would work for the final, obviously, but I liked them nonetheless.
I did a quick pass to figure out my values before going into the real colors. This was really helpful, and I feel pretty dumb for not doing it before now. Oh well. Kali suggested that, and I did it because she's a genius. She also helped me out with a lot of the colors. The basic colors I went with are there on the right. The colors always get slightly changed and acquire more depth once I start to add texture and what little traditional rendering I do.
I've explained a few times what goes on in these few steps, so I won't harp on it too much. I select my flats and apply textures on a single layer above my color layer. My textures are mostly from high resolution watercolor brushes and some other custom stuff. The purple and red layers are drawn in where I think shadows should fall and are set to Multiply.
Colors are applied to some of the lines and a few more overall textures are added. The texture layer helps to make the colors a little more cohesive. The levels get adjusted and there we go!

Some details:


And a larger version of the final image for your perusal.
Thanks for reading and for following this project through its trials and tribulations. This is a difficult process, and I really appreciate the encouragement. I hope these posts are helpful.

The Hobbit, part five

"What iss he, my precious?" whispered Gollum (who always spoke to himself through never having anyone else to speak to). This is what he had come to find out, for he was not really very hungry at the moment, only curious; otherwise he would have grabbed first and whispered afterward.

"I am Mr Bilbo Baggins. I have lost the dwarves and I have lost the wizard, and I don't know where I am and I don't want to know, if only I can get away."

I've written a more formal and informative post on the story within this image that you can read on Picturebook Report.

Ok, now that's over.

I've had a long and arduous trip with this image, starting from a design that didn't come easily and a stack of thumbnail drawings inching close to sixty in number, but it's done.

Look for the process post on this image in the next few days, when I can get around to it.

I really wish Gollum were in more scenes in The Hobbit, since I have a lot of fun drawing him and would've liked to show his weird face, but here we are. It was more important to show Bilbo's reaction than to show Gollum, and since Gollum is the unknown enemy, it seems fitting to leave his visage to the imagination.

Thanks for sticking around through all the sketches and the missteps. Wolves and Eagles are up next, and the next final Hobbit image will show up in September.

Gollum 7

I guess I drew these a week or so ago, while warming up for a recent freelance job. That job did some good things for my brain, and these two pages are about the last gasp for this Gollum design. Well, not really the design, but these mark the end of some of the shapes I was using and the way I was thinking about them. This always happens. These drawings and this design and these shapes are all fine (some of them are even good), but they are charmless. I don't want to know anything else about this character because it has no personality. It's not necessarily character design but closer object design. I may as well be drawing a series of lamps.
That's not to say what I'm doing here is much different --it's not. I think my head is closer to being in the right place, though, and the drawings are coming along easier now. I'm thumbnailing the final piece for this guy (40 thumbnails in and still searching), so whatever the final design for Gollum is is what it is. I'll know for certain that it's the final design once I hit Publish Post next Wednesday.

There should be some production work for another project showing up on here before too long, so that will be something different to look at.

I read awhile back that John Lasseter of Pixar liked to say that Pixar's films didn't get finished, they just got released. Da Vinci said just about the same thing about art in general. I sympathize.

Gollum 6

I don't know that I'll ever be satisfied with Gollum's design. I like all the elements, but they just don't fit together in the right way, which leads me to believe that they are the wrong elements. I'll keep going.

Gollum 5

Here is some more process work for Gollum, who is still not quite right. I still have to work out the shapes and proportions in his face, even though I'm not sure how much of it I'm going to show in the final. I need to work out how everything fits together. The second (top image, second from left) and last face drawings are the best on here.

I still have a ways to go here. There are elements that are working but not quite clicking. Good thing I've given myself another month, eh?