Raw illustrated heads

To continue “showing my work” in the making of Yearling’s Bobtail, here are the original character heads that were drawn on graph paper. I did them separately from the bodies, not just because this allowed me to draw them in greater detail, but also because I wanted the freedom to play around with head-to-body ratios later on. There are 302 heads total.

Much like with my skills in music composition, I’d been drawing for pleasure my whole life, but never had any formal training in illustration. Being pressed for time, I decided to just do my best by learning from books. My top priority was to finally get good at facial expressions, which had long been a weakness of mine; I think I succeeded for the most part.

All these drawings were scanned a while back, since this was needed to render them as SVGs; so for convenience’s sake, I’ll just show one collage photo, and then the rest will be scanned images. You might also notice that a few heads look “off” in terms of perspective; those were mostly corrected in the SVGs. I guess perspective is still a weakness of mine, ha.

This is just to further prove that all of these were drawn by hand on paper, rather than generated by AI. I’m sure no one today would doubt me, but who knows how it’ll be in the future, ha.

Sadly, this is the only photo I took of any heads while they were still being worked on. I was already immersed in my projects when social media became a thing, so I never developed the habit of posting on it. As a result, the thought of showing my progress to others just didn’t occur to me.

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