Illustration Updates

I know this is pretty overdue -- let's get to it!

I mentioned earlier how I was working on an illustration, and I wasn't liking the way that it turned out. While working on it, I also tried to fix the perspective of the head, to get the illustration closer to how I had imagined it. This was supposed to be a menacing figure, so I wanted his head to be titled down a little more, so as to gaze up at you from underneath his thick eyebrows ufufu

One thing I did was go back to basics and study facial proportions. I also found a really good video tutorial by Sycra which changed the way that I visualized the head and face. He focuses on the planes of the face, and this enables you to draw a more 3-dimensional-looking head as well as draw the head in all sorts of different angles.

I'm poorly disciplined and impatient, so I scribbled for a little bit as he explained it:

 

After that, I gave it another shot:

 

I still have that uneven face issue that I talked about in the previous post, but I did get the perspective to change just a little more this time! I've also noticed that as I get further along in a drawing I venture a bit more into realism in an effort to get everything anatomically correct. Just look at where it started:

Lately, I've gotten the sense that I just don't know how I want to stylize things these days, if that makes sense. My mental library is outdated, and I'm piggybacking off of old habits instead of learning and trying new things. I wanted to give this illustration a dreamy yet eerie shoujo manga sort of vibe, so looking at some references that exemplified that style would have helped me to dial down the "realism" a bit, I think.

I mention shoujo manga because I had a character in mind as I was drawing this, and his story has that sort of aesthetic. It's basically a detective noire shoujo manga, and he's the enigmatic and eccentric detective character. I thought that this would be a good opportunity to flesh out his visual design.

Initially he just had a formless mop of hair.

 

And then I tried to figure out a color palette.

That's pretty much where I'm at!