And that’s people’s chests.

When stated previously in the last article, I made a point of stating that when designing your character, the chest (and that is, the core of the body) should be the first stage of your barebone structure, and the primary reason for this is because it’s the part of the body that’s the least dependant on all the other parts. It’s also going to take a large chunk of your picture depending on the size of the character. If your character is big and up front, you’re not going to be allowed to get away with a bad chest without feeling the wrath of a million, million fanboys. It’s easier to make mistakes with the rest of the body and get it pass screening than it is with the chest (I’m not saying you should ever be willing to fudge an arm or a leg, but the eyes are more likely to blank out an arm that’s twisted the wrong way or a badly drawn background hand than they are a warped chest.

Okay, last time I’m using this as an example of bad art now guys.

On the other side of things, when your character’s a tiny background piece, the body is going to be your first priority on keeping that blurry assortment of shapes in the background recognizable as the creature you want it to be.

The only problem that lies with the chest going first is that when it comes to someone actually deigning to grace your art with their sight, the first thing the eyes will hover to is that face thing that’s connected to the bulb that sits in its own little egg holder on the chest (again this is why people can get away with drawing misshapen limbs to the casual viewer). As such, the novice’s instinct is to get to drawing the head before everything else. And despite all I have just spent pages saying, this is completely true and you should so totally do that. But in sketch form only.

When building the body, the head comes last, even after the fingers (the reason for this particular example is that it’s easy to draw the hand dramatically pointing towards the screen but off just a little and then have the head looking in that same direction than it is the other way round). The chest comes first.

So let’s get to the chest.

Your barebones from the last article should have us two balloons at this point. One for chest and one for hips. Please note that this part of the tutorial does not cover clothes. Our characters are going to end this particular article naked and possibly with nipples.

The chest and the hips are an interesting pair since humans can be very different on what part has dominant control in movement. The majority of people see their own little psychological homunculus as their head. When this is the case, the chest usually takes precedent over the hips. For others, those who are naturally athletic and the like, tend to live from their hips. This is all irrelevant when it comes to art really, but know that usually one will take over the other as the dominant starting piece, rather than just getting in the habit of starting with the chest each time.

When starting these I usually like to draw a line connecting them. If the flowline goes through the body, then this usually follows it to a point. Learn how the two work with each other through constant practice, how they tilt based on body position, how one counter balances the other, etc…

An important point to note at the balloon stage is that when it comes to perspective, you can expect one to disappear into the other (during a bird’s eye view of the character for instance.)

A final point to pick up on before we get to drawing our body are the arm and leg join-uppers, aka, the shoulders and buttocks. These are just four extra balloons each (with the buttocks essentially overwriting the hips. Include these now and incorporate them into the ‘core’ (that is, chest and hips) part of the design rather than the following arms and legs section, since the chest isn’t entirely an independent entity from the rest of the body, and you’re going to need to know now just how those pectorals work.

Genitalia

This wouldn’t be a renaissance level tutorial (EVER) if I didn’t include those parts of the body that weren’t associated with reproduction. Unless you’re catering to certain demographics the parts ‘down there’ (THEY’RE CALLED PENIS AND VAGINA) can usually be straight out ignored during your character design. If you’re practicing your anatomy though I wouldn’t recommend cutting them out. The hips of men and woman are different for those very items listed in caps in the above sentence and it’ll learn you good to know why. For these guys, practice is necessary (but not too much practice). For the men out there, I would suggest sketching away a few dongs for yourself, if only to get rid of your squeamishness, and perhaps also the assumption of how penis size usually works.

Breasts are a whole other story. Now I know what you’re all thinking ‘heh hehehe heheheheheheeh….boobies’ And yes, I’m thinking it too. For the woman and overweight male (I’ll presume you were all thinking about the latter half of these), extra balloons are usually required. Width depth and perkiness are all something to consider. Bounce factor isn’t exactly necessary but probably will be something you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Contour lines are required if you don’t want them to look freaky… just go look at diagrams already!

Now we begin the fleshing out section- literally. With the chests and hips, the important muscle groups are the pectorals, abdominals, gluteus (the ass) and latissimus dorsi (back), with the trapezius (neck) and deltoids (shoulders) following up. Understand that from this point in your own style should be keeping in, so I can’t really tell your how to draw them. The basics are the same across genres, as you can see below. I can include pictures (as below), but what’s important here is your own ability to observe the naked, sweaty chests of many people. And this isn’t just the ones you want to look at. Be they full of muscle or full of flab, between slim and sexy to slim and nerdy, voluptuous breasts or saggy ones. You are going to need to understand them all if you are going to create people out of nothing like your god complex secretly (or very openly) wants you to do.

Beyond that, you’re going to need to understand the sub types. There’s a difference between athletes that are built for boxing to those built for bodybuilding to those built for running. There is short and petit sexy and there’s Amazon sexy.

Below follows a lot of basic types, drawn without arms for those who think the side views look very weird. This is no where near a comprehensive list.

Muscular male: The Superman. This is usually the most generic of the super hero types used and the one every Burne Hogarth student will be familiar with. Every muscle group is heavily defined and in perfect proportion. Here you simply have the world’s most perfectly developed man. Note now how the pectoral(chest) muscles overlap to where the shoulder balloons are. They’re connected here folks, and they’ll change considerably when that arm gets raised. Be careful not all your characters end up looking like this.

Heavily muscular man: The Hulk. Now take the perfect development of above and exaggerate. Every muscle group is bigger, usually but not always at the expense of body parts that can’t be bigger (the head for example). Height doesn’t necessary have to be affected here but width will be. More muscles mean broader shoulders and even larger back muscles. For a stockier effect, reduce the distance between chest and hips.

Lightly muscular man: The Spiderman. Usually seen as toned/with definition, but missing the bulk. Everything is usually cut down a bit. The abs in particular don’t look like they’re trying to escape from under the rib cage. Shoulders have a lot less broad to them and the traps don’t look like they’re trying to take over the neck like the heavy guy above does.

Fat man: In comic characters there’s rarely a man who is just a little overweight. It usually jumps straight into fat territory. Muscle is still important here but the layers of fat are coming on. The MIGHTY SIX PACK is usually obscured by this point by several layers and the pecs start to droop a little. Any sign of the back muscles usually disappear from sight. This continues in several stages that I won’t bother describing until your get to…

Obese man: By this point muscle has disappeared and what’s left is hidden by too many layers of fat. The neck gets hidden by the chin, breasts have started to form far too eagerly and the circumference is now an issue much more than it was before. The muscles that don’t get hidden by the layers of extra tissue are usually about the level of the lightly muscled man.

Sumo man: This is a fun combination. A diet on excess, but without muscular entropy. The man keeps the broad shoulders but gets the beer belly too. The pectorals are still firm  but carry droopage at the end (this can vary to pure sagginess). The ass is awesomely huge and can be terrifyingly fun to draw.

Average Joe man: Harder than you would expect since the average joe is usually considered a mix of muscle and fat but on the opposite end of the spectrum to Sumo man, often with one in no great proportion to the other. It can also end up disproportionate, with one having broad shoulders but a bit of a beer belly to being skinny but, again, having a bit of a beer belly.

Teenage man (may also be seen as shoujo man): At this stage we have someone who usually hasn’t started to develop that much muscle but would be hard to consider that skinner. Usually ends up looking a little smaller than Average joe man. Please note this is not to say that teenagers cannot be heavily muscular or obese (or indeed Spiderman type). This style is usually on the path to cartoon simple style and as such the important of muscular definition starts to fade.

Cartoon man – does not care about the difference between such antiquated, nonsensical, real, notions as chest or hips(these type of people may even go so far as to ask what lips are with confusion in their voices). These people usually go from upper body to trousers as they sit on the simplistic side of the sliding scale of realistic to cartoon.

Stick man – It’s just a line. You’ve already drawn it!

The great thing about this whole section is, once you’ve got the barebones down on your creation and set up the muscular structure, it will feel like these things just start to draw themselves. Diligent practice is what’s needed here folks. Draw the muscles over and over again to get used to them. Once these are set in stone you can work towards the fun stuff (not that this ain’t fun) working your own style into the mix.

Until then, we go onto the next stage. Legs!

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So by now you should be aware of exactly what it is you want to draw. You’ll have character design, composition and all that jazz that was in the last section down <include link to last section>. So all that should be left in drawing the silly little scribble that you hope the people on deviant art will love you for, right?

Wrong! I mean sorta… I mean…

Well, in an odd way drawing can’t be that simple. Great works even after planning aren’t usually spat out. They need to be built upon, set up, and generally roughed out so we know we’ve got everything sorted in our head. In other words, we need a rough sketch!

So let’s make a thumbnail.

You’ve heard of thumbnails I’m sure. For this you’re going to need to get a pair of pliers and rip yours right off so fast that the blood shoots out and hopefully starts pouring down the face of your widowed aunt who, if you’ve been paying attention, should already have been placed into a position where the crimson tide can blind her from the travesty you are about to create. After you’ve healed you’ll move onto another type of thumbnail, the small tiny one that is usually used by deviant art and those porn sites that are always relinking me to their credit card page.

Each one is a sex link of sexiness hidden behind deceptive plant pots

These are designed to be small and quick. A thumbnail should be taking you no more than five minutes to draw out if you’re spectacularly good at art. For everyone who doesn’t have an instant affinity with anatomy, perspective and the mystical flow that I shall talk about later, expect to spend a good half hour getting this right unless you’re lucky.

Understand now that the thumbnail is the fundamental framework of your drawing. As abstract and foundational and somewhat shitty as it looks, a lot of effort should go into this. This is because this s the time where you can see if your layout looks so horribly bad you can feeling the universe trying to tear a hole out of itself just so it can make you leave politely. The thumbnail/loose sketch/rough is where you get everything right without being two hours into your design of offshoot Naruto characters with ten tails that woos Sakura and Hinata with ease and is soooo not based off yourself and then suddenly realising that Taruno’s arm isn’t foreshortened right and you’re going to have to use Mr. putty eraser to fix everything.

Remember the possibly old adage of failing to plan = planning to fail

Like the rest of the Internet, i will now try to include this image in each and every one of my articles

Now the thumbnail I’ll admit doesn’t guarantee a great piece of artwork. You can have a nice looking piece of artwork without all this planning. A lot of people get on fine with just bypassing this step. However these people, I shall warn you now, are doing one of the following:

1)      They’re using design techniques to either bypass the need for design or, like above, just plain hiding it.

Shortcuts are everywhere in art, especially eyes

Take in note that this isn’t always a bad thing. I always kind of liked how Mr. Liefeld did the legs of his hookers

2)      They’re able to design it all perfectly in their heads and then essentially transmit it to the paper. This is because their observation techniques are awesome.

This second one can come from both practice and skill that’s been built up around keen observation and an excellent imagination (like hell am I gonna admit it’s some kind of invisible talent installed at birth. If you can’t do it and yet want it, you’re going to have to practice the crap out of your hand and eyes and come to understand just how one can draw without any setup beforehand. I know I’m not there yet. I can usually draw realistic looking faces from scratch without framework but a full battlefield with ten shoulders half of which no longer have faces what with all those bullets flying into them… is still out of my own grasp.

But anyway…yeah; thumbnail is key to gud art.

Now let’s go over how to do one:

Sketching out your stickmen

You’ve probably seen one of these before somewhere:

This is the body work for every humanoid character you will ever draw. They are also completely useless in my humble opinion to ever consider rebuying once the hands have rusted off. Too imposable, and parts snap back into place when you don’t want them too.

What you will want from the doll though is his (or her!) basic shape. Torso, hips, shoulder balls, arms, legs and head. We use these to make slightly more retarded stickmen to make the base of our picture people.

But before we do that, i’m gonna need to talk to y’all ‘bout flow.

Flow is one of those notions that you would see a lot of people stalling when trying to explain, saying it’s something you’ll only really get with practice and that it’s hard to describe. I’m gonna bypass all that right now and state that Flow is what makes pictures awesome and dynamic.

A picture with flow makes you feel the warrior charging up to the enemy as his opponent recoils in terror, the blade of his… blade swinging so wildly that oh my god your hand got sliced off. A picture without flow makes it look like you got your mother to act out a scene of her standing in line at a supermarket and told her to act surprised when you came in dressed like a clown because you though it would be oh so funny. Then she tries and it just looks wrong because she keeps eyeing the goddamn camera and is standing stock still all the time.

An absence of flow can also occur where the artist forgets that his (or her!) 3D picture is supposed to look 3D despite being on a two dimension world living on a three dimensional piece of paper.

Anyway, how do we make flow?

Why, like this~!

Don’cha just love the proof that i’m an amazing artist?

It’s a start okay.

Have some more lines.

Take special note of the arrows. The flow will usually make sense only to yourself in the early stages

I’m possibly losing you, so let’s use some x-men to give you some perspective.

X-men make everything make sense

Understanding me now? Good. Flow goes the direction you want your character to go. If your character is in mid jump, the arched back leading up the arms and going down the legs is the flow line. If the character is punching her opponent’s jaw, the flow line is the arm. If the manga girl’s wavy waves of hair all unrealistically into the background, that’s a flowline. If the person is just standing there at attention the flow line becomes a Y. Every picture you should draw ever should have a flow line with its characters, even those standing stock still.

Flow within foreshortening

I haven’t spoken a word about foreshortening yet (I don’t think anyway… I have been pretty ranty), so you might wanna go look that up until I do. But still, what foreshortening means is that sometimes your flowline is gonna look like this.

One day i lan to have all these lines in an art gallery AND PEOPLE WILL PAY ME!

And the reason for that is this

Remember the flowline is always solely an aid to help show the dynamic direction of your picture. It shouldn’t be in your final piece.

So the best thing you can do to help you understand this a little better is to use varying shapes to define levels

Perspective lines help if you’re a beginner, but poses like this can be quite difficult unless they have their own tutorial dedicated to them.

Bigger squares equal closer to the front of the picture. Small squares the exact opposite. You can even use other squares for a sort of mid way point.

When drawing these pictures though, it does help to have a stock picture on standby, just to help you get the pose right whilst everything else is hidden

Not so necessary with such a boring pose as this, but when the character’s flailing teir arms, feet and tail, it’ll prove handy

And that’s flow line.

So, now I’ve spent around fifteen pages getting you to a stage where you have one single line on your piece of paper, let’s shape the character up and get some drawing done

I’m just going to take this moment first though to just blindly sidestep perspective. There is a lot to perspective and it’s a whole other tutorial in itself with reference to one point/two point/ birds eye view, blind spots, circular perspective and dynamic manga perspective. It’s all gonna be quite long winded and worthy of its own section. One which I will hopefully get around too.

For now though, we’re gonna do the balloons of anatomy.

Remember your mannequin? Don’t go get him! We don’t need that damn thing.

What we do need is for me to show you how to draw that thing properly. Yes, even the retarded mannequin will need drawing correctly to get your picture absolutely amazing and precise. Gee, aren’t you glad you started reading this tutorial and have to witness me stretch every little part out? I know I am.

here, have some basic height diagrams to make you feel you’re learning something

The Burne Hogarth School of making bodies has a great way of doing this and it goes like this in its simplicity of the order in which to draw things that make up your little dancing corpse:

Chest

Hips

Torso

Buttock

Legs (going down)

Shoulders

Arms

Hands and feet

Neck

Head

You’re possibly going to notice one big problem here but let’s sidestep that for the explanation a moment. The reason why this is simply the Best way to sketch up a body is because this one’s on the sliding scale of least-to-most dependent body parts to other body parts. To explain more competently, the chest position is not dependent on the arms as the arms are to the body. To explain in a way you’ll get, stand up, go to a mirror and rotate your chest right now, keeping your hips in place. Note how even in keeping your hips in place every part of your body has moved a fraction. Your neck is now in a different position from a second ago and even your ankles will be tense at an ever so slightly lifted angle. If you had to draw your body as it showed in that mirror as a before and after shot, you’d be drawing two very different versions of your self and not just in the way you’ve inexplicitly put on fifteen pounds.

Contrast that with an image of yourself standing stock still in the mirror as before and one in which you’ve lifted your left arm. This will have barely affected anything. Your legs don’t have to shift to compensate, your neck will only move a fraction and even your other arm has remained exactly where you left it. Your chest may tilt but it’s hardly the same effect that moving your chest had on your arm.

Do you get it? You couldn’t get away with drawing the arms first and then try to fit the body around it. On the contrary, you need to draw the core of your body first as that dictates where your hips, legs arms and head are all gonna end up.

This is the bit you’ll want to practice loads of. Luckily there’s a very nifty site you can use to test with lots of different poses

Of course this does all lead up to the problem you may have noted earlier and that’s the head.

Heads show up a lot (oddly enough). And adding the face to them is something you’re going to want to be ready for. A novice drawing the whole first may end up making the head too small during framework construction. Prevent this early by sketching a little face above it roughly the size you want.

Now Mr. (or Mrs.) head being drawn last is gonna hit most professional scribblers out there hard. From the dawn of picture making we as an entire human race have always been used to drawing the head first. It’s the most interesting piece of the body. The flashy center of our homoclulied existence. You can make a foot in all its articulated glory and it still ain’t gonna express the anger a face will make when said foot gets trodden on. So leaving this section out too late may end up presenting a bit of a problem, namely you ain’t gonna want to draw up an entire picture only to realise too late that the face is too small/at the wrong angle/in the wrong perspective and you can’t fit the face where you want it no more, especially when that emotion can be key to the drawing and especially when the head is the focus of the entire picture.

So once you’ve got to the stage of drawing the head out you’re gonna want to fudge the process a bit and take this opportunity to make sure you’ve got the expression mapped out

Now again, making expressions is a whole other tutorial in itself, one which I will be making later in all its high references glory. For now I’m gonna move onto suggesting you go get Scott McCloud’s Making Comics book. There are three pages in there that are worth more than the rest of the book combined (and it is an awesome book) and they’re all on making emotions. Regardless for now, put your emotion in here. Sketch it out flat and then try to apply a basic form to the head position you’ve currently sketched up. Make sure you get it right. That is why you’re wasting time sketching up this thumbnail isn’t it? Getting the basics right now means you don’t have to waste time redoing large sections of your picture later.

Now, what you’ve done for this one character, do for all your other characters in the picture WITH JUST AS MUCH ATTENTION TO EFFORT AND DETAIL AS BEFORE! Go on, I’ll wait.

Done? Good. Now is the time to sketch out your scenery. Remember your events work from the previous chapter and build it up from there. If you have good perspective this should just flow right out.

Don’t worry, a tutorial on perspectives will show up eventually. If i were to suggest one, it would be this one. For character poses, they know want they’re doing.

Now you should be done with your basic thumbnail. If you’ve got any all important, all encompassing effects you want to add, now is the time to add them but all the same you should be ready to move on

Finishing your thumbnail.

There’s one particularly hatable evil about your thumbnail, you usually have to transfer everything you’ve just done to another sheet of paper. This can be because the sketch is now so sketchy and inerasable that you could damage the paper in trying to get rid of that arm you didn’t like the look of. Maybe it’s because you wanted to have the sketch done on 400gsm card and didn’t want to risk losing it in advance. Maybe you did it on scrap paper. Regardless, you either gonna have to do a lot of eraser cleanup that hopefully doesn’t destroy the base work you’ve set up, or start a new using your thumbnail as a reference.

Have fun with that, but bask in the knowledge that you now know what you’re drawing.

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So you want to draw amazing pictures, huh? You wanna be like the big guys? Like Omar. Like Joe. Not like Rob. Well okay then. Just stick with me and I’ll show you the drawing methods I have chalked up over my LESS THAN A DECADE OF EXPERIENCE. Soon, you’ll be drawing exactly like me.

Not like me either huh?

Just be quiet.

What you will learn in this chapter:

How to come up with character designs

Elements you should consider when drawing

It’s actually quite easy to draw a character. Look at the picture below.

Truly a masterpiece

That took me twelve seconds… roughly ( I was looking at the clock at the same time so I could keep it under twelve seconds, so its kind of there).

But designing the character, that can be the tricky part. I mean, you may have an idea for a character in your head and you think it’s perfect. You’ve got the rough size laid out and the dark, grimy background of doom and maybe even his or her or its favourite weapon being brandished menacingly with teeth clenched for extra hard-ass appeal. But if this is your first time drawing the character chances are you’re gonna hit some bottlenecks in your design. These can range from the features of the face to what’s being worn on the bottom half (it can be very easy to forgot your characters have legs in the design process) and unless you plan for all pictures of the hero’s lower body to be cut from the panel, you’re gonna need to jot down some ideas.

Now you may even not be wishing to draw your own character. You may be doing a fan piece today. Nothing wrong with that, but unless you want the picture to be called ‘a perfect trace of Spiderman as taken from Joe Quesada (you may hate the guy, but you can’t dismiss his art)’ then you still have plenty of design elements to taken into consideration.

Design Elements to take into consideration

Character creation

Let’s assume initially that you’re creating your own character (if you’re not, scroll down to Events) and let’s further imagine that, up until this point, you had a complete blank slate on the character you wanted to produce.

Now obviously it’s pointless me telling you what character to go make up, or the ideas and styles or anything really. This is your own creation and you have your own style. Even if you’re an absolute beginner you have your own style and it’ll be moments like this that’ll help you develop them. So let’s go through a few pointers for good character creation.

Please note that nothing is ever mandatory in character creation. This guide ultimately remains nothing more than my opinion on the way to go about it. Most of it is common sense, but bringing it to attention should help ease your design process and prevent you overlooking details.

Backstory matters, but it’s not vital. A character could be a twenty year veteran of some of the greatest wars but be depicted as a regular butler who conceals himself in plain sight, or you might just be having your weirdo schoolgirl fetish day and draw one of those up with absolutely no personality planned for her. The backstory serves as the starting foundation of the character though and helps to define his or her gender, body size, body type, clothes, weapons, powers and so on. It explains everything from where she got the scar from to why he was walking home with a shopping bag from the convenience store that night. From here you can start to generate details on what your character looks like. I find it’s often better to conceptualize the story of your character before you start really imagining what they look like, rather than making up a back story based on his appearance

Basic details. Clarify a few things with yourself on to what the character actually looks like. Height, weight, gender, hair, face, skin colour. The big criteria are important to establish right now. Every detail is important but the little details you can add later. Decide to change your character from a dwarf to an elf in mid sketch and you’re going to find yourself reaching for a new piece of paper.

Base details you’ll want to establish now:

Gender (male/female/other)

Race (human/elf/mecha/dog/tentacle beast)

Height

Weight and body type (big but obese/big yet muscular/small and skinny/skinny yet defined)

Understand base details are limited and yet aren’t just the aesthetics. You don’t really need to start thinking about stuff like eye colour or number of fingers just yet. Two things to consider though are job and hair colour. A soldier is going to give a different impression than a ninja, as a ninja is to a civilian (unless he’s a really good ninja). This will also help categorize the clothes and inventory the character is going to be carrying at a later point. Hair may not be important, but for the manga artists out there chances are the hair is going to be a integral part of the design (if not curling round the entire picture). You don’t have to be realistic with the hair and your considerations. An elite female spy can have hair so long it seems designed to get stuck in ventilation fans yet as long as it looks cool your viewers won’t really care.

The Event You could skip this section if you want. If you’re designing a character for the first time you may just want a piece of pose art. A cool pose is all one needs. Put that on a blue background and add some photoshop effects and no one will diss your drawing. It can still look cool. However, a lot can be said to improving one’s style simply by including a whole world into the picture.

Your event is what’s going on. Not just the where, but the when and the who and perhaps even the how if you do it right. It’s the back alley where one fights generic punks. It’s the bedroom where the girl so in love angsts. It’s the city tops where your character reaches for the sky. It’s also the time of day, the person’s current attitude and feelings, what they’re wearing. It’s the conflict the character has been dragged to on a day when she thought she’d finally get some piece and quiet or just a fun day out with friends. This is the time to start considering just what you’ve got going on your page. The time when your imagination soars.

The meaning of your picture

Some may be blanking a little here on meaning. These people probably have meaning as simple as ‘A really cool fight scene’ or ‘the girls posing to the camera’. This is fine. I’m not really here (today anyway) to dictate what you shouldn’t be drawing. Simple pictures are fine and this entire section can just be as simple as saying you want to draw a picture of Ken punching Dan for the sake of the shits and the giggles. No problem.

But maybe you want to take it a step further. Perhaps the picture should have an inner meaning to it. Something that speaks both in the subtlety of your characters environment and yet shouts volumes to the inner workings of a dystopian wasteland brought on by the overburden of capitalism and one man’s struggle to find individuality in a wasteland run by warring cults.

Maybe you want to draw a pretty butterfly.

Or maybe you want a draw a beautiful insectoid creature, untainted by the wastelands brought on by the industrial revolution and caught in a time of perfect, childish innocence. A pure, innocent, virgin butterfly, whose perfectly beauty is only marred by the corpse of another off to the side, its abandoned corpse a sample of beauty’s inability to last forever.

Personally, I want to draw giant robots fighting each other with swords right about now.

The meaning of the picture should be established now. Don’t think it has to be complicated and don’t think it has to be a truly unique idea that’s never been done before. Adding meaning for the sake of adding meaning can actually make it a bit hollow but all the same you must develop your meaning now before you actually start the picture. Adding existentialism into your line of thought right now can add a bit of wow to it, but it can add a few hours if you just want to make a quick sketch.

Think what you want the character and events surrounding him/her/it to represent and then  think of ways to tell those looking at the picture and then play with the ideas of how this might get told by the picture.

It’s from here we can start building the picture.

Composition consideration

This first chapter overall does feel a bit cheap. It feels like what I’m saying is kind of obvious, and it will be to a lot of artists. What I’m hoping it does is bring about a sense of focus in you though. Too many pictures can be drawn awesomely and has a fantastic unique style but not really say anything because in the end, they were just drawn and made up as they went along. All a person could hope for in meaning or storytelling is a glimpse into the artist’s deep seated sense of guilt towards his parents that the picture might just hope to show us subconsiciously.

Here is where things start again to feel like they’re getting somewhere. This is building the framework for the picture in your mind. The framework of a picture (or composition) is what a lot of pictures by themselves lack. This is the real planning stage.

Things to consider in composition

Character positioning.

I could argue background goes first but in some cases background may just be the empty canvas. To best imagine what your composition is, imagine your character and events and back story and everything in reality as if hey were there in front of you just doing what they were doing in the situation you’ve set them up in. Now imagine you didn’t give a shit about drawing and that you were a photographer. Snap a shot and keep it in your mind.

Now think of where the character is. What pose do you imagine the character being stuck in? A casual stance. Hugging a friend. In the middle of a jumping kick. General pose is vital in deciding how the picture is going to look. Now you can get away with a lot in drawing but if the pose is wrong then the picture is going to drop a few thousand points in style (and the meter only goes up to ten).

Now, ask yourself other questions. Is he in the foreground or the background? Is she off to the left of the picture, right and center? What parts of the body are closer to the camera. The feet? The head? The arm pointing the gun at the viewer? Are you seeing the front or the back of the character?

You’ve probably got a good idea in your head immediately of the character’s position, probably long before you started reading the tutorial. Don’t let this lull you. Even if you’re borrowing another character for the sake of fanwork, deciding where they go in the picture makes a static character dynamic and a bland sideways camera angle into one that shows them totally tricking on thin air during a backwards somersault.

Background:

Background usually fall into five different areas of increasing complexity:

None: What background? This is just a blank sheet with a character on it. You’ll be lucky if its even coloured paper! A blank background isn’t always just for time saving. It can give a dramatic silence to a scene just a much as an empty battlefield. Then at times, it is just for the purpose of timekeeping. When you do this the positioning of the character becomes even more important. A character can look much more imposing if facing the right angle and shoved on the right part of the paper. 

With the same shitty image we can make a character changing from a scheming mastermind to a looming thug, all by moving the image up and down.

Abstract: Designed for your desktop background. The abstract is exactly the same as the blank background but with the silent depth removed. Though the character isn’t exactly in limbo, the background is irrelevant and usually done to up the coolness a few clicks.

The background here doesn’t represent anything in reality, but sure looks dang cool!

Simple background: The background isn’t important, but you still want a location. The can be tricky to get just right. Since the background isn’t a focus at all, you need to sum up the whereabouts so that people can get it in a quick glance. Here you need to consider generic features for the landscape and pop them in. With simple backgrounds, the issue is keeping everything reduced based on its position. This means you can’t go ahead and draw a complex ivory tower in the background that grabs the viewers attention and then think you can get away with scribbling in all the other buildings. You could get away with the building in the foreground being a lot more detailed than those depicted on the other side of the city, but the point is to keep everything relative and in perspective,

But even with simple backgrounds, a little effort really brings out the atmosphere of a picture

Complex background: The lines are so blurry between this and the previous that it goes straight to complex. At its zenith, the background is an integral part of the picture. If you took the characters away from this place and dumped them elsewhere, it would look wrong. I’m not saying you couldn’t change the theme from an urban backyard to a backyard in a tribal rainforest, but you couldn’t get away with changing the post apocalyptic wastelands into a homeroom class and expect to keep up the level of persistence in a bleak wasteland (maybe comparing those two is a bad example…). At this point you can go nuts with detail.  The shops the heroes are walking through all have their own signs and special offers. The cars have stickers in the window that the viewer can read.

The background meshes with the characters at this stage. The car is there to be walked over by the eccentric with no care of personal property. The pile of books the librarian has fallen into all move aside in regards to his body weight and they all have their names on them. The trapeze artist is reaching for that baton for a reason. You don’t have to include massive levels of detail in the background, but doing so makes for the more entrancing parts of artwork.

Background focus pictures: These are just the complex backgrounds but with the focus being more on the background itself. Maybe you’re drawing a troop of soldiers charging and no one is more main character than the other. Here, the character throwing the grenade is just as important as the trench he’s climbing out of. From this point on, you could get away with making interesting pictures without even needing to include sentient beings, but this is a character focused tutorial, so I shall move on.

Note there isn’t a main character here (the closest is the kid with a baseball bat), yet character is still kept strong for the four kids and the zombie children.

Other points for background.

Angle

I’ve mentioned this before but it can include its own sector. Things are naturally cooler looking when the camera doesn’t look like it could just replace your head standing at shoulder height. Even tilting the entire picture can add effect. Bird’s/Worm’s eye views add bonus points too.

Light and dark

Since we’re still planning, now might be a good idea to think where your light sources are. Think natural light. Think artificial light. Think positioning of light and what light is going to reflect off of. Think shadows. For some of you, this will be the key theme in your pictures.

Especially those of you wanting to draw Death Note’s Kira slightly leaning forwards pictures.

Positioning of other characters

The main character might not be the only one on there . His allies and enemies and those innocent bystanders that are just collateral at the end of the day will all have their place in the picture. And hey, they need designing too. Maybe not as much, but Ronnie Chavstoppable will add a bit more to the picture than Generic thug #3443. It might even be an idea to flick through the character design section at the top of the page again.

Details

Details are a wonderful thing that come in two stages; the details you decided right from the start you wanted to put in and those you clicked would be awesome if your picture had them at a later point.

The range of possibilities to add to detail can be beyond the scope of any guide, since they can range from the cracks in a building to the earrings the character is wearing that they got off their master. For now, the important thing is to plan space for them. The worst thing you can do is decide you want to insert another character hidden in the background but failing to plan her precise location and ending up having to shift something about later.

Also be aware of how detailed detail will actually get based on where its position. Detail in the background at the far end of the street two blocks away will be a blur. The design of the trainer that’s stepping on the ‘camera lens’ will be intricate.

Effects

Let me just say impact is not made from your effects. A solid piece of character artwork is not developed with big flashes or lens flare. Impact will come from good composition, good positions and interesting looking characters. A good effect will come into play when it meshes with everything else in the picture, not stands out from it. Take the girl’s energy ball in the picture below. It’s clearly not the focus here. The fight is the focus and the cool flashy hadouken fireball of doom is just another part of the process. The same goes for her wavy headband and the giant weirdo in the background (no, not Zangeif)

This is also a good example of character positioning, minor characters and attention to detail. Hell, i just love Omar’s work all round!

When considering your effects, and especially your large manga hairstyles, consider how you’re going to integrate them into the piece. If you find yourself using hair to hide body features, make sure you’re doing it for the sake of planned style, rather than to hide the fact you don’t know foreshortening.

So by now you should have a general idea of what you want to draw. Sorry if this chapter felt a bit too concept heavy but well THAT WAS THE POINT. We’ll get to drawing techniques next lesson. For now understand that if you start out with just a rough impression, your design won’t go that extra level. Plan your artworks! Art comes with both instinct and thought.

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This is gonna be my first real in-depth tutorial that I ever really bothered doing. Actually, that’s a lie. There the other one as well. Let me rephrase. This is going to be my first tutorial that shows you something tangible, not the pseudo-scientific cognitive left brain at 30% stuff I did the last time. Don’t get me wrong. That’s the stuff that taught me to draw gud all those years ago and without it my art would still be two dimensional, wonky crap but if you happen to come here wanting actual advice on- oh I don’t know- how to draw a cartoon body correctly, then until this tutorial pops up, you ain’t gonna wanna come here.

This tutorial is going to be in ten parts (maybe more/possibly less) and released weekly. That’s because learning how to draw a body ain’t that simple. Well, it can be. It fact it can be mega simple. And that’s partly the point of this tutorial. There’s loads of its kind on the internet, in both manga and super hero form (mostly manga and occasionally furry) and both usually consist of the same basic premise:

a)      Watch tutorial artist draw the base of the character.

b)      Watch the character magically appear on the paper

c)      Watch tutorial artist dedicate ten steps to very specific detail that won’t apply in your drawing.

This be not the fault of the artist really. I’m sure all these artists have their reasons  for skipping on the more basic points of art tutorialisation and I’m sure the top one is that they’re fags. Regardless, I wanna do a little more in-depth tutorial here and do my best to focus on every little bit because, frankly, I’ve yet to see anyone else do it. Perhaps there was something on Manga Revolution but they’ve gone the way of Onemanga, much to everyone’s dismay.

Getting back to that part of Manga/Super hero. I often find little in the way of tutorials on drawing comic book heroes. Maybe I’m not looking. There’s loads of manga though and some are very good and well done to those people. But a problem lays in the too big differences to manga and super hero drawings. Super hero is, for a bizarre choice of words, usually more realistic looking.

Not that this is a good or bad thing, or even strictly always true, but manga follows a reduced formula and as old Mr. McCloud says, simplicity is easier to relate too. Often what this means is that manga and super hero tutorials are usually very far apart from each other despite at the base level all figure drawing is really the same, and I want to generate a more universal tutorial, so this will incorporate both…

And stick figures. Mostly because I draw lots of stick figures. Oh and, because I’m reasonably insane and like to throw huge expectations at myself on creating THE ULTIMATE DRAWING TUTORIAL, we’ll be doing several different types of character as well, including different genders. All follow a certain underlying formula anyway so after a while it becomes more a matter of aesthetics than anything else.

Some of this may appear obvious to some of you. But many artists find it very easy to learn only by copying other people’s works without going into the theory behind it. This leads to a lack of personal creativity. If you want to be able to draw your own characters in their own awesome fight poses with other awesome characters and they all happen to be wearing really awesome clothes… then you might get something here.

Let’s get down to the contents shall we? Each section should be updated weekly depending on if I can keep a schedule. This first week is just an introduction of what you’ll need for the tutorial course and what you can expect from each future update for this part of the series. Somehow even as I type I appear to be turning this into some kind of online course, which I guess it might as well be.

Course schedule:

Introduction: You’re reading it, and possibly regretting the doing of so. Who is this guy? Why am I reading his stuff? I thought I had clicked on links for Chinese lesbians? All valid statements/questions. None will be answered and instead I write a list of stuff I plan to teach whoever will listen and then tell you to go buy art supplies!

Lesson 1: Conceptualization: This is the groundwork. Your ideas. Your feelings. Your meaning in the pretty pictures that vomit out of the chambers of your skull and splatter against the once white clean dead tree that you have now permanently stained with your filthy excuse at an art attempt. While there be nothing wrong with just letting the pencil hit the paper and start wandering away on its own, it’s always good to have a plan of attack. This section deals on your composition, the flow of your page, the intent of your work, the positioning of your characters and what you want displayed.

Lesson 2: Barebones and thumbnails. Okay before was just concept. This is the real groundwork. Things will be going onto paper here. Ideas will be laid out. Stick figures will be drawn and links to pages on perspective will be handed out.

Lesson 3: Anatomy: Let’s draw these people shall we? Here I go more into what makes the best method for creating a person, whether it be in Manga, Superhero or even anatomically correct Greek statue form and why the head usually isn’t the best place to start.

Lesson 4: The body: We start with the core, and turn them into the chest and hips. We look at make and female differences ad maybe even add some shoulders and buttocks. Boobs may also come into existence. Genitals less likely.

Lesson 5: Legs: A lot of us use them. Personally I hate mine and they hate me. But I love drawing ones on paper, and then usually these to mock my own retarded pair.

Lesson 6: Arms: No one ever came to appreciate just how difficult I found arms. Shoulders are a big factor. Forearms get covered in detail. And muscles get laid out in a way Rob Liefeld wouldn’t recognise. Hopefully, I’ll have got them right by this point in time myself.

Lesson 7: Hands and feet: Maybe they each deserve their own section and we can get into detail on four of the most complicated points of the human body. Maybe I’ll be lazy by this point in time and try to merge them in with the arms and legs sections. Maybe I’ll have more than a hundred visits to the site at this point.

Lesson 8: The head: It may come last but your character will be just a carcass without it.

Lesson 9: Hair: Hair would have never deserved its own section if it weren’t for the womenfolk out there. Scourges of the universe that they are, they make us realise you can have different types (of hair. There is only one type of women). We go through them here, ignoring all the different types and instead on showing you the method on how to create hair styles for yourself.

Lesson 10: Clothes: Okay I’m getting bored of writing out a small paragraph for each section now. You know what clothes are. This’ll help you draw them/

Finale: Around here the tutorial on making cool looking, reasonably accurate characters ends and I jump straight to the ‘click to make background magically appear option. You will wish that I’d have written more. And perhaps beg for updates, and I will perhaps grant you this.

You’re now going to need me to tell you what you need. You would think it obvious, but I figure I shouldn’t leave people standing there helping not know of the notion of graphite and instead choosing the nearest possible stain makers pumping round their body in order to make marks on their mother’s coffee tables (for this tutorial, I will assume she owns more than one).

Equipment:

For this tutorial you’re not going to need much. Just a pencil and paper.

And that is all.

Perhaps a rubber.

Maybe a ruler.

One thing that always got me with art tutorial books is how they never seem helpful with what type of pencil you use or the quality of the paper. There is a good reason for this and, if you’re like me back before I learned this lesson, you’re scrolling through this looking for the exact measurement of art equipment to use ( (I use a 0.2mm mechanical pencil bought from Wilkinson’s for twenty five English pence and 220gsm card bought from the kids section in WHSmith for World Without Sky). Understand now that they don’t matter. If your artwork is crap and if you think it’ll be better if you just knew what type of paper thickness you should be using, your art will not improve. Seriously, don’t decide to put off doing your art simply because the 2H pencil you found in the drawer downstairs where your mother keeps the ball points won’t be good enough or because you can only find lined notepaper. It doesn’t matter, and thinking it does will only lead to procrastination, and not the type where you draw.

I personally like mechanical pencils. This is because I favour cross hatching over shading. I can still do both with any type of pencil (even with cheap biros really) so again it’s a non-issue. It also keeps me using the same pencil, which leads to some kind of symbiotic relationship between the two of us that you could never possibly hope to separate.

I can highly recommend putty erasers instead of your regular inferior human rubbers. This can be bought at your ‘probably not very local and you may have to travel to a bigger city’ art shop. They erase almost all pencil like marking, charcoal and graphite and they don’t damage the paper at all (maybe if you rubbed stupid hard) in the same way the regular rubber would. They can also be molded. Very useful. A Sketchpad is also good. Preferably one with a ring binder to prevent creases, and something above 200 <link> gsm. Prevents tearing.

Other than that long list of stuff, you should be good.

Let’s get drawing, shall we?

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When not being assaulted by the age old argument ‘Does violence in video games cause one’s children to become docile, little sheep with no intents of aggression as a result of a cathartic release of said aggression resulting further in a generation of youngsters who develop no discernable goals’, video games are assaulted by people who don’t play them as not being art. The argument is simple. Video gamers say that games can constitute as an art form. Some people who aren’t gamers say they do not. Most other people don’t care and quite a lot are still asking for us to get on with helping them developing basic food and hygiene. The last of these debates will not be covered in this article.

In fact most of them won’t. This was just a starting argument really for the idea that I found the last three Final Fantasies to be complete abominations in the notion of the RPG that I want to tear them apart and doing it on an artistic level sounds fun.

I’m actually kinda of glad that I don’t intend to try and answer this question because the question is unanswerable. ‘Are video games art?’ is as about as vague a generalizing question as saying that I know video games like I do the stains on the inside pockets of my ex-girlfriend favorite pair of jeans (do I have a ex-girlfriend? Probably. I haven’t called her in a while). I mean, come on, just how does one define art anyway? Pretty pictures? An expression of the human consciousness? A symbolic representation of human thoughts and emotions colliding with an objective reality to bring about an amalgamation of mind and universe? Who cares! I just want to mock Final Fantasy XII for having too big a level design in a pitiful attempt to hide a complete absence of story, and I plan on using art metaphors to do it!

Let’s start with the word composition. In art, this is how the picture is presented, where objects are placed, what colour scheme is used, what art style and so on. In games, you can think of this as the overall design layout; how a game is laid out, based on its intentions, concepts, characters, plot, gameplay mechanics, musical score, level design, quirks, features, variation of the limit break, plot twist, overuse of tropes, attempted underusement of tropes, viral media and so on and so forth with everything that makes us the game with the most prominent exception of the fan base, who both should and should never be taken into account because they are impossible to please.

Now in art (yes I can still focus), there is a rule of composition, so important, that some may consider it THE GOLDEN RULE OF DOOM! The rule is simple ‘Never make two intervals the same. In essence, this means repeating stuff is boring. A line of trees is organized but samey. Kids will ignore a line of trees planted precisely ten meters apart from each other by the roadside and groomed to look identical, but would spend hours playing in the forest. Same applies with use of colours, tonal values and even positioning. A picture looks naturally a lot more interesting is the lone gunman figure is standing off to the side of the canvas rather than directly in the middle. Mood can be created simply by taking a boring picture and moving it into the corner.

See? Can you feel the mood being inserted?

This applies in all media, from photography to music to media to literature. That last one may sound confusing, but think where we’d be without paragraphs and chapters. Paragraphs prevent a book from a single block of text that becomes all the more difficult to scan. Composition is involved in everything.

Including video games.

The problem is, how it’s used in video games.

Now the older games had it easy, simply based on the irony of their restrictions. A 2d platform world, a bird’s eye view of a maze; these were pictures in their own right and since they only had to be at one angle and two dimensions, composition was easy. The Pac Man maze has become iconic. The choice of angle and layout won’t be mistaken with another maze any time soon.

The same applied with games that were more than just one screen. Sonic the hedgehog had multiple layers in the background, but with no need to turn the camera around, the focus on that one angle made it all the more encompassing, The level designers simply had to master that one side of things and go from there.

What am I getting at? Why, insulting Final Fantasy 12 of course!

But let’s get there slowly. Video games didn’t stay 2D of course. They evolved. Some would say they created some other form of dimension. A third if you will. Some would get anal and argue that Duration was already present so technically they became 4D. Some would point out that there was 2.5D and that’s a valid point so we’ll sort of touch it a bit later.

Games hit what we will call 3D and here is where they were thrown a hardball. There was no focus on just one angle anymore. All had to be covered. So Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time came out and that one sided 2d environment was gone and now we had a camera to look round. The absence of detail helped a lot here in keeping the art and the games still looked good. Hell they looked great and got better as they continued to evolve. Soon camera limitations were lost. Worlds were expanded and created in full high definition, integrated bump mapping spherical perfection. It was the next age of gaming and we’re all still bouncing along for the ride and having the time of our lives as we’re thrown one new game to waste hours on after the next. Now we’re getting systems that respond to our movements rather than our controllers. Lawnmower man 2 technologies is getting every bit closer and then the matrix is just the next step away. Yee ha!

Still, doesn’t it feel like something’s missing?

Doesn’t it feel like we’ve lost something along the way?

Does anyone get that insipid little feeling that, somewhere along the way, the type of games that we liked the best (and if you’re not an rpg fan you can piss off now) have been losing the parts we liked the most and replaced them, sometimes with  things that seem nothing better than time expending tactic? Suspiciously long fields, generic towns, unnecessary side quests that bring nothing to the plot, the complete removal of side quests which didn’t add to the plot but were fun anyway, mini games that added variety, an over reliance on pretty movies, non interactive, stock characters and the barest of excuses for a plot that seems to be made up on the fly kind of like this article…?

Gasp! We’ve standardized the RPG. Even worse, it feels we’ve allowed middle manager accountant types to scratch their withered claws all over our gaming scene, optimizing the quantitative to give us more and more and more grind fights and less of that useful character development. It seems nowadays meta-rpgs are being made, rather than actual ones. We don’t need a town renowned for its ancient bounty hunting traditional where the party arrives to have their valuables stolen and they must preserve among a folk who provide them small yet useful chunks of information ultimately leading to a boss fight with an invading army’s Director President and his monster dog that all ends in a dramatic motorcycle escape that brings the two female characters closer than they were before. No, now all we need is the appearance of a town that does this.

Lost and confused and think I’m just blabbering? Correct on that third one, but let me ask Final Fantasy fans to do these two little exercises.

A)    Name three towns in Final Fantasy XII.

B)    Name ten towns in Final Fantasy VII.

Be honest with yourselves here. I understand people exist out there that are of the opinion that 12 is better than 7. And if you were arguing in terms of the battle system, I might partly agree with you, boring programming based combat system that it was. But let’s face it, were you to grab Rabanastre (I had to look that up!) in Final Fantasy XII and with a techno futuristic cyberpunk layout instead of middle/eastern European bazaar town that you had, move all the races across by one and turned the overall theme of the game into a space opera but kept all the mythos the same would you have actually experienced any difference. The answer is No, because to the designers the actual city didn’t matter. It was just generic capital city A. Try to do the same with Midgar and you won’t have Midgar anymore. The same with Balamb Garden. The same with Zanarkand. Locations were individuals in themselves. They weren’t just convenient stops along the way. They weren’t just huge bumbling cities designed to show off just how much time the developers had on their hands, and now we’re back to the Golden rule.

The problem with making a game level too big is a simple one. Quantity over quality. You can make a game bigger simply by grabbing a piece of grass texture and stretching it so it’s ten miles long. You can make a city bigger using the copy and paste function. Legitimate techniques one couldn’t say, but perhaps one could say that this argument is a generalization and of course the buildings are different. It’s obviously not all the same and instead there’s a bustling metropolis full of vibrant people and places to explore.

It’s all it needed.

The only problem is, it’s not that at all.  The fifteen or so people of the town before that had the history of the town divided between them and now the fifty or so people are all just being part of the picture. But this isn’t ‘show, don’t tell’. This is just ‘show nothing of interest at all and tell even less because we’ve destroyed the elements that create location exposition’.

The game probably won’t come where the newest blond haired, sword wielding hero won’t enter a town that has fifteen large streets all identical to one another, but the time is already here where wandering the large town with different sized houses and shop vendors and the like has become all but pointless because there ain’t no monsters there and there certainly ain’t no characters of sub-plot interest. 3D game cities are easy to make big nowadays and let’s face it, putting something in every nook and cranny would be even more time consuming than making the large city in the first place in the end a pointless exercise obsessive compulsive retardism.

Far too big to get in one screenshot

Except back then it wasn’t. Back in GTA we explored those city streets in attempts to find new cars and weapons. In Super Mario we searched for Stars and were awarded with big green dinosaurs and even in the pointless little town of Kalm, we still ran through every available door and searched every piece of background be it table, wardrobe and under the stairs cupboard containing a dog and goddammit we weren’t happy until we got that Peacemaker weapon that we didn’t know who it belonged too and that future hint about coming back later to do some of the hardest side quests in the game.

And this was the town that existed solely for the purpose of a flashback scene to explain the main characters hero complex. For the hour of game time you spent in it, it provided a lot more to itself than Eruyt Village.

So what did it best? What would prevent this in the future? What tricks did Final Fantasy VII do right that Final Fantasy XII tried to ignore by increasing its field zones so that anyone wanting a decent plot would be gravely disappointed. What made that 3D world different for the other 3D that I so love hating about?

Well, it wasn’t 3D for a start.

Not properly anyway. Created 3D, but portrayed 2D. This alone makes a world of difference in showing the world. It turns it into a movie. Hell it’s what turned it into art. It’s what prevents two intervals from being the same and whilst one can have 3D and 2.5D, just having 3D run the risk of making everything samey, especially the more you fall into sandbox territory and start dragging everything out.

Having fixed camera angles warps the controls, it changes the distance you can see the characters. It allows characters the sneak behind the scenery to find a hidden potion. Seeing everything turns off the imagination. It stops it being a fantasy.

Even the smallest of back alleys was memorable in Resident Evil 2.

So am I saying 3D is bad? No. We have plenty of 3D games that do bring character to their location. Silent Hill. Call of Duty. Even the giant Hyrule field had more to it than every open space filled with monsters in it from Final Fantasy XIII. And these just wouldn’t work if they were 2D or even 2.5D.

You’ll never forget where this is.

A location is not just a convenient place for a story to happen. It is the story, integrated into it with the rest of the characters, plot and gameplay. You could have a game without music and you could still create atmosphere in a good location design. Hell you could even have large open field the size of the game and get away with it (Shadow of the Colossus, praise be to ye), as long as it served a point beyond the notion of ‘let’s put monsters here’. 3D can be successful, but it also has to have a point. If you create a large empty space for the sake of travel time, you don’t need to create a large empty space.

Yet where’s this one?

Final fantasy developers said they wanted to break the formula of village/field/dungeon/village/field/dungeon. That’s fine. Great. Be innovative. Make something new, but their alternative seemed to be some bizarre mix of field/field/field/field/field/field/dungeon/field/village of complete pointlessness/field/field/field/field/field. I like to think I could field the next statement into the pigeonhole of obviousness but the aim of making your video game shouldn’t be ‘let’s take out the interesting parts and replace them with grinding’. And Cosmos help us when the designers’ next best thought goes along the lines of ‘Hey, people liked that Cloud character. Let’s make a girl version of him with pink hair!’

If such an argument was made, one would hope that a character designer would take Cloud for the deconstruction of the heroic jackass that he was, living on a revenge fueled hero drive, acting cool, talking smart, but all the while with a paranoid undertone of something not quite right that leads to the full on breakdown and eventual sidequest of self redemption that made Cloud the reconstructed success he is today. And while little Miss Lightning did this the rest of her game didn’t exactly jump to it.

At least it was better than Tidus from Final Fantasy XII.

No wait, I meant… crap. What was his name again? Balthier? No, that was the character they decide to claim was the real main character after they realised they forgot to make a decent story for the main character. Whatever, I can already be assured that he was completely pointless to the plot. He could have died and served as an invisible ghost and the rest of the cast would have been none the wiser. Basch was kind of cool. Ashe was secretly Yuna and Penelo was a lobotimised Rikku.

Mind you, this brings us to the next point of rant. Stock characters! Why do we have them and how the hell could we forget that the one thing you don’t do when making a story is make characters that lack character?

Let’s move onto Persona 3. Another game that wasted 15 hours of my life before it was deleted. For those who haven’t played it I’ll warn you now. It is boring. People will try to convince you otherwise but I’ll assume that’s to justify their own pathetic lives. Not only is it boring (apparently enough to win awards) it also goes out of its way to underachieve itself.

A special extra hour after midnight. People wander the streets with their minds sucked out of them. Monsters that are summoned by enacting suicide. All great ideas! Lovely original concepts that could be used to build up great plots and inspired character deelopNOOOOO! It’s a dungeon crawler where they don’t even bother to make the dungeons unique. They have a computer program randomly churn them up instead and the part that isn’t battle is you wandering around the same fifteen points of the game over and over and over again.

But don’t worry because at least they have a lot of strong character development with many different side plots to follow that are certainly interest and brig about a full flavour of LIES!!!! The character development appears to be the equivalent of what a person who has never had any friends ever and even their parents shunned them could only imagine the process of friendship to be. Why you just have to wander (the same places in the same city) over and over again. Occasionally, people with character portraits will appear. Start a conversation with them to spend ‘hours and hours of fun with them’. At least that’s what the computer will tell you as the screen fades to black. It seems depth isn’t necessary anymore, just statistical integers that represent friendship the more times your character hangs out with them.

You will not form lasting ties with any of them.

And these characters! Geez. Nameless, traitless hero character number one. Cocky, wise talking, bumbling sidekick, generic female, embarrassed love interest #1, sexy superior love interest #2, female robot #3485. Never make two intervals the same! No matter how differently they were drawn and how different they were said to be, stock characters remain stock characters unless you develop them an these characters. Well, let’s just say after 15 hours all I knew about them is that they were part of a group to stop the latest evil. Other than that, they might as well have been replaced with the Scooby squad.

RPGs differ in their narrative (or in my opinion they should) from other games.  There is an extra focus on story that won’t be there for other games. FPS’s and third person’s might, but RPGs are expected to go that extra mile. Some seem to be of the opinion that RPGs should be games that are secretly about numbers. Leveling up, adjusting your strength scores, balancing your party. But these are not the heart and brains of the game. These are merely veins that the game must travel through, bringing the game along with itself. There are dungeon and dragon types where you’re supposed to allow your imagination to fill in most of the blanks and that’s all sweets and sugars. Go halfway between the two and you often end up with a monster whose main power is boring one side of the fanbase and deluding the other side into this being THE BEST THING EVER!

The intervals of the game must not remain the same over time and if they do, they must have variety. A good game is not spending three hours in a row grinding enemies for the sake of leveling up, or riding horseback to your next destination all for the purpose of creating distance (cause there sure ain’t anything to bother looking for traveling between Iranian cities A and B in Assassin’s Creed). Distance can be created in five minutes of scene. Walk across a screen for two minutes, stop to talk/create character development while one complains he’s tired, continue walking again for two minutes = hundreds of miles traveled! Peanuts you could do it in three seconds if you cut away fast enough. It’s the law of montage. It allows you to create years in minutes and allows you to create giant cities without actually needing to render every building.

Your aim should not be to fill every gap and stretch every minute. Your aim should not be to bypass plot by telling the player that plot occurred and it was good so have +2 social experience points and that allows you to unlock a new friend. Your aim in an RPG should be immersive depth that leaves the imagination tingling because it wants to imagine more. It should leave the character second guessing, not droning on so long that after a while it feels like there’s no point even trying to initially guess because there ain’t no well developed plot here.

And if you can’t do that THEN STOP MAKING FINAL FANTASY GAMES!

Art is lost when two intervals are the same. It becomes a diagram, a poor simulation. But even with different intervals, stretch one out to five hours and you’ve lost the plot.

I think I’ve made my point.

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More stuff back in the archives!

Let’s start with an incredibly long post.

I’m not one to falter much in the first place (except maybe all the time) but looking through the site has really inspired me to go crazy on everything I want to do.
So I’m going to try and do everything.

…is what I said 90 days ago.

I made a nice list of goals I wanted to achieve. Short term rather than long term, I set up win conditions for myself as well as the methods to keep them up. I had 24 goals overall to complete and I ended up getting 19 of them done. The five that fell through fell through for a mix of reasons. Some I just haven’t finished sorting out yet (one will be complete just as soon as I take an old television down to the charity shop later today, another as son as I send the form off), some because I need to look into it some more (I wanted to get a thousand unique views to my website, I fell flat with just over a 100) and one because I didn’t get down to 10% body fat as planned (started at 18%, currently at 15%).

But that 90 days is over, and this new one has begun (I haven’t stopped on those remaining goals, I’m getting them out the way as we go). I learnt a lot from the previous one, how to apply timeboxing, habit scheduling, just doing it. Steve’s site has been a great help, and with the permission of the forum, I’d like it to be a great help in the stuff I wanna do for the next 90 days as well.

So I’m gonna list my next set of goals.

Goal range: From 23rd July 2010 to 20th October 2010

1. Do Five Transformers pictures for Auto Assembly
• Condition: The following five pictures are complete and signed at Auto Assembly
i. Scott McNeil picture
ii. Gary Chalk Picture
iii. Derrek Wyatt picture
iv. Simon Furman picture
v. Artist picture
• Habit Schedule: Saturday and Sunday Evenings after dinner
• Timebox: One and a half hours

Comments: I’m an aspiring artist by the way, and last year I went to a Transformers convention and sketched up a picture of Grimlock in a frenzied panic the evening before the last day. The reason? Because the voice actor of the original Grimlock Greg Berger was there! He signed me picture and everything. This year I decided I’m doing the same, but with everybody there.

2. Attend Auto Assembly
• Condition: Attend Auto Assembly August 15th
i. Status update: Ticket has been purchased
• Habit Schedule: 12th,14th,15th August

Comments: Well, I’ll have to go if I’m gonna complete the first goal.

3. Complete piano sheet music
• Condition: Be able to play the following on the piano to a reasonable standard
• Fur Elise
• Trumpet Voluntary
• Super Mario theme
• Habit Schedule: Monday, Tuesday and Thursday evenings after dinner for one half hour.
Comments: One of the goals of the first 90 days was to take up Piano. I ended up the 90 days having learnt The Beginner’s March and the Stars Wars opening theme. It was a good start and I’m going with more. A friend is teaching me piano in exchange for me teaching her karate, so I gets me lots of practice with this.

4. Complete WWS issue 2 script
• Condition: Issue Two script complete
i. Draft
ii. Clean up
iii. Edit with Sam
iv. Final Proof
• Habit Schedule: Thursday Night activity
• Timebox: One and a half hours

Comments: World without Sky is a webcomic we’re working on. Issue one is currently being inked by a friend and slowly uploaded. Meanwhile, I’m starting work on the script for issue two.

5. Do at least ten pages of lineart for issue two
• Condition: Ten pages complete and ready to be inked
• Delay Condition: Can’t be started until [Goal 4] is completed
• Habit Schedule: Thursday Night activity
• Timebox: One and a half hours
• Bonus Points: Don’t stop at ten!

Comments: And then move straight onto the lineart. We plan on getting into a rhythm of three times a week release with this, so I’m making sure we’ve got plenty of lineart to go with this. Fifty pages for issue one are already done (and replacing the old version of the comic as they’re inked. Issue two will be a little shorter at thirty pages.

6. Do 20 of the 10 laps
• Condition: Completed the 8k running course twenty times over the course of the quarter
• Habit Schedule: Tuesday and Thursday straight after work for the running
• Status keep: 0/20
• Bonus Points: Don’t stop running after you reach 20

Comments: I started running in the last set of goals and worked out a strip of field that I kept running around. At first I thought it was only 400 meters, but upon measuring it turned out it was 800 meters! So now I run round it ten times after work. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I do weights and karate practice instead.

7. Hold handstand for 30 seconds
• Condition: Hold an unassisted handstand for thirty seconds without swaying
• Habit Schedule: Nightly practice
• Status keep:
i. Can currently do: a basic handstand
• Bonus points: Try holding it and walking it
8. Flexible bridge
• Condition: Be able to fall back into the unassisted bridge and jump back out of it
• Habit Schedule: Nightly practice
• Status keep:
i. Can currently do: a bridge from the floor

Comments: These two are just things I’ve always wanted to do. So now’s the time to do ‘em.

9. Do a new article every week
• Condition: Write a new article for the workHate website once a week from now on
• Safety rule: Names of articles will be added over the course of the weeks
i. Teaching kids to draw
• Habit Schedule: Monday nights. Published on Tuesdays after edit
• Timebox: Three hours

Comments: On the workHate website, I’ve started writing articles for stuff I like. It’s a range of stuff from art to comics to exercise to personal philosophy. I’ve got a ton of extra stuff to add, so add it I shall.

10. Increase visit base further
• Condition: Increase public awareness of workHate Inc.
• Condition: 2000 unique visitors
• Methodology: See separate sheet
• Habit Schedule: Monday/Tuesday/Friday nights

Comments: This bombed last time. I ended up with about a hundred unique visits, so I’m learning better onto how to bring in the crowds. Steve’s articles have been a great help with this and hopefully since most of the content that’s being generated from this 90 days thing should be going up on the site, I should have lots of stuff to show people by the end of it.
(incidentally, the site’s www.workhate.co.uk)

11. Read the following books:
• Condition: Complete the following books
• Safety rule: Books may be discontinued if found to be boring
• Safety rule: Other books may be added to the list
i. Fall of Hyperion
ii. Genocide
• Habit Schedule: Lunch break reads

Comments: In the last 90 days, I got seven books read, to the point where I’m not entirely sure what else to read this time, though part of me wants to focus on video games next, so I might not do too many books this time.

12. Do a new workHate comic every week
• Condition: Complete one of the workHate Scribble comics once a week
• Safety rule: Names of comics will be added to the list over time
• Habit Schedule: Tuesday nights before dance. Published on Wednesday after edit
• Timebox: One hour

Comments: The workHate comics are little scribble comics I post on the website. They only take about an hour to do each and I love doing them. Only problem was setting the time to do them. With focus and self discipline on my side, I hope to have a dozen new ones on the site by the end of this at the least. Hell, maybe people will even find them funny.

13. Attend the snowboarding course
• Condition: Attend the weekend snowboarding course in September
• Habit Schedule: First week of September

Comments: I became a qualified Ocean Diver in the last 90 days, and this time, it’s time to hit the slopes. There’s a local indoor ski centre nearby that does a weekend training course. I intend to attend it in September.

14. Be moved out
• Condition: Moved into my own apartment
• Habit Schedule: Weekend viewings

Comments: Alas, I moved back in with my parents about three years ago and a rut of trying to find work kept me there for three years. No longer! With a job and good finances on my side, it’s time to get my own little human storage box in the world.

15. Create three storylines for TOFOTN
• Condition: Complete three episodes of TOFOTN
i. Episode 1
ii. Episode 2
iii. Episode 3
• Habit Schedule: Thursday/Saturday/Sunday Evenings
• Delay Condition: Saturdays and Sundays are delayed until [Goal 1] is complete
• Timebox: One and a half hours

Comments: My little novel, The Other Fist of the Ninja, is about to get its second sequel. As a webnovel, it comes out in large chunks each time. I intend to get three of them out and possibly more.

16. Complete games
• Complete the following games:
i. Final Fantasy III
ii. Yume Nikki
iii. Iji
iv. Condemned
v. Transformers: War for Cybertron
vi. Call of Cthulu
vii. Eternal Darkness
viii. Majora’s Mask
ix. Touhou game
• Habit Schedule: Nightly wind down: 11 o’clock onwards

Comments: There are too many video games I wanna play!

17. Translate 2 manga
• Condition: Translate the following from Japanese to English
• Safety Rule: Second manga to be added at a later date
i. Transformers Henkei comic
• Habit Schedule: Nightly wind down: 11 o’clock onwards
• Timebox: One hour

18. Watch a series of Raw anime
• Condition: Watch a whole series of RAW anime without any assistance with translation
• Habit Schedule: Nightly wind down: 11 o’clock onwards

Comments: Back at University I took up Japanese. I then proceeded to stop learning anything about Japanese because I was an idiot. I’m now back into it. I worked my way through ‘Japanese for Everybody’ in the last 90 days and learned 200 kanji. Now I’m going for a more practical approach to learning it, by listening, read and writing the stuff (tries futilely to hide the fact he knows no Japanese people to actually practice speaking to).
19. Do five art projects
• Condition: Complete five separate digital arts projects
• Safety rule: Projects to be added as completed
i.
• Habit Schedule: Saturday and Sunday Evenings
• Delay Condition: To be started after [Goals 1 and 5] are complete
• Timebox: One and a half hours

Comments: One of the poorer habits I have is buying Creative Projects magazines from the local market, skimming through them and never applying anything I’ve learnt. That should change with this little goal. The five projects in question will be Digital art projects based on techniques learnt and developed from these magazines. Hell, maybe I’ll show you them afterwards.

20. Learn blackjack card counting
• Condition: Be able to play blackjack using a four deck and keeping track of the cards
• Habit Schedule: Half an hour after Friday night Karate

Comment: More of a memory exercise than anything else. I’m not a gambler. In fact, in order to assist my Fruit Machine addict friend, I’ve given up all forms of luck based gambling altogether (not that I touched them all that much anyway). I just thought it was cool and wanted to do it. What nobler endeavor could there be?

21. Attend all dance lessons:
• Condition: Attend every Tuesday Night dance lesson from now until the end of the quarter
• Safety Rule: Illness and Injury are acceptable omissions
• Habit Schedule: Every Tuesday 20:00-21:00
• Timebox: One hour

Comment: This final one kinda feels like cheating. I just have to attend the lessons every Tuesday night. That’s all. The problem with that (if it can even be viewed as a problem) is that the class offers no advanced schedule. It’s just turn up and dance. Me and my partner have already got the Waltz basics, along with the Cha cha and Quickstep, and it’s a pretty simple plan with no future goal in mind other than the become THE GOD OF DANCE! Should be easy enough.