Three Images, Two Drawings, One Character

More delays on the Mock Poster Essay, I'm afraid. I'd like to say you can't rush Art, but in truth you can rush Art. You can rush it lots. It just won't be worth much when it's done.

Worse comes to worse, I skip it for now and finish the Spam essay. Better than than a bad essay.

Instead of the promised essay, I thought I'd show how I've been improving in terms of drawing. What follows is character design for a protagonist who, as it happens, has nothing to do with the Mock Posters and the stories they try to represent

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This was drawn... I'm thinking three to four years ago. I'm only putting up this rough form as all my attempts to retouch it have ended in embarrassment. Still, nothing to be ashamed of here. One ear might be a little too high and the like, but still not bad.

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This (the same character) was drawn a month or so back. My scanner isn't functioning right now, so I've been using a digital camera. It makes the whole thing way too hazy, but what can you do?

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This is the finished picture, touched up and cleaned up with Jasc Paintshop. For the most part, I use Jasc to sort of "ink" my lines, as well as take out what specks the scanner (or in this case the camera) puts in. In this case, unless I'm misremebering things, I didn't "ink"; these are all the original lines

I try not to do a lot of cutting and pasting, to keep the "cheat" feeling down. However, in this case I did cut and paste several times. Still, it doesn't look to far gone from the original, does it?

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The last image is what I aspire to be capable of without Jasc's help, the middle image is where I'm at (which I think is damn close to target), and the first image wasn't appreciated when I did it.

All images the work of Cullen M. M. Waters