Sketch: Elf Attack!

I don't have another new painting ready to go yet, but I thought I should post something for all the lovely people that decided to follow me. I've been doing some sketching, sort of hunting for an idea with the momentum behind it to carry it forward to something finished.

My first love was comics, I practically learned to read on the original ElfQuest series if anyone remembers those. I'm still an enormous fan of sequential art: comic books, manga, cartoon strips, webcomics, etc; so in the absence of any other motivating force I tend to gravitate in that direction in terms of style.

I ended up drawing a magic using elven warrior, less ElfQuest and more Dungeons & Dragons. I did warn folks I like geeky stuff, right? Anyway, I thought it would be fun to play with a spinning motion and foreshortening. I'm not entirely convinced it came out, but I kind of like it. I kind of doubt that I'll take this particular sketch any farther, there's not much story here, but if you really stretch your imagination you can see the forest path background and guess where it was going. On the flip side, after a few false starts, I think I figured out what I want to do next so I'm currently working on that.

The above was done in Krita, a free graphics program I'm still trying to learn ( I think it's pretty darn good, though). I used the pencil texture brush, shrunk down quite small because I think it it looks quite a bit like real pencil, more so than some of the other pencil brushes that come as presets. Below I'll include the super rough sketches that underpin this drawing, because I always like seeing that kind of stuff, I think it's informative and it's nice to see that drawings often look bad at the start because it's easy to forget that most artists don't just sit down and draw and/or paint finished work, they build to it.

I often do really rough sketching in blue out of habit. Working completely digital it's no longer necessary, but back when I drew things on real paper and scanned them into the computer it was a real labor saver because it was very easy to isolate and remove the blue lines from under inks without having to go to all the fuss of erasing everything before you scanned it.

You can see that the proportions are different, I wasn't quite sure what I was doing as I was drawing and the result is it looks like the character is floating instead of moving dynamically through the air. So I went to town with the selection and transform tools (they allow you to cut out and change the size of elements of your image) and tried to force more perspective into the picture without having to start over from scratch.

If you look carefully you can see where I've put down so many strokes trying to find the line I'm looking for that I've just turned around starting drawing in the negative with the eraser.

When I was finished I had a weird feeling of déjà vu and suddenly I realized that I had basically redrawn a character from a very old picture I drew 10 years ago when I was just getting my legs under me with digital painting, you can see I'm still trying to color it comic book style. It's not a great picture, but I'll put it here as a bonus, it's always fun to see progression, and other people's cringy old artwork.

I was actually a little bit shocked when I went back and looked this up, while it's probably pretty tame by most standards, it's the most graphically violent image I ever did. Also, those pie plate knee guards, not sure what I was thinking.

I'll put the sketch down here again, so you don't have to scroll back up.

If you like this, or found any of it helpful, you know what to do. :)

The elf is attacking! What do you do??? Let me know in the comments.