See? More Ellie.

Ellie Evolution

My one ever evolving project is Ellie on Planet X - kind of an internet comic/children's book thingy in the works. It's been an epic in the making, with its natal beginnings over ten years ago, still waiting to see the light of day. Ellie's character didn't even show up in the story until late in the brain storming process and has gone through many changes along the way. Partly because my style over the years has improved, but also because I can't make a decision on how I just want to do the art for the story. But the idea behind refining her character design has always been to simplify Ellie and come up with a formula to draw her the same every time.

Originally Ellie was going to be a little girl in a space suit, but for the practicality of the plot line it made more sense to make her a robot girl instead. The above drawing was the very first sketch I did of her. She already had antenna on her head to represent pony tails and a solar panel skirt. I went from drawing to 3D models, back to drawing, then to vector illustrations for simplicity (which only made it more complicated), then back to drawing, all the while trying to make her design more and more simple.










I found that having a permanent smile made it difficult to show different emotions on her face - having to cover it up with an arm or a shadow - so I dropped it. And I continued the simplification process by limiting the colors too.





I'll spend hours drawing Ellie over and over again just to work out problems I have with posing her or the kind of emotions I'm trying to portray.

And just when I thought I had it figured out I started at it again. I don't know if I like where it's going, but I thought I'd simplify her head some more and make it easier and quicker to draw. If ever the story makes it to the light of day I guess I'll have to choose.

Sketchy and sketches

I played it lazy last night and used my mighty tablet pc at Dr. Sketchy as opposed to real paper and pencils. Azucena teasingly calls it cheating. I've made it a point up until now to not use the tablet so that I would be forced into fixing on the fly whatever mistakes I make using traditional media. How else do we improve but by learning from our mistakes?

Our models for the night consisted of three hula hoopers, including Revolva (awesome name) who posed for us before. All proceeds went to Blight Busters which gives hula hoops to inner city kids for World Hoop Day. The fun part of drawing hula hoopers in action is that nobody can tell you that you got it wrong. The models were moving far too fast to get an accurate picture of what they were doing. In fact, all of my sketches are amalgams of the three hoopers, using an arm from this one, a leg from that one...etc. The session was more about capturing the feeling of movement than any kind of accuracy and it led to much more cartoony drawings than what I normally produce at Dr. Sketchy.

I'm also throwing in three sketches from lunch break earlier in the day. Kind of my warm-up for D.S.: a girl from a pop-up ad on my email, Ellie, and Azucena admiring a rock.

Coming up next: My Comic Con report! I got to meet Dr. Sketchy creator Molly Crabapple herself! Stay tuned!

Ellie, Ellie, Ellie, and Ellie

Just because I haven't posted any pages for Ellie on Planet X doesn't mean there hasn't been any work going on. It's just taking place behind the scenes. Since my acquisition of the fantabulously fancy LE1600 Tablet PC from Motion Computing, there's been a steady stream of experimenting on how to best create the artwork for the story. Thus, the pages that have already been done may have a different look and feel to what's coming next since I'm now able to do things that I couldn't before.

Much of the experimenting has helped flesh some things out in the story a bit more and helped me come up with new and interesting ideas (to me anyway). Also, practice makes perfect, and drawing Ellie over and over again in different poses helps get her looking consistent. A fun little exercise has been figuring out how to show the emotions of a robot that has a permanent smile using shadows on her face and reflections in her eyes. Here's some sketches:

Again with Ellie

New page posted on the Ellie on Planet X blog!

Ellie continues...

At long last, there's a new page posted on the Ellie on Planet X blog!

EXTRA! EXTRA!

I'm starting a new experiment today. I'm attempting an online children's book serial kinda thing. The plan is to add new pages on a regular basis. The story is rather open ended so we'll just see where it takes us. So I present to you the first page of Ellie On Planet X!

Find the story at: http://jimcandraw.com/ellie/