Ancient Artifacts - personal project

Hello Planet!
Here's an image I started in June. (If you click it, you can see it larger) My own projects go pretty slowly since they've got to share time with the ones I take on for work. I've got no shortage of WIP's!! The difference is this one is "active", which means whenever I can snag two seconds here or there, this is the one that gets worked on. It's sort of like having a 1500 piece puzzle around.

If you know who these guys are, you've known me for about 6 years. I decided to start building this illustration because I wanted to pay homage to the first story I ever constructed that had a beginning, a middle, and an end.

So I dug everybody up for one last group shot. Or rather, if there will be others, it's probably going to be quite some time. I know this one's just gonna crawl to a finish.. but it's dear to me, it'll get there. eventually. I thought it'd be fun to start posting on it, since we're sort of on the subject of multi-character pieces at the moment with the Avalon one and all.

I don't consider this character soup, actually. The difference for me is that we've got all of the characters together on one fairly believable plane, warped of course to suit the needs of the composition. (note that the knight at the top of this dog-pile is somehow floating?) I tried to set everyone up according to their character's roles, but in such a way that it feels like they're all sharing the same moment together. The theme of this entire story was pretty much one of those 'preventing the apocalypse by narrowly heading it off at the pass' kinda deals, so everyone is tense, standing at the ready. Except for Vice. I don't even know what his deal is, but that's him in a nutshell.

I arranged this sketch digitally, since I neither had a large enough piece of paper to draw this on or a big enough scanner to make drawing it by hand very sensible. This was hugely helpful, it meant I was able to use selection tools to chop stuff up and move it around. As certain parts of this developed, it would get unbalanced.. that's actually why we have the big bug-eyed lizard on the left, hanging out with the angry girl with the fancy croissant on her head. (I believe this explains why she is so angry.)

But! I hate inking digitally. Sketching digitally isn't too bad, I don't do it if I can avoid it. Truthfully, it's a clean and hurt-less way to set up a busy composition, but I like the feel of a pencil. Graphite kicks butt!! In the same way, I really, really dislike inking digitally. I've never been very good at making it look lively unless I created very quick lines, at which point the quality of the whole piece would sort of die. Actually, I don't like inking much at all. But that didn't stop me from trying.


First plan of attack: blow the digital sketch up real real big, and print it out in 4 parts. I figured if the lines were only light enough for me to just barely make out, I could re-draw the whole thing in ball-point pen. In four pieces. ...Yes. I started with the knight's head in ballpoint, then got another idea and decided to do the rest in pencil so I could create a greater range of tone for shading. The tip of the mechanical pencil is a lot smaller than the ballpoint pen's, and I don't have to fight it to make a mark. I would finish each section this way, scan the parts in, reassemble them, and oh my god this was a dumb idea.

FAIL!

This tiny part of the image took a really, really long time to render out with pencil. Once I got to another section, I couldn't make the marks match the detail from this side, and they wound up looking strange together. The final blow was when I discovered that I'd done all of the nicest work on a piece that got printed out slightly too small, because I'd neglected to check a setting on my printer, so I wouldn't be able to match it up to the others while I was working on them anyway.

Ahwell, it was a noble effort. Kinda stupid, but noble. I guess I figured I do graphite transfers like this all the time, so it would be the same difference as long as I was careful. That's okay though. I've got another plan. I experimented with this on a piece I just finished, and it didn't explode. This one here is more complicated, but the same rules from before ought to adhere- I'm gonna kill the ink stage completely >: (

Round 2, you scurvy dog you! *shakes fist*
More soon, thanks for reading!