Day 214/215/216: Usual Suspects

Well it's been a long time since I have written a post. Seems I didn't get better at blogging. The last time I posted was for day 38, which honestly feels like a lifetime ago. I know my history doesn't speak well for me, but I am going to try and make a post for every daily now. You can come here and read a little bit more about my process for each day. My struggles. My successes. With that being said, let's get to it.

As you can see, this daily is an example of me sort of "cheating" and doing 3 characters in one scene. For those that don't know, these dailies from from a project in which I'm trying to create a new illustrated or animated character every day for an entire year. As of today I have created 216 of 365. On rare occasions I will put a few days into one daily, but this is usually only when I get far behind. I've actually only ever done it one other time and it was when I was on vacation.

I will say that making the time is the hardest thing I deal with on this project. Some days fitting a drawing in is very easy, sometimes it comes out of work. Then there are days when I'm out with friends, busy with actual work, or just feeling burnt out. But, regardless of the pain, what I make every day generally comes out successful. And even if I don't love every piece as much as the next, I definitely learn something with each new attempt.

So, knowing I was going to put 3 characters together for this one, I thought it would be fun to put some fantasy characters all together at the bar. I started by sketching out my idea. I honestly didn't have a plan for composition when I began. I just started drawing the viking and built out from there. When I finished I noticed the archer was WAY too big in the sketch. Being lazy as I am I resigned to fixing it in Illustrator. I honestly wasn't sure if I wanted to use Illustrator or Photoshop for this particular piece, but in the end I felt the crisp shapes and lines in Illustrator would lend better to the idea I was going for.

To compliment the clean and somewhat simple shapes of the piece I decided to keep the color palette simple as well.

In the end I really enjoyed this making this one. Sometimes fitting all these characters into one scene is more fun because I can have more interaction and play around with details more. On the normal dailies it can be a little harder to do that.