Chewbacca Week!!! Star Wars 'toon sketches.

It's that time of year again...getting close to the three year anniversary of the Bad Flip Blog on August 13th, and you longtime followers know what that means - Chewbacca!  I started this blog with a horrible rendition of Chewbacca, and now it is tradition to do a new Chewie every year.  Usually, it's a painting, but this whole year so far has been doing paintings in the off hours, so I thought I'd change it up this year, and do a toon version of our Furry Friend.  I haven't used this style much this year at all, so I needed to do a bit of a warm up...

It took me awhile to find the right face for ol' Chewie, along with some Imperial Trooper doodles thrown in for good measure...although eventually I found a good face, and a good pose, with his crossbow, to take to the next stage.  But, I was having fun, so I just spent the night sketching while we watched Cheers reruns...!

I thought that I should make this an Empire themed Chewbacca, due to the 30th Anniversary going on, so I continued with doing some more characters from that chapter.  A horrible attempt at a Taun Taun and Wampa...but I found pretty cool Luke and Lando designs, to maybe develop at a later date.

Then of course, Chewie's BFF, Han Solo.  Kind of a cool body shape in that standing pose, but none of the heads are quite right.

Nothing especially valuable in here, maybe the Hoth Leia costume, the Tatooine Luke costume, and also kind of a funny head idea for 3PO, too.

I did it all from memory, so there's things in most of these that bug me, because I know they aren't right...but it gets the gears working to maybe do more Star Wars in my Toon Style.

Anyways...it's Chewbacca Week, so I better get back to him!  The pencil drawing for final, tomorrow...

Rumble & Frenzy 04b

Colors flipped...for those continuity purists out there.

Rumble & Frenzy 04a

Final, version A...I'll post the alt colored version tomorrow.  Threw in a bit of an homage to the G1 cartoon opening for the background.

Overall, the 3D test/practice was pretty successful, I had never used it to that extent before.  I think that last time I even got close to this was maybe the Sector 7 Drone from the first movie game, that was very rudimentary block shapes, but these guys had a lot more detail built into them.  Time to start pushing my 3D boundaries though...

Rumble & Frenzy 03

After I turned and twisted the composition, I played around with the camera lens to get some subtle warping, and create a bit more sense of movement, I finally settled on the final render, and brought that into photoshop for additional work.  It's been nice to have some of those trouble areas already handled, like shoulder and arm perspective points are already in place, I don't have to redraw a bunch to find the right angles for corners and curves.

So far this has taken a bit longer than if I had just spent more time with the drawing, and went straight to photoshop rendering...but like I said, I needed to re-familiarize myself with 3D, and it's been a pretty good learning experience.

Anyways, on to color...

Rumble & Frenzy 02

So after doing a block-in of all the shapes, I paused the 3D stuff, and brought him into photoshop for a quick color test.  Before any of you get fired up about the colors*, I'll just tell you that from my personal Transformers Canon, the G1 cartoon has precedence.  I lived in bliss until the Robot Heroes version came out, and had him colored red and black with his arms transformed into the jackhammers, so there was no escaping the ret-con, after all.  I guess I'll do two versions of the image, with the colors swapped.

After the color test, I went back to 3D, to do some punch up with the shapes, and do the Frenzy version of the arms as well.  I put them in the pose from the sketch - and here's the awesome thing about 3D - so I could rotate the characters around, and reveal more of Frenzy than I had in the sketch, making a better overall composition than what I would have had, had I just began rendering from the drawing.

I might play with lighting and camera a little more before I find my final shot, but this is pretty much locked to go back into photoshop for additional rendering and color.

*OK, non Transformers Nerds...in the cartoon Rumble was blue, and Frenzy was red...the toys had the names reversed, and basically everything else outside of the cartoon had them listed this way.  This is kind of a new revelation to me, so those facts may be a little on the hazy side...but in my world, the cartoon rules.

Rumble is Blue, and Frenzy is Red.  So there.

Rumble & Frenzy 01

...aaaaaaaaannnd I'm back!  That was a loooong time away for this blog, that's for sure!  Was out of town for two weeks, and last week I was putting my house back together, mowing the lawn, finding new homes for all the SDCC widgets I got, and trying to learn a 3D program.

I've had an image of Rumble and Frenzy bouncing around my head for a long, ever since I did that Soundwave awhile back.  I did versions of Laserbeak and Ravage, but I felt I still needed to get all those deployable minions out of my system.  So, while on one of my flights, I doodled up this:

A couple of troublemakers.  So when I got home, knowing the plan was to tech demo with the little bit of time I still had off, I decided to do another detail pass at these guys, via an overlay drawing:

But not too detailed, as I decided I was going to build these guys up in 3D.  Something nice and blocky, to ease into it.  I got some details figured out, but left some things unfinished, or didn't even bother with going to the trouble of breaking out the circle templates, etc.

So armed with this image, my Rumble and Frenzy G1 figures, and the ever-trusty and invaluable Ark opened to their model sheet, I started to get to work...

Going on Vacation...

...for a few weeks...but let me leave you with these bits of BADASSERY!

First off, the DLC G1 Starscream from the Revenge of the Fallen.  He came out pretty great, I loved him in the game, and was proud enough of the design to do a little poster, and then use him again for the TF:Continuum cover...how could he get cooler?

Here's how:

Print him out, like a paper cut-out? That is pretty cool.

OK, whoa.  He stands up in robot mode too...?

Because he TRANSFORMS!?!  So somebody made his kid's birthday invites out of Starscream, that actually transforms from jet to bot, revealing all the invite info.  AMAZING!  Awesome dad, awesome kid, hope he has an awesome birthday!

And then last night I get this email...

WhattheF!?!  My Soundwave SKETCH got tattooed on someone's arm!?!  At first, I was all...'but I did a full color final for that'...I have to say though, it's looks pretty cool - and as tough as nails.  I'd like to think that the guy who chooses the rough sketch over the color final, is the same kinda guy that chooses a tin can lid for shaving over any of those pussy-ass Gillette comfort razors.

I'm not really into the habit of posting other people's work on my art blog, (even if it's based on my own!) so you guys who sent me this, please take credit and post in the comments section.

I just wanted to say thanks so much for showing me this stuff...I really don't have the vocabulary, other than AWESOMEAWESOMEAWESOME!

Back at the end of July, folks.  Miss you already...