A Change of Pace

I need a break from the daily grind so I decided to do a mini project in which I take a regular park bench/lamp and change the setting just to see what I can come up with.

Aries Temple Plan

Final "House" design

Here's a 3/4 view of the outer temple.  I plan on shading it soon and doing an interior of it as well.

Basic Plan for the temple and where stuff goes.  I decided to try my hand at designing architecture with the classical Golden Ratio mainly because of the setting.  These temple are found in Greece so it would only make sense to use classic Greek design methods.  :D

Gold Saint: Aries

Left: Complete Armor  -  Right: Combat ready

Man, I had no idea what I was getting into when I thought of this project.  Trying to have the armor believable but still iconic and some-what loyal to it's original anime design was a huge headache that, I can honestly say, I did not see coming.

On the bright side, I learned quite a lot from this first character so then later ones will be a breeze in comparison!  :D

Nameless Aries Saint: Clothes and Body

Body Type and Clothing

Looks like he's a Speedo's kind of guy...

I wanted to explore the possibility of placing this man not in some fantasy/mystic realm but somewhere in the real world and I figured Tibet would be the closest place to this guys' race's origins.  I could have gone super ornate and detailed on the clothing but he's a humble man who's given up everything of luxury in hopes of rediscovering himself.

Gold Saint: Aries Helmet design 01

First pass at the front design for the Aries Helmet.  I had started working on it in color but I kept getting distracted so I just switched it up to gray scale.

Lately I've been getting back into Saint Seiya and it reignited my passion for the whole series from when I was a child.  "The Lost Canvas" and the more recent "Omega" series' also inspired me to do a redesign of the characters.

I'm not sure if I want to go along with the series' characters or go a different route and make new characters all together (I guess along with my own story as well?)

The Aries Saint seems to be a kind of "lineage" thing where the armor and title is passed down within the family or at least within the race of people so I wanted to keep him looking similar to the Aries we're all familiar with.  I need to play with different hair colors because, right now, I'm not diggin' the "pink" color... works fine in anime... not so much when you're trying to pull it towards realism.  Oh, right, I'm designing the characters as though they were to be made into a live action movie, so that'll play a big role in the armor designs.

Here are a couple of images of the series' Aries character:

The Daily Warm-Up

Today's Sketch

Warm-up face drawing, inspired by Michael Buffington [drawaholic.blogspot.com], my character drawing professor from AAU.  I try and time myself with these to see how far I can get in 1 hour (+ or -).  It's an exercise on speed and accuracy on anatomy and form.  I'm doing them with colored pencils but I think I'm going to switch over to graphite seeing as how the wax just wares out too fast.  I could do charcoal but it's way too messy and I don't want to get it all over the carpet. D:  Well, I have a whole box full of colored pencils, I suppose I'll switch out when they're all just stubs... but I digress.  My goal is to reach 1,000 head drawings in hopes of improving.  :D  (This is going to be one really long thread.)

Here are a few others I've done before this one.