This is rooster boy. He’s had his heart broken, and has been up all night lamenting the fact; I suppose to us it sounds like crowing.
I used this week to try out a few new things (for me, anyway). I went for a heavier outline, used a base texture, and overall tried to get a more “tagged” feel. Not using shadows was rough, but I resisted and kept it flat.
I like where this experiment ended up, although I’m pretty sure that if I didn’t add the text and feathers on the ground, it’d be difficult to tell that this was a rooster-based character. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to get his wings to behave like arms and fit in a sweater.
These are the sketches and inks. I redrew the type about a million times, until finally settling on this cursive look. I rather enjoyed coming up with three-toed boots, though.
It has a crumb (the artist) feel to it… its great!
Hah, I wish! But thanks very much.
I like the colors on this a lot, and I do think it has a tagged feel to it (though you could even go a little heavier on the outlines, I bet.) Poor sad Rooster Boy.
(wings: I know this due to the fact that I’ve been reading the Manual of Ornithology I recommended on the blog, which is crazy interesting – you have to think of the “hands” part of the wing as tremendously elongated, with a fairly short humerus to take all the flight stress. If you put your arms in standard three-year-old’s “chicken” position, folding your arms so your wrists are near your shoulders, (minus thumbs-in-armpits,) you’re actually pretty close, except that you then have to imagine your hand bones mostly fused and extended quite a bit. The trouble with having the arms extended as you have here is that one then expects the feathers, including flight feathers, to be fully extended as they would be, which of course then totally refuses to fit in a sleeve. Not sure if that is at all helpful or just pedantry, but there you have it.)
This is the best response I’ve ever read on *anyone’s* drawing blog! And while my “just make the sweater sleeves baggier” approach seems a little silly now, your advice totally makes sense. Looks like I’ll be making a trip to the library… Thanks!
Very nice texture. Poor fella, he does look so sad.