Vanellope Von Schweets

 

I saw Wreck-it-Ralph twice in theater! One with some really good buddies and again at Disney Studio Screening during CTN2012. I really have to say it's one of my favorite animation film in 2012. I'm not fond of Sarah Silverman personally, but I thought she still did justice to the voice of Vanellope. Of course I been wanting to draw something for WIR and what better timing than the release date of WIR on DVD and BLU-RAY (and 3D blu-ray?), MARCH 5th, 2013. 

I'm also showing my WIP of my rendering. As much as I want to finish a piece in a couple hours even if it's fanart. Its still take me a couple of days to finish it. Each new artwork from me is like a new battle. I kept trying to develop new ways to render like "oh I saw this style on an artist's work, wonder if I can imitate it," or "saw a really cool shortcut technique on PS, let's try it out this drawing." I try not to be too comfortable with a style or a technique, so I can push myself harder to learn more stuff. 

1. Like any drawing, its start with a sketch. I had to look for references of the character and think of a pose. Once I thought up a pose and doddle it out, I actually have to do a couple layers of the sketch. The first one which is not shown it's really simple and just scribble of a general idea of the pose. From the scribble I add another layer on PS (I did all this on Photoshop by the way), to add more details of the character, I try to be as detail as I can so I don't have to think of too much changes when I do the lineart.

2. Clearly from my sketch, I still made changes on the lineart. I really like fine clean lines and the "Pen tools" has been my best friend for that. 90% of my lineart is done with the pen tools.

3. Once I am good with the lineart, I can start rendering. I starts out with flat color. Then I would usually work on the face  like adding blush or whatnot. Oh for this piece I also color in the lineart, sometime I would keep it as a solid color and when I am not feeling lazy I would also color the lineart. I usually would color the lineart a couple shade darker than the colors around it.

4. Shadow time! First I have to figure out where I want my light source to be located, in this case it's the upper left.

5. Adding some highlights on the hairs and the tights because in the film Vanellope has these almost shinning tights.

6. I see alot of second lighting/highlight in alot of artwork, it's usually blue or something like that. I don't really understand the reason behind it at first. Then I watched a video where an artist was explaining that beside the main lighting, artist will add a second lighting (usually cool colors) to add more dimension to their pieces. I usually don't think of that because when I render it's usually 2D style, so it's flat colors. However, thinking of a second source light really make me rethink how I want render my characters and what can I do to add more dimension to the characters.

7. After I am done with the piece, I will play around with effects. Right now I really like the blur effect on  drawing.

 

I am trying to improve on my rendering and my foundation for it is really bad. So I'm going to start a series of "Back to Basic" assignment. For the first assignment is rendering circular to show basic lighting. I did a couple of different rendering style so I can have a better understanding of different styles.