Thursday, July 2, 2009

Final Fantasy VII + Gipi (part four)

This challenge continued...

Two updates in one day! I'm excited!

Good old Barret. Barret's a nicely fleshed out character with an interesting backstory and a lot of great moments in the game; he's also the third and final character from your original party, so he seemed like a great choice to round out this challenge.

As far as costumes are concerned, I didn't feel the need to change a whole lot with Barret. The only thing that truly bugged me were the metal bands around his mid-section. How does that not chafe? How do you move with metal bands around your stomach? I swapped them out for wrapped fabric instead, giving him a sort of pirate look. 

Since his outfit didn't pose much of a challenge, I took this as an opportunity to really try and explore what makes Gipi's style so appealing to me. Gipi's inking doesn't have any line variation to it; he doesn't cover up his mistakes; you can tell he doesn't spend hours aching over whether or not something is perfect. Yet there's no question that the man knows what he's doing. What I found was that the looser and more relaxed I was, the more Gipi-like the drawing felt to me. It also helped to do a few warm-up sketches (which I may post later).

This may be the last in the series, so I hope you enjoyed it! I'll be continuing with the Square-Enix theme for a while. Keep checking back!

3 comments:

You Don't Know Me said...

Beautiful! I always assumed the metal bands didn't go all the way around, or that they were equivalent to a metal plate (he had them around his left wrist too, if I'm not mistaken). I love this one - lots of movement and expression in it!

Johnny Kane said...

Nice. Get to Xenogears!

Chris George said...

Aw... No Cid? This drawing and the ones that preceded it are friggin' awesome!!

This totally takes me back... Waaay back. Also glad to see I'm not the only one who stumbled onto Gipi at my local comic shop. These posts make me want to go dig up his books... And my old ps1 FFVII!

Great work! And yes, please do get to Xenogears ; )