SotW #52 is an homage to one of my all-time favorite sitcoms, Community. Felt like it was time to draw something a little different after spending weeks going back to the Trek and/or anime well. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go turn this into a butt flag!" I was doing a little number crunching on the SotW last night, and I found that if I maintain a schedule of 2 SotW installments per week, plus the daily manga pages in December (see the next post), I'll be able to hit 100 total drawings by New Year's Eve with a few weeks of cushion. I honestly can't believe I've kept this self-challenge going this long, but here's to going the distance!
Also wanted to add a little preview of the project I'm working on that will constitute the finale of the Sketch of the Week series at the end of December. It'll be a 10-15 page one-shot Evangelion/TNG crossover comic that I'm pretty excited about drawing. Today, I finally finished its 8-page script, and I think it's not bad (the point of this comic will be the art anyways, I'm not expecting Michael Piller quality on the story here). Here's a preview of page 1: I'm smartly making the main comic in black-and-white, so I never have to touch that damnable beige pencil again when drawing the TNG sets. Haven't decided on when I'm going to start drawing it all - probably next month or during October. I've got about 4 weeks in my production schedule where I can do a single regular SotW installment and use the rest of the time on the manga pages. I want to take my time on this and not try to do a whole bunch at once, which is how I burned myself out on the Wrath of Khan manga project I did earlier this year. If I draw 2-3 pages a week over a month, that should be a sensible pace to keep my passion for it alive and not kill it.
Got a new sketchbook yesterday that's meant for mixed media usage, so I wanted to try it out and see if it takes better to colored pencils than my previous sketchbooks. From the looks of it, I'd say this new sketchbook's a winner! It's the smoothest I've been able to shade with colored pencils since I got the set earlier in the spring of this year. "Whatever happens... happens." The wisdom of Bebop's Spike Spiegel.
Well, since SotW #54 was already posted in the 200th Art Challenge thread (https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/✨⭐✨...rek”-–-with-prize.308721/page-3#post-13879907), I won't dual-post the final artwork. What I'll do instead is give a glimpse into the workflow behind my process into making it. It all starts with an idea. As shown in the clip of the script I posted upthread, I already knew how I wanted the title page for the EVA-Trek manga to look. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the image I was thinking of where Shatner and Nimoy were holding phaser and tricorder respectively. As a substitute, I used the image of them simply posing at the camera. Now, that left the poses in the image sorted, what about Misato and Kaji? Thankfully, I've got a fairly extensive collection of the animator reference settei for Evangelion, and lo and behold, there's one sheet where they drew Misato in the exact pose I needed! Pretty sweet when things work out in my favor! These were my two starting points on the drawing, side-by-side: About an hour of sketching it out, followed by tracing it over in marker for the linework later, we've got our Head of Ops completed: Here's where I ran into trouble. The settei I've got didn't feature Kaji in the particular pose that Nimoy decided to use in the original photo so I had to think about how to proceed. I ended up using the animation references for his face almost unaltered, since Kaji would more or less be looking dead down the lens. Since he'd also be hidden behind Misato's hair if I just put him in Nimoy's exact spot, I adjusted Kaji's position in frame a little bit to compensate. So, after about another hour or so of sketching, erasing, resketching, tracing, and signing, we've got our final linework done. The final step, which ended up taking 2-3 hours (I lost track by the end), was coloring. I was a bit nervous here because I don't typically favor color in my drawings. However, something about this drawing called out to me as it needing to be in color, so I had to grin and bear it. The fantastic part about the new sketchbook I got this week was it really takes to colored pencils in such a smooth way that they almost look like marker by the end! My poor black pencil took the brunt of this one (am I glad I didn't put them in DS9 uniforms) thanks to Robert Blackman's designs. The easiest part to color was Misato's hair. For some reason the purple pencil in my Prismacolor set moves the smoothest and cleanest out of every pencil in the set. And so there you have a little glimpse into how I put one of these drawings together. Now I gotta go and take a couple excedrin to quell the leftover head and back ache this gave me from hours of focusing and hunching over my drawing board.
I still haven't started working on either the commissioned drawing I told myself I'd start over this holiday weekend, or even the Trek-themed drawing I'm going to do for Star Trek Day on Wednesday, but like any good procrastinator I decided to put my brain to work with yet another EVA-Trek sketch (I know, and I'm sorry I can't seem to let this idea go). So here we have a color concept sketch of (Provisional) Ensign Shinji Ikari, Pilot of the Evangelion-class MU-01 aboard the USS NERV: My concept for the Starfleet-ized plugsuit is still pretty rough. At this point, it was mainly reducing the bulkiness of the First Contact spacesuit and merging some of the details from Shinji's EVA plugsuit around the neck and abdomen without making it so damn form-fitting. I also decided to make the trim and accent colors on the suit match the purple and green on EVA-01 since the Starfleet version of the unit will be far less colorful than its anime counterpart (R&D of the 2370s must have a love affair with the various shades of gray for some odd reason). The comic I'm going to draw isn't even going to feature the Interface Suit, but I wanted to start working on some designs to flesh out the concept a bit. I was also curious to put Shinji into the DS9-era uniform for a couple of reasons. Obviously to see how it would look, and also for an in-universe reason. The comic I'm going to draw will take place about midway through the procession of Angels in the original Evangelion series (maybe just after the 10th one, Sahaquiel) and should run concurrently with DS9's The Way of the Warrior, but with the crew of the NERV still in the TNG-era uniforms. My reasoning is they've been away from Earth and/or Starbases for quite some time dealing with the appearances of Angels across the quadrant and haven't had a chance to switch to the new uniforms yet. The events in the comic will force them to return to Earth, where Shinji gets a field promotion to Ensign for his service to the ship and crew, and the back half of the story would have everyone in the DS9 jumpsuits. This also begs the question of why I'm putting in so much effort for events in the story I'm never going to actually write and/or draw?
It's Star Trek Day! Instead of me going on about how much this franchise means to me, I decided to pay homage to one of its weirdest moments and drew a bonus SotW of Data singing A British Tar:
I wish I could take credit for her character design, but you have to thank Yoshiyuki Sadamoto for that. I only try to honor his work as closely as I can.
Today's Sketch of the Week is the 57th installment of the series and also the SEVENTIETH drawing I've done in 2021. To celebrate such a momentous milestone, I wanted to work on something that would test my coloring skills and also my abilities at drawing facial expressions and hair (things I feel I still have some issues with). So, I figured what would be a better skill workout for me that to draw the characters of the manga/anime The Quintessential Quintuplets? As you can see below, there's no shortage of varying hairstyles to draw amongst them. It took me two separate sessions (4 hours to draw, 4 hours to color) over two days, and left me a physical wreck by the end, but I think the effort I put in to complete it was worth it! After finishing this, though... I think this might be one of my scheduled weeks where I only do a single drawing. I managed to do 4 total drawings in the last 7 days and I think I need to give my brain and body a break.
Well I finally managed to finish the drawing one of my friends commissioned me to do this evening... right as an earthquake struck, so who knows what kind of omen that should be interpreted as. While I can't share the full drawing yet until she gives it as a present to one of her friends, here's a little sample, which just happens to be my favorite part of it: Drawing an irritated Scotty is always fun, I gotta say.
This Sketch of the Week ended up turning into one of my favorites, as it continues to build upon my Eva-Trek concept. Also was another long session of work, done as a single 8-hour from start-to-finish mainly since I just couldn't stop myself once I kicked off working. FILE PHOTO, STARDATE 48543.2: Lieutenant J.G. Asuka L. Soryu argues with Acting Ensign Shinji Ikari as Chief of Ops Lt. Commander Misato Katsuragi looks on, moments before the first sortie against the classified lifeform code named “Israfel.” Approximately 2 hours after this photo was taken, the USS NERV’s First Officer, Cmdr. Kozo Fuyutsuki lectured pilots Ikari & Soryu on the steep amounts of gold-pressed latinum charged by the Ferengi Science Fleet to remap portions of the Beta Quadrant following an incident in battle “too embarrassing to be noted in the ship’s log.” As a bonus to this drawing, I also took some time during this session to draft up a concept of a Starfleet-issue Evangelion entry plug, and I think I'm happy with how I melded the Sternbach aesthetics of the shuttlepod cockpit with an Evangelion: (Please ignore the obvious issues with perspective and the control console looking weirdly askew)