Sasquatch

Another small drawing for The Stranger, advertising the Sasquatch Music Festival. This is the first time I have ever drawn a sasquatch (no Yetis either). I am surprised I rode out that fad a couple years back.

AD Aaron Huffman.

Updates

Time for some non-Hobbit updates, folks.

Here is a small drawing I did for an article in the Seattle Stranger about suicide and the Aurora Bridge. Read the article here. AD Aaron Huffman.

Some other small mentions:

-I was recently featured on We Love You So a few days back. It's a really swell blog cataloguing some of the influences behind Spike Jonze' Where the Wild Things Are that now serves as a general site that posts great stuff.

-Even more recently the super-talented Morgan Schweitzer featured my work on her blog, Monster Casserole.

-Last but oh no not least, Irene Gallo of Tor Books wrote a blog post featuring a number of charming and dissenting opinions on the ranking of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings vs. The Hobbit. For some reason my opinion is also there, sandwiched between John Howe and Mattias Adolfsson. You may know some of the other artists: Ted Nasmith, Justin Gerard, Stephen Hickman, Michael Kaluta, Donato Giancola, and Ian Miller.

More Hobbit drawings when I get to it.

Gollum 2

Gollum's getting weirder. Some of these are good, some of these are bad. I'll let you tell me what's what.

I really like that Gollum isn't given much explanation in Riddles in the Dark. It makes it a lot stranger and a lot scarier. Bilbo just wanders further down into the mountain, having escaped the goblins, and finds this pool. The narration tells us that there are other things in the old mountains besides Goblins; things slithered their way in when the mountain was still young and stayed. After being nearly killed by the goblins, Bilbo finds something that eats those goblins there at the heart of the mountain. And on top of all that, it lives by some weird code and agrees to a riddle contest with Bilbo? So weird. Gollum is the strange midpoint between the dark unknown and the familiar.

Gollum 1

A small confession: I am much more attached to the Rankin Bass Gollum than I am to the Weta version. Don't get me wrong, Andy Serkis did a stand-up job and the animation was groundbreaking and it makes a lot more sense in the long run, but come on. What's more interesting to look at? This guy or this guy? Those Rankin Bass guys were out of their minds on a lot their designs, but their Gollum is hilarious and great.

Anyway, Gollum is described as being slimy and dark as darkness, with long thin fingers, big lamp-like eyes and six teeth. He has pockets or at some point in the past has pockets.There are only small allusions to Gollum living outside of the cave and even smaller ones to him previously being a hobbit. I've been thinking a lot about all of the weird versions of Gollum that have cropped up over the years (a bunch compiled by Carson Ellis here), though many of those don't make a lot of sense in my version. I don't think Gollum can be be much bigger than Bilbo, if he has to resort to throttling goblins from the shadows to kill them. I picture him a lot like the corpse of a frog man, or like some little crustacean always between shells.

Only a few of these are alright, but they are a good starting point.

The Hobbit, part four: process

Alright, so, here continues the series of process posts for my Hobbit pieces. I'm going to try to streamline these a bit since a lot of the things I'll be talking about have already been explained about as far as I'm capable. I like to try to change up my process a little in each personal piece so I don't get bored and so things stay fresh.

Obviously, though, everything starts with thumbnails:



At this point I was freaking out a little bit. This was what I had accomplished through Friday, with the piece to be delivered the next Wednesday. I knew the approximate scene that I wanted to illustrate but not the proper moment, vantage point, or action. Kali was away in Chicago so I didn't have her around to help me out (like she always does). Things weren't working in the drawing or the composition, and before a sketch or thumbnail can click, you need to get at least one thing right. When you're working alone and the only eyes on a drawing are your own, it's easy to get discouraged.

I took some time off. I watched Moon, took a nap, got some coffee, and thought about what I wanted. I'm usually an advocate of letting your hand work a sketch out rather than your mind, but when one tool's not working you need to turn to the other. I knew that I wanted the dwarves chained at the bottom of the piece, and that led to placing the viewer amongst them. Once you have one thing working, it's easier to place the rest of the pieces where they need to go. After a few more bad drawings, I hit on something I liked:
I took Gandalf's figure out of the piece entirely, since Bilbo and the dwarves see the sword before they see the wizard. The piece immediately became stronger with the focus narrowed on the dying figure.

Up to this point I was drawing using a few different col-erase pencils, which I had never used before (and you can't tell because these images are in Grayscale). They're really nice to sketch with, since you have a larger range of values and you can really work a single sketch out without obscuring too much. They're also about 50% cheaper than the basic pencils at my local art supply store.

After I solidified a couple of things in the composition, I took the thumbnail into the computer and started moving things around digitally. I'm not 100% comfortable drawing digitally, but it's great in the early sketch phase because you have so much control over everything and can move and resize and play with value effortlessly. These were the thumbnails that I built up, and the numbered ones are those that I sent to Kali for her input.

At this point I was dealing with a slightly different part of the story than I ended up with. Immediately before the Great Goblin is killed, the bonfire is snuffed out and begins spewing blue smoke which shoots sparks into the goblin hoard and kills a lot of them. This is a super cool image and it would have been great to draw all of the goblins in their death throes, but it would have required a lot more work to maintain the clarity of the scene and time was very against me. I changed it a bit and focused the lens even more narrowly on the Great Goblin's death.

I printed this thumbnail at 8.5x11" and redrew things a bit before rescanning and drawing further.
I worked out the Great Goblin's position and the dwarves a bit further and printed it at my working size, which was around 12.5x17.25". I spent some time sketching out the goblin hoard on a few sheets of paper before drawing it all together in a more comprehensive final sketch in light blue pencil on rag marker paper.
Here are my underdrawing and the final drawing, which was done on matte duralar. I really liked how my final drawing looked when layered over the sketch, and I figured I could work it into the final somehow. I remembered this post on Adam Rex's blog about using an original sketch as something of a texture layer under black lines. Adam did it 100x better than me, but it's something I'll be looking into further. This is how the two drawings look scanned:
Having the underdrawing in the final piece roughened things up a little and, I think, helped maintain some of the original charm. I think I ended up setting the layer to Multiply and lowering the opacity a bit. The little "x" marks are in places I intended to fill with solid black. I didn't draw that in since most of my coloring is done with the line layer turned off and it helps me to see where the blacks are going to go while I'm doing that.
Here are my two layers of flats. The first is a simplified layer which I use to block in colors and the second is the one I use to make selections. When I'm trying to figure my colors out, I don't necessarily need the same amount of detail in the flats as when I'm making selections. The simplified flats are easier to deal with when I'm just looking for the general, overall color.

The blue smoke and lack of additional light sources in the scene lent itself to a pretty specific color scheme.
I liked a lot of these alternate color schemes, but none of them were exactly right. Luckily, by this time Kali had returned and could help me out a lot. I usually shy away from cool colors, but it was called for on this piece.
Here are the final colors I went with before going into the rendering and texturing stages. I rendering things out in the same way as usual, but with a few different Multiply layers to add more shadows and depth to the smoke and main figure. I compiled a few of those steps into one image below:
And a few details of the rendering with the lines removed:


The little vertical lines are from a brush that I made from a pencil texture I've used in the past. I really like to turn textures into brushes so I can really layer them on without using a ton of new layers and inflating the file size. I was a little leaner with my texturing and rendering on this piece compared to the last several since I knew I wanted to keep a lot of my black lines and figured that too much texturing and rendering in addition to the black lines would look too messy. In general I am trying to draw more and focus less on digital tricks, and finding that balance is a really interesting challenge.

Here is the final piece in a little higher res for your examination:

The Hobbit, part four

"Suddenly a sword flashed in its own light. Bilbo saw it go right through the Great Goblin as he stood dumbfounded in the middle of his rage. He fell dead, and the goblin soldiers fled before the sword shrieking into the darkness."

Chapter 4: Over Hill and Under Hill

Click to enlarge.

At this point in the story, Bilbo and the dwarves are crossing a mountain ridge when they are are kidnapped by a hoard of goblins and taken into a cavern below. The Great Goblin recognizes the Elvish weapon Thorin carries as one that had slain dozens of goblins and goes mad with fury, leaping up and preparing to devour the dwarf. The great bonfire goes out in a pillar of blue smoke as Gandalf appears and kills the Great Goblin and many of his soldiers and the prisoners beat a hasty retreat.

Phew. That was a tough one.

I mentioned in the previous Hobbit post that I've been trying to work more with my unaltered linework, and that continues here. I'm realizing that there are places where it's appropriate for me to remove lines or color lines, but it's not quite the necessity that I used to feel like it was. I think this piece is more successful than the last in that regard.

I'll make a process post on this when I can, but don't expect it before Monday. I really appreciate any comments that you have on these pieces, as always.

Great Goblin 5

Those silhouettes up there are just warmups to get my hand moving properly, not serious ones. That secret stuff block isn't actually for an exciting new project, but it's from some freelance stuff I can't show yet, so there we are.

Anyway, tooling around with the Great Goblin some more led to these drawings. I didn't spend too much time making these look super nice, since I really need to just get booking on the thumbnails for this piece and needed to work a few things out for my own benefit. Necklace of skulls, wooden leg. Alright, ready to go.

I thought briefly about having the necklace of skulls being of the different races the goblins go to war with or conquer or whatever: Dwarves, eagles, and wargs (though they're buddies, the goblin chief might still want to show his dominance over them). HOWEVER, I have not designed the eagles or wargs and I don't want to shoot myself in the foot in case I come up with cool designs that don't adhere to those skulls. SO, dwarf skulls will probably have to suffice.

Gigantic melancholy and gigantic mirth

A small ink drawing I did for Steven at Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time!, a wonderful blog devoted to drawings of literary figures, both character and authorial.

I've been a big fan of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories for a little while now, (Jose Villarrubia turned me onto the books and some of the early comics) and I'm really particular about which depictions of Conan I like and which I don't. I feel like a lot of illustrators just draw a really muscle-bound guy, a lot like the Schwarzenegger Conan. That's totally fine, but not really what I think the character is about. A much smaller sect of illustrators is able to tap into the actual character and draw something that is more along the lines of Howard's descriptions. Frazetta did it, Buscema did it, Brom does it, Gary Giani did it, and Tomas Giorello (who does the current Conan series) does it pretty well.

I always, always picture Conan just covered in scars, old and fresh. He's the toughest guy in the world, but never one to shy from a fight and certainly not a guy who's going to worry about parrying every minor hit. Conan is strength and impulse more than technique in his younger days, and I imagine he's had his face smashed in more than once.

I hope to do something Conan related eventually.

Great Goblin 4

I couldn't resist doing some more silhouettes for the Great Goblin here. More of these are working, I think, specifically 12, 14, 15, 17, and 18. I've got some stuff in mind for clothing and armament, so I should have some of that stuff up before too long. I'm still not quite sure whether I like the larger, more impressive horns or the smaller ones. They both say different things about the character.

Have you guys been looking at Picturebook Report? Kali and Andrea put up some crazy good pieces in the last couple of days. Can you believe we're doing all of this for you? It is sometimes hard to believe.

Great Goblin 3

Some silhouette exercises, numbered for your (and my) convenience. I like doing these because they're quick and helpful, letting you make easy decisions about posture and shape without putting in all the little details. I took a class with Brian Ralph in school and he really hammered home the value of silhouette drawing.

I think 3, 6, and 8 are my favorites so far, but let me know your thoughts. Also compare these to regular goblin silhouettes (here).

More soon.

Great Goblin 2

The facial structure of the Great Goblin is making more sense to me the further I go into the design. I'm pretty confident that I've hit on something I can live with, but there's a certain joy to drawing further once you've happy with a design. You never know what you're going to stumble upon, and even if it leads nowhere, well, you can always backtrack.

I didn't draw any caps or helms on these guys because I want to focus more on their physical shapes. Those things will be added in later in the design process.

I suppose I'll be heading into silhouettes and armament for this guy soon, if not right away. I'm beginning to think a little further down the line to the next design I have to tackle, and that can be a little dangerous. I don't want to get complacent or over eager to move on without giving this guy the attention he deserves.

I've been reading a lot of the articles over on Temple of the Seven Golden Camels, which has been helping me keep my mind in order while I draw. Now that I'm on my own and no longer in school, there's no one to really kick me if my drawings start to get flat or if I start to get lazy in one way or another. The series of posts called "A Kick in the Head" (beginning with this one) has been especially useful. I forgot to draw the little arrows letting you know the order in which I drew those Goblins (top left, middle left, bottom left, top right, etc.), but I think you can tell that I started thinking a little bit more from the third drawing on. When the drawing is sound the design is easier to come by.

Also I am reading Making Comics by Scott McCloud. Take from that what you will.

Great Goblin 1

Designing the Great Goblin, the chief, king, warlord, of the goblins in The Hobbit has been an interesting thought process for me. In some ways it's just taking elements from the previous goblin design and expanding on them, making things larger and meaner and all that. In other ways, it's developing the concepts of goblin physiology and implementing those upon the original design.

There in the shadows on a large flat stone sat a tremendous goblin with a huge head, and armed goblins were standing round him carrying the axes and the bent swords that they use.

-Over Hill and Under Hill, The Hobbit

That's the extent of the book given to describing the Great Goblin.

I've been thinking of the goblins as having some sort of physical development that kicks in once they hit adulthood. Because they are so warlike and so violent, very few actually reach full maturity and become these larger and more powerful creatures, which would naturally obtain some sort of leadership or even deification within the tribe. These are the Great Goblins, who rule their colonies, lead in their wars, breed with the gross goblin women, and pass on their superior genes. They also have the darkest, reddest caps.

I am still playing around with how I signify these changes in the design, and specifically how I add them onto the base goblin design. I like tusks and horns, since those are developments that exist in natural animals and signify maturity. I'm also expanding on the pig/bat/mole-like nose that the smaller guys have. The second page up there contains a few solid jumping-off points.

In other news, Picturebook Report has gained a new member in Chuck Groenink! Good news for everybody.

I also have to direct you to this post on Kali's blog, which talks about the amazing sketchbooks sent to us by Mel Chao and Mark Grambau of To Boldly Fold. It is truly an amazing piece of work, and for someone whose artistic talent stops at two dimensions, seeing the care and craftsmanship that goes into these books is truly humbling. I will talk more about the book once I start to work in it.

Goblins 6

I tried out some weirdo bird/turtle Goblins, which were pretty funny. I couldn't picture them singing, though, so that wouldn't work. The final design is the checked face on the last page, though a few of the other ones will work with a few tweaks. This was a strange process. I threw together a lot of animal parts I wanted to use and blended until I couldn't really see them anymore. Add a little raccoon tail and a bandit mask and we're good to go. Moving along, then...

I had some fun drawing more Goblin weapons on that last page. A few of them work and a few of the last batch work. I really like the cleavers with the big teeth and the fatter blades, as well as some of the little daggers.

Great Goblin's up next.

Goblins 5

Here are some terrible Goblin drawings to make your Friday more hilarious:



I took several steps back to reevaluate the Goblins, and maybe now I'm approaching something even remotely correct. The lower left drawing on the last page is where I'm at now, which is alright. I spent a couple pages up there knocking off King Mignola (who has a lovely new website), which got me somewhere, I think. Maybe not. Hmm. At least their caps are fitting better.

There is also a frustration-cthulhu up there, which is a great thing to draw when things aren't going right and you need to blow off some visual steam.

There's a part of my that wants to give the goblins a weird tapir snout, so we'll see where that goes. So far all of these design explorations have stopped at about 5 installments, but I'm going to be passing that with this one. Man. I still have to do exercises for the Great Goblin before the next piece, also. Pfffff.

The Hobbit, part three: process

Here I am now, one quarter of the way through this project. Things are coming together pretty nicely, though I'm about to pass the point to which I have concept drawings. Goblins are next on the docket, and I am still designing them, so....things should be getting interesting!

Anyway:

I spent a lot of time thumbnailing this piece. I very consciously spent more time than usual at the thumbnailing stage in an attempt to make things easier on myself this time. It certainly made some things easier, or at least not as stressful when drawing didn't go well. It's easier to settle down after doing a lot of bad thumbnails than after doing a lot of bad full-scale drawings. LESSON LEARNED.

I actually ended up putting the drawing down for awhile at this point, which was great, although it pinched the deadline a little. I was struggling through the thumbnailing process and wasn't getting anywhere, so I needed something to kickstart my brain.

I took some time to really put things together in my head a lot more than I usually do and drew this almost immediately upon returning to work after my short breather. I really like to draw my environment by hand and then place figures in digitally, since I can move and resize them easily. I also don't risk irreparably mucking up the drawing.

Alright, at this point I'm drawing on drafting vellum (more on that later) at 8.5x11" to get things more finalized. Trees are great to draw since you can place branches basically anywhere you need them to shore up your composition. On the other hand, it's also shockingly difficult to draw a convincing tree that doesn't specifically look like you calculated exactly where you needed to place branches. It's a tight balance. I had sycamores on the mind when I drew this, but the trees are described as being either Beech or Oak, so I tried to hit it somewhere in the middle.
Once again, I'm combining my drawing with Photoshop to decide where things need to go. I ended up eliminating the male elf on the left almost entirely, since he threw off the balance. Photoshop also made it really easy to block in where I wanted the leaves to be so I could draw them more spontaneously when it came to the final.
I'm drawing on rag marker paper at full size here, one step before the final drawing. I spent most of the time here further blocking in the leaf clusters and decided what the main elf's face would be like. I have a book of Klimt's drawings on my desk that nine times out of ten I reach to whenever I'm having trouble drawing women.
Here is the final drawing before it's scanned. This was my first time using pencil on duralar, which I mentioned in the previous blog entry. I'll touch on my paper preferences later on in the post. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to add more tone into the drawing and work in less layers than I usually do. It was a little disorganized but ended up giving me a real sense of satisfaction when everything was in its place. I ended up redrawing a bit of the girl's hair digitally, since the movement was off.
My flats on the left and the colors I worked with on the right. I try to keep the flats on my own work pretty wacky colors so I don't subconsciously start to think about my final colors while I'm doing them. It's really to make sure that my selections are clean and simple. This is the first blue sky I've drawn in recent memory.
I've mentioned in previous process posts how I texture my shapes, represented here on the left. This is the main point at which depth and richness get pushed into the colors. The middle image is a new step for me, which I'll incorporate into future pieces. I took scans of a few different pieces of ratty old paper and combined them into one texture. I erased parts of it out where I wanted the texture to be cleaner and then set the layer to Soft Light over my rendered layer. The change is subtle, but it ends up adding a lot of fun little irregularities.
I'm coloring my lines less and less in these illustrations, and leaving a lot of the original black in the finals. I mentioned in the first process post how I isolate my lines to color them, so I won't reiterate that here. The image on the left shows my lines and the one on the right shows how they look over the drawing at this point.
This is another texture layer I applied, made with powdered graphite and a wide brush (and my fingers). I erased about 50% of the texture from the main tree trunk, since I liked how things looked already. The rest of it was colored based on what it sits on and the opacity was turned down to about 25%. This just breaks up some of the obviously "digital-looking" paint strokes and unifies the colors a bit.
Here I've added a layer of light, desaturated purple set to multiply to add some simple shadows.

This is a separate drawing of some leaves that went over everything. I did it separately so it could be colored simply and quickly.

And here is the final image after a few adjustment layers. I also added a small design to the wind chimes.

On paper types:

Here are the four paper types I typically use, laid out to show their different opacities. I also sometimes use vellum bristol, which you already know is totally opaque.

-The copy paper is super cheap and crummy. I use it for sketching outside of my notebook.

-The rag marker paper comes from Borden and Riley and I buy it in pads of 11x14 and 14x17". My local art store doesn't carry it anymore, so I have to buy it online and so use it less than I used to. It's tough and semi-translucent with a medium tooth. It's a bit light and tends to crinkle a little more than I care for, but it's solid and takes pencil very well. It scans fairly well, but I typically add a piece of opaque paper behind it when I put it on the scan bed.

-The drafting vellum (sometimes called design vellum) I buy is the closest paper I could find to the Borden and Riley rag marker paper. It's slightly more translucent and a little less liable to crinkle, though the tooth is slightly different and it doesn't erase quite as well. I buy it in pads of 9x12" and go through it quickly. It's great for comping images together and I sometimes use it for finals.

-Duralar is the newest addition to the bunch for me, and so far I like it a lot. It's tougher and heavier than the other papers and more translucent, though there is almost no tooth to it and it tends to smudge easily (which also means that it erases very easily). I buy it in large sheets and cut it down. It tends to smooth out pencil lines, which I like, and registers faint lines very well. I'd compare its surface to the surface of a Wacom tablet (to the point where I got deja vu while flatting my image). It scans very well.

I can't say how these surfaces react to other media, since I really only draw in pencil outside of my sketchbook.