I'd like to say I finished my weekend with these inks on Dave, a second main character from "I Thought It Would Be Zombies..." but that wouldn't be entirely true as it's now technically Monday morning here. (Yawn)
Looking at it now, I think when I sit down to add colors later this week there are a few lines I'd like to bold up... but I'm overall happy with the current result. The core character trio of this comic are all based on friends of mine, but as I've continued to work on the title I'm moving further away from likenesses and toward a more animated style. The characters are becoming amalgams of multiple sources, both visuals and personality, and that's a good thing. For one, it makes me feel less guilty about putting my friends through horrible trials as the story progresses!
I'm really enjoying the little gizmo in the second picture, which is a Clip Studio Tabmate, a bluetooth controller with programmable buttons that works in conjunction with my art software of choice, Clip Studio Paint. I've gotten to use it enough now over the past couple weeks that it feels almost 100% natural, like a Playstation controller does to an avid gamer. My right hand is free to draw while my left hand switches tools, zooms in and out, rotates the canvas, etc. It makes for a substantially better and faster workflow. Any of you fellow Clip users out there, I highly recommend it and let me know if you have any questions I can answer!
Time for bed. I'll see you back here in a couple days with the third and final of our main trio... Julie! And hopefully by the end of the week all three will be in glorious color.
As a reminder, these pieces are planned to be included in a soon to be released art/preview book of "I Thought It Would Be Zombies..." I'll be sending out free digital copies to everyone on my email list which you can sign up for at bryanimhoff.com. Don't worry, I don't spam. I'm far too lazy to send out a constant barrage of emails!
- Bryan "the Imp" Imhoff
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It would be awesome if you released some "behind the scenes" content as premium subscription only content. I would definitely be interested in seeing things like the process of such a character design (how awesome it is btw) and maybe learn some things along the way. I'm not an artist, at all, but curious learner. Either way, i'm really diggin the aesthetic.
Thanks so much, I'm glad you're diggin' it! I can see myself playing around with Liketu's premium features for sure. I've got to consider how I might utilize it. I appreciate the encouragement!
It is a bit early and we've got a lot of work to do to make it a lot more user friendly, but just a thought anyway. Will be following your stuff either way!
I'm also curious, are the main "Explore" categories on the Liketu homepage manual or dynamic based on usage? If the former I'd advocate for an art or illustration tile, and if the latter I guess we'll just have to get more artists posting!
So, the way the categories on explore work, is we have a default list (admittedly from years ago where we first started) and that is used to append to the dynamic list where the dynamic list doesn't have items (if there aren't enough unique categories being tagged by current liketu users)
We will probably do a lot more tweaking to make these context aware. For instance, in "My Feed", the categories are procedurally generated by the categories most used by the people you follow, and if you click on anyone of them, then its the most used categories that are most commonly used with that one. It probably looks a little bit repetitive but we designed it with the assumption that eventually the platform and it's users will have more than enough posts to fill those up.
I personally would like to "explore" more ways of delivering usage dependent categories on the explore page, but we don't track browsing behaviour, only chain behaviour, so we'll have to think about how to go about making that more feasible.
Hey! Yes! I definitely wouldn't forget the face of this handsome man.
The technology and its stuff, it looks more comfortable hmmmm it reminds me of VR controls.
and the small figures in the background?
I've never had VR or anything like a Wii... but you're absolutely right it reminds me of those controllers I've seen! With a little practice it's very comfortable and intuitive.
Those figures are little artist mannequins that are built like very posable action figures to help work out poses and use as reference. They're usually found under the name Figuarts or Body Kun but can be kind of tough to shop for as there are a lot of cheap counterfeits around that don't pose well and fall apart!
Hahahahaa I haven't had them either, (I want to have a VR team, from what I've seen they are great), I imagine that over time using it would be more natural like everything.
I knew of those but of those that were made of wood, but those look very different (more updated). How can I distinguish one from another? As long as I can buy one of those, I'm not going to screw up and end up with shit instead of the tool you're telling me about.
The companies official site just links through to Amazon shops, but hopefully those links would get folks to the proper products!
The couple I have are from this series, they're a bit more anime inspired, particularly the female figure
https://www.shfiguarts.com/category/1/154/SHFiguarts/SHFiguarts-Body-kunBody-chan.html
And then they have a series called "Archetype" which is more expensive and the figures have more super-hero type proportions. (I've got my eye on those...)
https://www.shfiguarts.com/category/12/155/Figma-Figure/figma-archetype.html
And if you browse around the site you'll see that they make all kinds of licensed character action figures that are pretty posable, so if you have some favorite characters you like to collect then the figure can kind of fill two roles! But the plain artist model series I linked tend to be the most posable ones.
Thanks for the links I saw them and saved them, I love them all and I think that to tell the truth I would collect each one of those figurines, they are so many models, wonderful! I think it would be like a child in a candy store, I wouldn't know where to start.
I saw the poses of the ones you want and they can practically be placed as you wish, they also come with various accessories and are elevated too? It can be given quite a lot of utility, it's very cool!
I hope you can get them soon😊.