Working in Illustrator and failing miserably in the process.

This here is my first attempt at vector based work, as you can clearly see it's a terrible piece of work, I had never before used Adobe Illustrator and it shows. This was for a front elevation for a character board I had to do, the elevations need to consist of at least, front, side and a top view though I felt it necessary to focus primarily on the front view since that is where the detail is more prominent. It was a case of tracing over something which I had drawn and scanned in with the pen tool. What it boils down too is that I hated this first approach to the elevation, I had made a mistake in drawing the face though, at the time, hadn't realised. What's also apparent is the clear colour contrasts, it's blocky in terms of shading and looking back at it, I hate it. I also think one of the problems was that the realisation of the character hadn't been fully seen so in that respect he lacked actual character and personality. 

Because of that last attempt I redid the elevation, focusing more so on gradient-based shading rather than clear cut bold colour contrasts. The outcome, though better still lacked what personally, I wanted to achieve, it didn't have that cartoon sensibility about it, or at least the depiction I had set out to achieve, nor did it have the character and personality I had mentioned previously.  The design of the boots and gloves did change however, this was mainly due to failed experimentation in Cinema 4D, which I'll talk about later on. The face however, was more reminiscent of it's original concept, because his face is long and shaped like a drinking cup, I had to work out whether or not the facial details would be spread out, or condensed, the original concept had the facial detail at the bottom of the cup giving the character a rather large forehead, this elevation however, had the face midway and personally, it still didn't work for me. Because of these flaws within the design, I scrapped using Illustrator and approached Photoshop...

Using Photoshop, for me, allowed for more flexibility, I felt I had more control over the overall approach of the design and because of this worked at a much quicker pace whereas with Illustrator I chugged along seemingly slow. I built the character up and changed his backstory which in turn, changed his actual physical design. I drew up the front elevation in a vector-esc manner, though this was to give the character form and allowed for me to work off a template of sorts when working over it. What's more, I felt that I was able to depict the character's personality, which was now established and also give him that cartoon sensibility I had been after so it made work allot more motivational to see the overall execution of this piece.

...A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER...

After a couple of hours of shading I had finally came to the conclusion of the front elevation. I went into a fair bit of detail I'd say on this elevation alone, the lighting and shading really bring out the character, pin point curvature, crease's and depth, it was what I set out to achieve from the start and thankfully, what I achieved. Whereas I had used a simple, bold brush to draw out the structure, I used a more distorted brush with rather low opacity to basically, build up on the layer of colour applied to achieve a somewhat detailed character elevation. There wasn't any sort of problem I encountered, I found it relaxing to sit, hunched over my laptop, scribbling away on my Wacom tablet, it's pretty old too, does the job though. After all this was achieved it struck me, I had spent a fair amount of time on one elevation and had about 2 more to go... Fantastic.

Now, who is this character? Doctor Al Saltwort Carbonate, aged 38, born March 17th, 3042. This next part you can choose to read of ignore, it's pretty much just his backstory and a written piece which, for once, I'm rather pleased with. 

"Born into a family of Monotheistic Religious psychopath’s, Al Saltwort Carbonate was forced into believing the ways of the higher entity, commonly known as, “God”.  At the age of six, his Mother enrolled him into Saint Paraphila’s Academy of Properganda, it was here where Al discovered his love for science and the factual basis that engulfed the subject as a whole, with time however, his forced manner into believing in God slowly led him into denial about the existence of humanity as a whole and with it he began questioning whether he himself was real or just a marionette acting upon a scripted stage.

 As these questions slowly became his demise over the year’s, he slipped into paranoia and began showing signs of bipolar disorder, feared amongst classmates, Carbonate was left to his own means of work, sinking slowly into deep, nonsensical trances whilst doing so. One day however, in an attempt to challenge God’s will, Carbonate jumped from the fifth story of his high school building, plummeting to the ground and landing face first, smashing his skull entirely and leaving him facially deformed though miraculously, his brain remained intact and functional. For the rest of his high school and higher education year’s, Microsoft Sam was his means of speech and tubes were his means of food and water intake, his pride crushed and self esteem at an all time low, his bipolar disorder triggered a psychotic rage within Carbonate and in doing so was the cause of death to the entire college campus through a so-called, “freak” explosion which coincidentally, Carbonate survived.

Psychotic, misguided and mentally unstable, Carbonate pursued a path of petty crime, disorderly behaviour and injustice towards man until, through a spark of diabolical genius after being tasered in an escape attempt, he envisioned a cure for his deformation and thus after his ten sentence to jail, left and began work on his Carbotron-Autograft, the machine that was to restructure his face. Many years slaving away lead to the accomplishment of the Carbotron-Autograft though it came at a price; his body began to reject any food or water substance and Saltwort found himself rapidly dying.

Putting the Carbotron-Autograft on hiatus, Saltwort began work on a Bio-Mechanical Hyper alloy Endoskeleton, a system which didn’t require standard hydrocarbon fuel substances nor Fission or Fusion fuel, it was to be completely operational through Biodiesel and protein nutrience. Over time however, as his health deteriorated ever more, Saltwort lost interest in the Carbotron- Autograft and more so on his own survival, he had calculated his life expectancy and if it were to be correct, he had approximately 5 days, 13 hours, 15 minutes and 32 seconds to live and the timer was ever ticking. Aftert slaving away for days on end, grafting and amending frequently arising problems, Saltwort slumped into his chair, exhausted, frail and only minutes away from death he gazed at his work, overwhelmed with an emotion he had only once felt before, joy.

Instead of running off of Biodiesel and protein nutrience, the Endoskeleton ran off of radio-active sugar substitute which fuelled the atomic nucleus within its nuclear-energy cell casing, grafted to run the most sophisticated system of hydraulic actuators and servo-motors ever constructed, baring enough power to run the lights of a metropolis for days on end and it was all placed where a man’s heart would be, shielded in a case hardened, fully armoured, hyper alloy torso.

Pre-installed with distinct guidelines, Saltwort booted up his new to be body, readying himself, he injected his body with a lethal dosage of liquid-neuroparalysis, unable to move, Saltworts body began to shut down completely, as it did the Endoskeleton removed the brain from Saltwort’s dying body and placed it into a cylinder-like pod, from there it infused the brain to the inner working’s of the pod before sealing it inside. Time passed, gaining conscious from the pod filling with highly focused Cerebrospinal Glucose Fluid stood Al Saltwort, alive and well, fully piloting the Endoskeleton, his brain was linked to the entire system, he could see, smell and taste like he used to be able too. His new persona was that of a soft beverage-drinking cup with a simple facial structure that could express emotion. The focused Cerebrospinal Glucose Fluid only fuelled Saltwort’s bipolar disorder, spurring it to maniacal heights, with that however; he became an incredibly quick thinker with impeccable reaction times, a force to be reckoned with. Distasteful towards man, Saltwort left his past behind, with that he took up the persona of Doctor Al Carbonate and swore not rule mankind, but to destroy it in the most inhumane way imaginable by whatever means necessary until he sets the stage to oppose God."