i was listening to a book on tape, or a series of books i believe, a few weeks ago. it's a rather iconic figure, but i thought i'd take a slightly different approach. see if you can tell who i meant it to be. i'll not take offense if you can't tell, i have been quite terrible lately. oh and this is almost a month old. i'm awful.
in my original plan, the bricks were going to look cooler. in fact, the whole background just let me down. i really should have tried harder. yeah, i suck.
yeah, here's the fruit of my lunch. not the fruit that i ate for lunch. in fact, i did not eat fruit for lunch. lunch was fairly dull. that is, it wasn't very interesting until some co-workers started to discuss their favorite bad horror films. my favorite part was when one fellow referred to one of the characters as tom petty. the other fellow cried, "no!" in anguish. amusements!
anyway, here's the little sketch that i started with. i doodled this quite a while ago. i can't say i'm entirely happy with how it turned out. i always lose something from doodle to what could almost be called, "painting." i suppose that could could be eliminated by what one might call "time," and perhaps even something as elusive as "practice." mind you these are all over-exaggerated air quotes. 
it would seem from the evidence that i spend a good deal of time thinking about world of warcraft, not to mention the obscene amount of time i waste actually playing the thing. i figured the best way to make that work for me is to parlay it into something more productive... like drawing silly characters inspired by it.
i fiddled around quite a bit trying to get a good handle on how to construct the head. a good and funny shape eluded me for a long time because i had to integrate the tusks in there. i still don't know how he'd do alot of mouth shapes, but they would be funny. i was inspired a bit by the head of american dad's roger. i haven't actually looked at roger's head in a while, so i'm hoping it isn't too derivative.
next thing i need to tackle is a full body sort of thing. i imagine he has very long floppy feet, and it makes me giggle inside to visualize them flapping about as he walks. if all goes well, i hope to build this guy in 3d and animate him. i do believe it would amuse me greatly. i'll probably be playing wow though.
i need to work more on my painterly stuff, this is kinda sad even for a lunch time speed thing.
this is lomoe. it seems like he's looking at something very close.
So, back in the heady days of school at Full Sail, my buddy, Brandon Ford, and I got together to work on our final project. We came up with this character, the last man on earth. In a derth of creativity, we called him Lomoe as in Last (insert a random O) Man On Earth. Why is he the last man on earth? it doesn't make a difference, but he is, or at least he thinks he is. We decided that we could have alot more freedom if we never said why he was the last man or if he really was the last man. Our initial plan for him was to put him in situations that one might always want to do, but felt restricted because other people were around watching.
I think the character still has alot of potential, so I'm rebuilding his head with better topology (i hope) and making him new blendshapes. I'll be using Osipa's blend shape control method, tailored to my needs. My main objective is to really push the blend shapes so I have as much flexibility as possible. I may realize in the end that blend shapes don't give me that flexibility, or deform too linearly, so it's possible that I may be forced to find some different solutions. We'll see.
