Muppety

Planning on seeing the Muppets sometime this week. I'm a big fan of the vintage Muppet stuff, less so of more recent endeavours, and very much cautious about new Muppet offerings. The reviews have been very good, freakishly good in fact, so I'm hopeful. We'll see soon.

Anyway, I was in a Muppety mood and I doodled these 2- not real Muppets, just something in that style. The little girl below reminds me of the beautiful simplicity of early Sesame Street muppets.

Down in Fraggle Rock Pt 5

Boy it's been a long time since I've worked on this one. I wanted a project to keep me motivated to practice my digital painting, so I figured a big free form group shot of a bunch of Fraggles would be good. I'm just kind of making each one up as I go along, not worrying about the overall layout or anything, but of course trying to get some good personality in there. The reason I've neglected is so long was that my Wacom was really acting up. My stylus finally died, and after getting a new one I find that that seems to have solved most of the problems I was having. So enough talking, check out the progress below.

This is where I left off.



So I blocked in a new Fraggle. I really wanted to make this guy unique. So often the background characters were meant to just blend in, and not really have unique features. I wanted to make this guy old, with grayer colors overall, a beard, and a hat. I kinda sketched him looking into his hands. I think eventually I'm going to put a doozer into his hand, but didn't have time to do it tonight.

You can see below, just barely blocking in the actual face, I've already lost a slight tilt to his head that was in the original sketch. I didn't notice this loss till after, and as I still like the end result, I didn't bother to fix it. Still, often there is something subtle about the sketch that is lost if you're not careful.

The beginning of facial details. Some bags under his eyes and liver spots or freckels on his nose.

Fur on the body and the arms are defined now. Love making these little guys look soft and squishy.

Here's his beard. I've really gotten a bit more extreme (realistic?) with the lighting on this guy, which means I might go back and adjust it on the others.

And finally, his hat. I seem to remember that the fraggles wore some sort of hat like this, though it looked like it was carved out of a gourd or something. But I felt the overall shape looked a little too Smurfish (especially with that Papa Smurf-ish beard), so I wanted mine to be a bit more angular. And I tried to make it look like a patchwork.

That's all for today. I hope to work on this a lot more frequently.

What's good about it?

Down in Fraggle Rock pt. 2

I've started adding the second Fraggle.
I decided to give her eyes that were not quite typical for Fraggles, but still Muppety (it's a word- at least in my house), and that made her kind of feminine looking. I'll probably just leave her this way until I get some of the Fraggles around them blocked in, and then go back and finish what still shows. This will ideally be a very crowded group shot, so in the end it may just be a bunch of heads showing.

Down in Fraggle Rock Pt. 1

I loved Fraggle Rock as a kid, though I don't know if I really watched very much of it. I do remember my mom telling my brother and I that there was a new kids show coming on, and we could stay up to watch it. Strange as it seems, it was originally an HBO show, on at 8pm, which was our bedtime. I believe it was shown on Sunday nights, so perhaps Jim Henson was hoping to recreate the success of Disney's long standing Sunday night program, something in prime time for the whole family. I don't remember watching more than a handful of Fraggle Rock episodes in this time slot, but somehow, through merchandise, books, and reruns, the world of Fraggle Rock became pretty familiar. Though my memories of it were pretty vague, I do remember that the thing I liked most was the atmosphere of the setting. The fraggles lived in these endless caves, all colorfully lit (like the caves in Star Trek, where was all the light coming from?!), which always looked cozy and warm. I was never claustrophobic- far from it! I used to love to take a coloring book into the deep closet that was under my grandparents staircase and sit and color behind the coats, for hours, with a flashlight as my only illumination. So living in a cave seemed like great fun to me. Anyway, thankfully we now have Fraggle Rock on DVD, and I often put it on to listen ot in the background while I paint. I took a break from a larger project today and just started doodling in Photoshop, and I decided I'd doodle some Fraggles. They all have things in common, but there's an endless variety of colors and features that can be mixed and matched, so I thought it would be a fun thing to doodle. My plan was to just draw a pile of them, just fill up the page. And since I'm still kind of figuring out how I prefer to do this digital painting thing I think what I'll do is post it in stages, as each character comes along. Here's what I've got so far:

First off, this isn't supposed to be any one Fraggle, in fact, I would like to have them all be new Fraggles, not ones from the show, though my daughter says this one is Wembely. But it's not- Wembely has green body fur and overall is more yellow green than this guy. Anyway, I really stumbled over how to do this, not quite knowing how refined I wanted this painting to be, so he's not as pretty as some of the others might be. Hopefully I will remember to save some more preliminary progress shots along the way so you can see how each one evolves. This guy's looking at another Fraggle, who's not there yet, but hopefully will be tomorrow. See you then!