Pachi Particulars 02: Color and Blocks

Hey guys, hope I haven't been leaving you too high and dry since the end of Manga Madness! To be honest, for the last week I was unable to come up with any new ideas; not to mention I had a very busy work week so I really couldn't take the time to think about the blog. But I've got some new works on the way, so look forward to those. For now, here's two miscellaneous drawings I worked on recently. One is new, and the other is a twist on an old...

This drawing is featured in the blog gallery, but I never included it in a post. It's also the image that inspired my first From the Action Pages sketch. Anyway, I felt a desire to mess around with a color image again, and though one day I'm going to seriously start an image from scratch with the intent of coloring it proper, I decided to use this old drawing and try to make it look more exciting. Adding in these effects in Photoshop has been mostly self-taught with the help of some tutorial videos on Youtube, but I'm starting to feel like I'm developing my own way of doing it that works. Some day when I make a serious post about coloring images using Photoshop, I'll lay out the steps I take, but I don't really feel qualified now since I'm still a beginner at this kind of coloring. I can say this - even if it's hard, it's a lot of fun. It's very rewarding to see color appear on your characters - it's as if they're coming to life.

As a side note, his boxers are supposed to be a dirty yellow, but all of the shading made them look olive green. Sei would NEVER wear olive green boxers. >_<' It's obviously why he's so angry, right? Right?

I did come up with ONE new idea last week - a drawing showcasing the fact that I had no ideas. So I thought, what would be an ideal way to conceptualize my artist's block? Well, with a block of course. I felt like I was being oppressed by this block, so naturally it needed to be crushing me. The block itself ended up as an amalgamation of random stone shapes with one stone on each side representing how I felt in my current state. It wasn't pre-meditated - it just turned out that way. That's what happens when I draw with zero ideas - randomness. But even so, I still tried to make it look good, but that didn't go over so well. I wish I had left shadows out of the equation in this way, because I came out with an incredibly uneven shade all around. On the bright side, if any of my sketches had to suffer from poorer quality control, I'd rather it be one I wasn't doing seriously.

Now then, I'll answer the question on all your minds: what's with the anthropomorphic teeth? Well, they have arms and legs and mouths because that's funny. My teeth are oppressing me, with actual spite! Hilarious! Oh, no, you mean, why are they teeth to begin with? Let's just say I had a trip to a new dentist last week and the visit was......how do you say.....enlightening. New worries in regards to my hygiene arose that made it doubly difficult for me to focus on the blog, thus the double oppression on my poor anime-self. Speaking of, if anything came out well in this drawing, I'd think that my rendition of myself did. I went for a more cartoony style using fewer lines of detail and less attention to realistic shapes, and I think in that regard it looks alright.