Female Magus Sketch

[cald]

I decided to finish it, and now my hand hurts.  I hope people like it.

[Cooper]

Nice colour. 

[Ramsus]

You're really good, especially with the colors and keeping the lines clean. I'm surprised at how many good artists are showing up these days. You should definitely do some more stuff to post here.

Also, Zeality might freak when he sees it and immediately post about it in the site news. Hope you don't mind.


And not to distract from your own work, but bringing this topic back really made me want to draw a little, so I couldn't resist...





I'm beginning to see female Magus as somewhat cuter in appearance, yet much more deviously tainted in mind and spirit than her male counterpart. Maybe it's because she seems more fun and interesting that way.

[Sora]

In other words, you can probably blackmail female Magus into bed with just a little knowledge about how to find Schala.

i was thinking that ever since Zelity said something alond those lines. problem is: 1) you actually have to know where to find her, or you'll die. 2) after getting the info she'll probally kill you. 3) she'd be a very very creepy person, and i wouldnt come (avoided a dirty joke via spelling) 10 feet close to her, cause if i did i'd probally die.

[Ramsus]

You know some poor schmuck would probably die trying. After all, there's a lot of bold, stupid people out there.

[CyberSarkany]

Somehow a skirt doesn't fit to female Magus...at least in my opinion.

[cald]

Cooper:  Thanks!

Ramsus:  Thanks for the compliments!  A tip for keeping everything very clean looking:  If you're working on the computer, make your document at least twice as large as you want your finished product to be.  When you're done, resize it and a lot of the "mess" kind of gets smoothed over.  I would love to do more Chrono Trigger art to post here, but we'll have to wait and see... I'm not too good at finishing things.  And of course I would be extremely flattered if ZeaLitY wanted to post about it in the site news.  Nice drawings by the way.  It'd be really cool to see more people's interpretations of the whole gender switching thing.  Are the people in the background in the second pic male Lucca and female Crono?

CyberSarkany:  I can kind of see what you mean about a skirt not being the right way to go.  I'm sure I mostly just went that route because it's an easy visual gender cue.

[ZeaLitY]

I definitely will.

[nightmare975]

It's almost as if she's leading me to my doom. 0_o

[Ramsus]

They're Lucca (or maybe Luke rather?) and Crono all right.

Also, thanks for the advice, but my inking is so troublesome that lately I just outright avoid doing clean lineart. It doesn't bother me so much, since I like rough and sketchy looking things, but I do need more practice inking. My main problem isn't getting clean lines, but that I'm not good at filling in details at the inking stage, and I'm too messy with how I draw, so it takes a while to clean things up and then ink. Given my lack of free time lately, I usually have to settle for quick sketches.

Usually, when I want things clean, I start with pencil on bristol board and clean things up before inking. Just getting my pencil work cleaned up, yet alone adding details, can take me at least a few hours, like this drawing did:



I was short on time, so I actually went ahead and used the pencil art in the final version. But that's about how clean I need my lineart to be before I can successfully ink it.

Digitally, I have to sketch it out zoomed out first, so I don't get the proportions and what not all wonky, and then I clean it up. After that, I'll zoom in and ink over things, so it's pretty much the same process as on paper. It tends to take a bit longer though, since my tablet sketches are always a lot messier and less detailed.

Recently though, I got a new tablet with a 6.25"x10" active area, so I can get some fairly clean lineart without really zooming in. For example:



Also, while I like doing things all digitally, I'd like to find something with a tool that feels more like a pencil in response. All the tools I've experimented with aren't precise enough or don't feel soft enough. It's a bit frustrating, so lately I've just been pulling out the ink tool in Inkspace or The GIMP and doing quick and rough ink sketches (like the female Magus ones here). I've spent days tweaking brushes in Photoshop, and I've tried a few different programs, but nothing feels right -- though Alias Sketchbook Pro comes close. I might give Corel Painter a try soon, but if you have any suggestions, let me know.

I'm beginning to think I might have to create my own custom sketch tool for the GIMP.

[justin3009]

Top one kinda looks like an older Nina from Breath of Fire...

[cald]

Ramsus:  I understand how tedious it can be trying to clean up line art.  If you look at the unfinished drawing on the first page you can see how much cleaning up takes place.  Ultimately it all comes down to what you're trying to achieve.  I wanted this drawing to look as much like a Toriyama piece as possible, so I HAD to clean it up, but if that isn't necessarily what you're going for then a loose sketchy look can be totally cool.  I use a tiny Wacom tablet for drawing.  The pen part got stepped on by an old room mate so it's cracked and is missing the side button, and the tablet part had something spilled on it (by another room mate presumably) so it has these annoying bubbles in it, but it still works!  I do all of my sketching zoomed way out and then I zoom in close to clean it up.  I rarely work on paper anymore, mostly because I'm not that good at drawing and working on the computer allows me to revise pretty much infinitely.  Anyway, I like your style, so I say stick with the loose line-work if that's what you like to do.