Glaivers

Not exactly new. These are modified from one of the previous generation of stick figures. One of the better ones, but I was going through another detail-inflation phase so a few parts had to be scaled back.

I thought of the original as a "dragon knight", hence the scalloped armour and weapons. Don't take that too seriously though - they're generic designs. I don't have anything interesting to say about the linework. The colours on the other hand...

The top row are what I come up with if I have a blank white screen and a default palette. I always slip into default R, G and B. Boring. The green one is ok, but they're all too Lego-coloured.

After getting annoyed by the Lego colours I redid them from interesting-looking colour palettes I found online in places like http://chromaa.tumblr.com and http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes and I'm a lot happier with the look. I wasn't slavish; I kept #3's red weapon for example.

I was deliberately restrained with the shading details. I want to use flats whenever I can get away with it. However I did shade the fleshtones, for the first time. I think that's a big improvement and something I want to keep up going forwards. It fixes a long-running problem I was having with skin tones not looking like human skin because they had no depth of colour. Faces are important and deserve extra attention. I'm still sticking with the uniform oval-shape and line-eyes, but I suspect it's only a matter of time before I give that up for flexibility, expression and character.

Swamp Hunters

They hunt swamps? I don't have a clear identity for these guys. They're a revamp of a last-gen figure I'd labelled as a skull-clan archer (#1's head on #2's body is almost the original). They feel like outdoorsmen or survivalists.

Bows are awkward because they put a lot of lines across the torso. This limits the detail that can go on the figure's clothing before it becomes cluttered. Also you really ought to give archers a quiver, which you might notice I failed to do here. I don't have a good justification, I just couldn't find a neat place to hang one.

#1's has kneepads because I liked how they made his boots femur-shaped. That's not a great reason, but it is the reason. When I coloured him I was thinking "chicken".

#2 I consciously dressed up in natural materials, then gave him the compound bow to mess with that. I like his little mantle.

#3 got away from me. He still seems like he needs something more interesting than just trousers. I tried a hanging sash, flowing cloak or loincloth but it didn't stick. And the colouring stage wasn't much easier. I repainted that sash so many times... I wanted the rest of his clothes to be neutral, naturalistic colours so the sash had to be his point of interest. Nothing seemed to work right though. The West Ham-coloured pattern is ok I guess. Maybe I should have tried to give him a better gimmick with the linework.

In contrast to a lot of my recent characters, there's barely any shading detail on these. And I'm okay with that. They didn't need it.

I spent too long writing this and now my tea's cold.

Pistoliers

I was trying to do a new pirate, because honestly so far the pirates have been pretty shit. I think almost all of them need to be redone. And as a lot of my figures do, it turned out looking pretty androgynous. And since all the other pirates are male, I decided I'd roll with it and make the gunslinger a woman.

It's interesting to me that I seem to have settled on hips, thighs and shoulders as the distinguishing characteristic for women. I didn't set out with that as my plan; it was just the path of least resistance.

So as it happens when I was done with them they didn't look much like pirates any more. Far too well-dressed. Maybe they're first-mates or something. Or I might put them in the "generics" folder. Whatever.

Number two has literal hand-cannons, which amuse me. The iron sights on #3's guns are cute, because they're "free" in terms of line count, though they do require an extra node because they break the rectangle.

The gun barrels have three shades - a shadow layer and the usual metal shine. I think that, unlike flat metal, they really need that third shade to give a 3d impression.


Colours took ages to coalesce. #1 was based on a my little pony and it was all downhill from there. The result is three colour palettes I don't usually use. I'm getting more adventurous with colours and I like it. The purplish "highlight" on #2's hair is cute and gives it an interesting texture. I think that's a technique I can exploit elsewhere.

Halberdiers

An old design fixed up to a higher standard. I can't remember what inspired this one specifically, but i remember being disappointed that it didn't turn out properly. Well, whatever it was they're ok now. They're not part of any theme I can think of, so they'll go onto the pile of miscellanea.

The detail I'm most fond of #1's scarf. I even managed to exercise restraint with the fold on the hanging piece and leave it to colour detail. #2's fur collar/snood was tricky; I liked the shape but it took a few tries to get a detail that gave it the right texture.

Colouring was hard. It took a real effort to get them nice and bright. #2's palette is a bit of a mess and I don't know how I could rescue it. I'd probably need to start over from scratch on that one. #3 is weird, but in a good way. The base colour of his trousers/sleeves and his tabard-thing is closer than I like two colours to be on the same character, but it worked really well even before the gold detailing.

For the weapons I made sure that they all had a hooked part. I wanted them to be obviously funky polearms without looking like axes.

Wallopers

I was looking through my "fragments" file of abandoned projects that might yet be salvageable. And I started tinkering. These are the result. Burly punch-men. You can tell how old they are because they have those tiny feet. I haven't used those at all in this generation of veeps until now I don't think. Maybe I should - frees up space. Especially effective when I want to emphasise the upper body.

Highlights: the way the lines on #2 create that burst leotard. #1's cigar and scars. #3's jawline
#3 lets the side down here. He seems to lack pizzaz and I didn't know what I might do to rescue him. It happened at the colours-stage. Before that he looked pretty cool. Maybe it's just that the leopard skin and scarring worked so well that he wasn't left with anything. I thought about a design on his T-shirt, that would give detail. But what he needs is character. He looks like some kind of diner thug or trucker. Boring.

Ho hum.

Hydrocore

Meet the hydrocore. I like elementals, but I'm trying to make them more interesting by not making them "pure". For example, the pyrovile isn't just made of fire, he has a skeleton. The zephyr king is... is... ok he's pretty generic. That's why hydrocore has a fleshy eye and a strange heart-organ.

He took for fucking ever to colour. I feel it was worth it though, I stepped up my game for him and the colours make him four times better than his linework. I was tired at the end when I did the splash of foam he's sprouting from, but I think that's passable.

The pose isn't perfect but all in all I'm pretty happy. I guess he could be brighter - the linework blends into the dark areas a bit.

I don't have a theme for him to live in. I just did a sketch and I liked it enough to complete it. I guess he could go with the brine cultists, but I'm not keen. Something will turn up.

Now I'm going to try and do some more architects.

PVC cheeseborg

Another refurb. The "PVC cheeseborg" was one of the later MK2 veeps I did, and also one of the better (in my humble opinion). I barely changed any of the original lines when I returned to it.

Leftmost is the original. From the moment I drew him, I imagined his pointy trousers being shiny yellow plastic. With the cutouts it became obvious to me that his name was "PVC cheeseborg". The "borg" part made sense at the time.

No shared theme here. These guys are generic characterful (oxymoron?) sword-havers. I decided #2 was armoured in some kind of scaly leather, hence the texture. The colour scheme took ages to get working though and it's still only just acceptable. With #3 I continue my inexplicable fascination with people in plate-mail leggings. He was this close to having a belly shirt too. No idea what it says about me that I keep trying to give men bare midriffs and metal trousers.

Very happy with #1's colour scheme. The grey bits were originally red and they looked nice, but I'm so glad I tested the grey. #3's eyepatch was an indulgence. They're such cheap and easy head-detail that I have to ration my use of them.

There's not as much variation in the swords as there might have been. They all needed to be long, slightly curved and relatively thin because of the pose. Because they go behind the head the middle part of the blade can't have any important details that might get lost behind a hat. I'm mostly happy with them, but I regret making all the blade/hilt joins boring. It might have been interesting to blur the line between those components a little. A sword where the blade becomes the hand-guard for example, or a hilt that extends up along the back of the blade.

Revamps are a good idea since I'm still having trouble with new sketches. I do want to go back and revisit some of the earlier stuff I posted on this blog, but for now I'd prefer to do as much new stuff as I can. If I ever wind up using these guys for anything, then I can get all perfectionist.

More culting

Yet more robed cultists. These ones aren't coastal though. The masks make them look like spider-cultists. Maybe underneath the robes they're even hideous gangly insecty bastards themselves. Who can say. I haven't decided yet.

The basic robed cultist outline here is a pretty generic one, and if I decide that I need some generic cultists I may well adapt these guys and just swap the masks for faces.

The colours are pretty wishy-washy. barely any unity across them except the eyes. But since I haven't decided what these mysterious hooded figures are for, this was more like three tries to see what colour scheme might look good than anything serious. Thinking about it now, maybe a sandy-coloured beige or ochre would work, and set them apart from the sea cult with its desaturated greens, blues and purples.

Truth be told they're all, linework and colour both, a bit of a rush job. I've been concentrating so much on the cute little icons lately that I suppose I wanted to prove to myself that I could still do figures. Tomorrow I'll decide they suck and redo them. That's been a productive attitude in the past.

Quiver filler

Utterly generic and characterless. Filler. They'll do as practice if nothing else. I'll probably come around to liking them in a day or two - that seems to be the usual cycle of things.

I don't think I've used a longcoat as a variant feature before - it's always been a base part of the character. So that's good. And #3's outfit turned out nattier than I'd hoped. #1's ended up looking rather plain after I put so much flash on his brothers.

Not much in the way of meaningfully swappable parts unfortunately, but that might be a consequence of there being so much variation just in the torsos. The quivers and the boots could be swapped about, but that's trivial. It'll be head swaps and colour schemes that makes the only real difference.

Knuckle-draggers.

Brawler-type fellows with those claw-gauntlet weapons that are so impractical in real life. As if I care. Eclectic and implausible is how I roll.

And eclectic is certainly what these guys are. No unifying style between them. Barely any individual style either, which means that head, weapons, body and legs are all freely swappable. With such different styles, they'll make good individuals. Though for some reason I feel that they belong in a city of some kind. Alongside the thief characters from earlier perhaps. Maybe they'd make good "boss" thugs. I suppose that varied fashion does work for a generically cosmopolitan urban area.

I've had the parent sketch and basic skeleton for these lying around since last year; I'd abandoned it because I wasn't making any progress. I'm glad to have brought it to a finished linework. #1's claws were awkward. Still are actually, but they'll do.

The legs are the really dodgy part - all three of them have weird-shaped boots/cuffs/kneepads. I think I've managed to hammer them into something approaching an acceptable shape, but they're definitely the weakest area.

Inconvenient doorbell

Today I seem to be getting stuff done. Not much important but... well. You take what you can get. It's nice to get back into the groove of doing these guys after a lime-filled drought.

Swordguys in robes. Initially based around your typical elegant samurai in dressing gown, but mutating as I worked on them. I'm going for a hodgepodge aesthetic overall, so that's a good thing.

I was pleasantly surprised how different the three variations ended up. The original seemed so specific that I assumed the differences would be trivial. On the other hand, once I'd finished I started worrying about remixability. It looked like there was only swords and heads to swap about. But a quick bit of experimentation revealed that the torsos and lower body could be convincingly swapped about too. Which was nice.

The part I'm least happy with is the weapons. The pose and style really demands an elegant two-handed sword. You can tell that #3's was a bit of a stretch. I think I meant it so be some kind of reverse-bladed scythy thing?

i didn't actually set out to do these guys just now, but I've had their base sketch lying around on my WiP document for some time and I got carried away fiddling with it. It was a particularly sparse scribble (as you can see), but it had something about it that made me want to work off it.

That's how these guys normally start off you see. A pencil scratching of lines that appeal (though usually a little more complete than in this case) then drawing over the scan in Inkscape.

But yeah. I was impressed by how easily the finished three came from that empty scrawl once i got going. I have other barely-sketches too, lying around waiting for a spark of inspiration to ignite them. Sometimes I'll develop them to a lineart like this, sometimes I'll just re-sketch them to try and get back into the groove I had when I made them originally. And sometimes they just languish. There's one of a guy with a large hula-hoop thing that I want to develop, but I'm lacking a good direction to take three different hula-hoop weapons. Hollow buzzsaw-type, maybe something with spokes? Spikey might work. I don't know. I've done plenty of this already today, I have real things that I ought to be doing.

Suddenly; armoured guys.

Sudden unexpected productivity! Inspiration hit this morning and I managed to get these done in pretty short order. No complications, no real difficulties, no burnout. Unexpected, but I'm not going to complain.

It was the collars you see - I saw a breastplate with a really nice tall, open collar and when I tried to scribble on of my own, these came out. The swooshy cloth roby-thing covering their right leg was an idea I yoinked from some half-remembered Rackham miniature I once saw. Saves me having to do a symmetrical set of complicated plate-armoured legs. Implying complex 3d shapes with 2d outlines is easy - but doing the same shape twice from different angles to order is hard. besides, the cloth looks kind of cool and helps moderate the nodecount and level of detail.

Fairly complicated by my standards, but (possibly due to the limes) I think they're allowable. Oops - just noticed that I missed the second guy's axe - that quad shape on the blade is meant to be a gap. No big deal - this is just a quick white-out to make 'em look a little more presentable here.

So, armour. Lots and lots of armour. Fun. Not sure how interchangable the bits are. I kind of themes the armours, so #2 has that curved/pointy thing going on, while #3 has the triple-layer. I oculd probably get away with mix and match still. Interesting (to me) how different the looks are. #1 seems like a warrior-monk kind of guy, probably because that weird armoured headband is remeniscent of a tonsure. #2 Seems like a paladin or generic knight for reasons I'm unsure of, while #3's banded armour makes him look a bit more menacing and sophisticated.

Javelins and squires.

I've been vacillating about whether to put this up. It seems a little like admitting that the previous linearts aren't getting coloured any time soon. But, if I'm not then they're not so I might as well keep going with what is getting done.

I'm hoping that I just need something inspirational to jump back on the colour-horse again. In the meantime though it's linearts.

I was really happy with javelineer pose, but the more I look at it the more limp and noodly it looks. Still, it's at least an attempt at something a bit more dynamic - I really don't want to fall into a rut with posing.

I like the heads; hair continues to be a difficulty but it went ok here. Torsos took ages to detail in a way I was happy with. The funny angle and a lack of space really limited what I could do without it looking cluttered and messy.

The legs are... bothersome. Those crotch-crescent thighs aren't working right, but I can't seem to fix it. I'm calling it done and moving on rather than obsessing though - for all the bits I don't like, overall I'm going to call the javelineers "adequate". They're characterful enough to me that I can let myself overlook the dodgy bits.

Speaking of characterful, I'm very happy with the pose of the squires. Not exactly dynamic like the javelineers, but different and with a sense of motion. Stumbling forward with someone else's weapon and armour.

I like the pose so much I wanted to give them more variation - perhaps a sheathed sword rather than a lance - but I couldn't come up with a third option and this way they're all themed and can go alongside the heralds.

It occured to me that the pose was perfect for soemthing I tried to do when I was paying more attention to the mad surgeon theme - an assistant stumbling forward with a comically large syringe in his arms. Now that I have an idea of the knid of lines that pose needs I could try and do a different version for it, but I also wonder whether I oculd get away with a novelty reskin.

I want new models in preference to reskins, but it seems like an interesting way to do "rare" characters: reskins that completely change the character of the model. It could be kind of cool, or it could be kind of lame. It would add more variety than just an on-theme reskin, and would be an easy way to get a new character without having to make a complete new model. But easy is often a trap. The big thing turning me off the idea is what if the "rare" variant appears alongside a regular? It'll probably look obvious and cheap.

In the works: masked jungle natives and small nippy dinosaurs. Will they make it past sketch? Who can tell!

A change of tack

So, I know the name of the game was supposed to be "keep ploughing forward" but that ideal wasn't terribly useful when I was hitting feldspar.

I did the rightmost guy first, using the same block shading method. But I just couldn't summon any motivation to do the others. On the one hand i think I failed to come up with interesting colour schemes here. On the other I might just have OD'd on amateurish block shading. In any case, I tried something different on the other two.

Rather than worrying about light sources, I embraced the flat cartoon look of the veeps and did a sort of graduated fill, darkening towards the bottom to draw attention upwards. I'd pondered using this method at the start, but (lazily) never actually tried it. I'm not sure what to make of the end result, but it was very fast and a fun break. Trying new things is good.

It's not actually a graduated fill - instead it's multiple passes with a low-opacity brush of a different colour (hence the banding). But that's not important. Middle guy I carefully selected the shades to work down to. Leftmost I used a universal grey-purple shadow colour. And as a result the one has no contrast and the other is way too dull and dark. But there might be potential here.

I kept working on linearts while i was trying not to finish colouring the monks. Heralds!

I expected difficulty making meaningful variants, but it flowed pretty easily in the end. The tabard designs were fun and they could look nice with some bright heraldic colours on them.

I think these guys might be part of another themed group like the (neglected) brine mutants and the psycho surgeons. Some kind of knights, squires and chivalry thing. I can think of two acceptable armoured knights I've done in the past that could be purposed for that. I've avoided making variations for old veeps so far because I wanted to be making new stuff rather than going over old stuff, but it remains an option.

Speaking of redoing old stuff - trivia time! The heralds were me idly re-doodling one of the veeps I drew way back when I first started playing around with vector stickmen. Of course looking back now they're all abominable, but there's brain fodder to be had there. The cutthroats from a little while back were another example of trying to modernise one of the original bunch.

I've deviated a fair bit from the original idea. I'd wanted to see how few lines you needed to make something identifiable. Which is how I came up with the basic skeleton pattern. But I've gone the way of packing in more detail instead, with the minimal lines thing being just a stylistic quirk.

Saturday night ninjas

I've failed at giving these guys a good name. The title above is a placeholder until I come up with something good. They're supposed to be vaguely city-ish unjapanese ninja-ish people. And the one in the middle turned out a bit too John Travolta as a result. I'm not entirely unhappy with him though - he's just a bit weird. Sporadic weirdness is good.

The linework's a bit borderline. The idea is they're drawing those cleaverish swords from where they hang on their backs, but I didn't get it looking right. It might have worked better with an actual visible sheath, slung like a bedroll, but the twisted torsos made gatting a working angle a bitch. At least the legs aren't as bad as they were - until i realised and fixed it, their left knee was roughly three inches below their hip.

Alpha makes me think of white chocolate and raspberry though, which is nice. And Beta and Gamma's hairstyles have pleasantly low nodecounts.

They're done though. Post 'em and keep moving.

They have questions.

Androgynes with axes. In a curious pose that is either pivoting on one foot or dancing - hard to tell.

I was really playing about with metallic-looking shading here. Not satisfied with most of it, but I got to try out a few new things and practice others.

I'm having contrast problems again I think. I need some kind of standard to work from, rather than just daubing colour over a neutral brown. Maybe go back over the old ones and find a few that I'm happy with, then use them as reference?

That sounds distressingly close to the correct way to do things - not my scene at all. I'll probably just make a half-assed effort to triple-check before I call them final.

I did more three-tone shading on these than normal. Not the skin as I said I was going to do - that's turning out trickier than I imagined - but on the stronger metallics. It seems like a good idea and I should probably have done more of it. Making life harder.

I'm not sure if I'm making any progress. It doesn't feel like it. But then it never does, until I look back at what I was doing a couple of months ago and I decide that they're all no longer up to par and must be scrapped. Still, even if it doesn't feel like I'm getting better, it feels productive to be adding to a growing library of these guys.

Tracheaocide; now with R, G and B.

Done! Same day even. And... they're ok I think. I'm happiest with Mr Beta, but none of them are awful.

I suppose Gamma needs more contrast. I can handle that with levels. That's a point though - I should probably try and standardise how much contrast there should be between light and dark tones of the same colour. So far I've just been eyeballing it, but I'll bet if you took a bunch of these guys at random they'd look wrong together because the lighting doesn't match.

I suppose the number to look at is the V/B. Thinking about it, if I wanted to make different colour-versions for the same figure, I could do it by making a greyscale base figure for the light/dark definitions and then applying it as a transformation layer over flat colour. Hmm, no that wouldn't work actually - I'm always going to want some areas darker or lighter aside from lighting. I could define and save the /shape/ of the shaded areas though and use that as a guide.

I need better words to think about this stuff really. Perils of a non-technical education. I often find that - trying to talk about something new to me and I just don't have the words to say what I mean. Gives me a newfound appreciation for academic language, and a disdain for people who automatically dismiss it as pretentious.

Oops - that was almost proper blogging, and that's not what this thing is for. I'd best bugger off before I start trying to share my other profound, uneducated insights.

Tracheaocide

These are only linearts so far, but I rather like them. I have enough to say about them that I want to post about them now rather than just after-colouring. Besides, sod's law says that I'll fuck up the colouring and end up hating them, so I'm going to strike while I'm still enthusiastic.

Something that i think is interesting, regarding interchangability of parts, is the face-mask. It's exactly the same lines on all three heads, but the context provided by the three bodies changes what you interpret it as. I didn't plan it this way, but when I dressed the first variant (beta as it happens) in his scarf, I realised that I'd have to carry the face and neck areas over between the three variants if I wanted interchangability. And it worked out better than I'd have hoped.

These remind me of the nurses, in that I managed to make the three variants far more different than I usually do. Rather than just different cuts of clothes or hairdos, I've suggested quite different kinds of outfit. And rather than going for interchangability in the parts, I've themed them relatively strongly.

Alpha is a semi-classy highwayman type. He has the neck thing, a shoulder-cloak and a snazzy waistcoat. His daggers are the most elegant-looking to me, too. I'm thinking he should be dressed in expensive-looking red.

Beta is a more raggedy street-type. The daggers are ugly and brutal-looking. He has a cool long scarf-thing going on, which I've tried to tat-up a little, and looks a bit more desperate.

For gamma, my thinking was "world of warcraft rogue". Rigid, layered leather-armour with shoulder pads, and military-looking knives. Which is pretty much how it turned out.

Despite the strong theming, the heads, weapons and bodies are all meant to be interchangable. I was using the themes as inspiration to create individually interesting elements, not because i had my heart set on creating three very distinct characters.

Broken

Well, I got the sworders coloured. I'm not really happy with them though. There's some aspect I'm overlooking and I can't work out what it is. I know the metallic effect is dodgy, but I don't think that's the big problem here.

Too little contrast perhaps? The way the sword acts as a background for the head? Lack of or wrong focal points? I'm not sure. Done is done though and I'm not sad to put them behind me.

I'm wondering if I should use more tones on fleshy areas. Faces are focal points after all, and they could use more contrast. The pale skinned ones work adequately, but dark skin in thick black linework needs brighter highlights. It might also be the tool I need for things like weatherbeaten skin - it worked for raw skin on the sea zombies.

Bleh. So much negativity here. Must do better.

Red Riding Hood's saviours

Sudden unexpected productivity! I got the woodsmen coloured. I did try out some brushes on these. It seemed to work pretty well on the inside of the cloaks. I'm not sure exactly what it's meant to represent, but it look right to me. Large flat areas certainly seem to benefit from having some kind of texture. Unfortunately the fur ruffs - the areas I started messing around with brushes for - didn't turn out terribly well at all. In fact they look abominable. I'm thinking rough fur is something that needs its own technique, not a cheap gimmick brush. But, again, I'm calling these done for now and moving on.

Other areas of note: I'll call Alpha's antler-head axe a success. Gamma's mouthbeard is atrocious, but i think that might be as much an issue with the linework as the colouring. Oh, and I seem to have changed the hue but not the value for the inner shade of Gamma's cloak, meaning it looks like it's glowing. Oops.

I tried implying creases and folds in the cloth here - most visible on the lower area of Beta's tunic. I like it. It's a little dodgy in places because I was mostly playing it by ear rather than thinking about where creases/shadows should appear naturally (another awful habbit to shake) , but it seems a pretty "cheap" way to add detail. Only problem is that if I establish that I'm willing to add that level of detail here, it raises the expected standards everywhere else. Not really a bad thing, but I should be careful of detail-creep.

Oops - just noticed that I left Gamma's cloak as single-shade. Can't be assed to fix, export and reupload so you'll have to take my word for it that I fixed it.