Ramblings and experiments

Hello friends!

On this gloomy autumn day I'm continuing my ramblings from earlier this month. I guess I'm experiencing what some people might call art block, but I'm just perceiving it as general frustration and "What is this crap, why is nothing working??" It's not like I don't have any ideas, it's just that they don't turn out the way I had hoped and expected.

Things have been going pretty well for so long and I've been really happy with my work. So it was only a matter of time for me to hit a road block. The last time that happened, I did a lot of style exploration and focused more on backgrounds. But I think I've come to the point now where I have neglected my character work and I haven't been enjoying it as much as I used to. I think what has been bothering me the most is that I want to be more expressive with my characters and poses and we'll... expressions. And I see people at out there just creating amazing flowy artwork from imagination. But in order to achieve a certain amount of realism (especially when it comes to faces), I need to rely on reference. And as a result, I often end up compromising and my characters are not as expressive as I wanted them to be. And it all takes me forever.

To solve this, I've been experimenting over the last couple of days with more stylisation and decided to full-on embrace my anime influences. I'm a bit nervous because I want you all to like my work and I don't want to ambush you with anything that's drastically different. But to be honest, these are some of my favourite drawings I've ever done. And they were so much fun and relatively quick and I've been feeling like a kid just drawing all day and not wanting to stop. I haven't felt this way in a long time.

And when I look at these I can actually start picturing my Phantasma project coming to life as an animated movie (it's mostly a crazy dream, but hey) and it makes me really giddy.

Ironically, I did look at references when I created these. So you might recognise some people that have been floating around on Pinterest. But I was mainly concerned with capturing the feel and essence of that character, instead of sticking to the photo.