Sketchbook
This space contains some of my sketchbook pages. I wanted to include it here to demonstrate some of my process, as well as the iterative nature of design. A sketchbook is a diary, within the author will put to paper their thoughts and emotions. What's interesting to me is everything I wrote or drew, I did for a reason. Because the ink doesn't change, but I do, looking back in a sketchbook is, to me, investigating the journal of a familiar stranger. I may have drawn something because it looks nice, because I wanted to practice, because I just needed to draw something, or because I needed the thoughts in my mind to be preserved in some way before it faded into the mists of my subconscious mind.
In an case, I hope you enjoy looking through some of these pages. Feel free to click on an image that has one of these lil' guys by it to visit it's subpage, or find the subpage under the sketchbook tab above.
On the right you'll see a sketch of a character named Carmen. She was the main character of a manga, or rather the pilot of a manga, I made for a university project. The setting was a modern fantasy, playing off of Faerûn specifically. My main goal in the project was twofold; first, I wanted to push myself to create a world, characters, and a short story and make a storyboard for it. Second, I wanted to mash together all sorts of ideas, some new and some old, to make something new. For example, the city the world was set in was Waterdeep, but so far into the future it's unrecognizable. I used the Kas'Atelier from my personal dnd project, adapted, for the main organization around which the story would centralize. Of course, most of the parts were still unique, but I think I managed to cram plenty in.
Speaking of the Kas'Atelier; on the left here is K'hanna, a dnd character I decided to develop a ton of lore for. I'll keep most of the information about her voluntary, but go ahead and click on the image to learn more!
Down here I have a small collection of specific character related sketches. Character designs are by far my favorite to work on. There are tons of little ways you can communicate information about the character and the world around them through their design. I really like to make sketches that make me ask why they look that way; the image to the right for example, makes me wonder why he looks so forlorn, why are these pinwheels so significant?
Here you can see some of my attempts at chibis, in addition to Carmen down there just sorta staring at you. I really am interested in making more of these, but I feel like the cutesy style is exceptionally dangerous. It can be hard to get right, and if it's wrong and very quickly turns into an ugly lil' guy.
I doodle a lot of little symbols in my sketchbooks. I do this mostly because I just need to put something on the page, but also because I want to see if I can make something interesting for use later. On the left here is a whole page of these little symbols where I try to make some magic symbols using a small set of rules. I wanted to try to make them represent something so some of them got names like "The Saint", "The Thief", "The Priest", "The Servant", and things like that. For a fun little game you can try and guess which names go where, or name them yourself!
Lots of my sketchbooks are dedicated to practice like these. I find images that I like and I try to replicate them as best I can while changing and adding select parts. The process is great for helping me understand why certain decisions are made by certain artists, why others think otherwise, and they help me develop a sense of what I prefer. I think my style should adapt to what feels best for the character/setting, so having a more robust understanding of other peoples art choices is imperative.
Additionally, the parts that I make changes to help me develop new ideas for characters. Sometimes I'll be practicing a pose and ask myself "Why might a character be doing this pose? What does that say about them/their environment?" The more questions I get from a sketch the better it tends to be for developing a compelling character.
