jelloapocalypse

Epithet Portrait References- [PART 1: Banzai Blasters]

Added 2024-08-28 08:18:27 +0000 UTC

PART 3 - Percy, Ramsey, and Zora
PART 2 - Gorou, the Bartender, and Howie

The Patreon's been a little light this summer on account of Amy and my ongoing move to Canada, which is still at least two months away from being "Finished". I just spent the past week sick in Los Angeles with Lenti shipping stuff from my old apartment and I'm flying back tomorrow.

I've watched TONS of animated movies to review, but my voice hasn't been well enough. So instead, I decided to wrangle some of the hundreds (thousands?) of pictures I took of myself for the art team to use as reference images when drawing the Epithet Erased cast in various poses.

There are a ton of these, so I'll be doing them in batches. This first batch is available to all patrons! The rest will be $5 tier and up.

I've decided to start with the Banzai Blasters, mostly because I think Arnold's portraits are really good and the images of me being knocked over as the generic grunts are funny.

I'll also credit the artists who were in charge of each character:

Arnold portraits by Serina Hernandez
Bugsy portraits by Riel Gustave
Generic Banzai and R/G/Y Banzai Girl portraits by Rae Kumnertsena

The portrait pipeline went as follows:

First, I would listen through the episode's audio, which at this point had no music or SFX. I was listening for any moment that required a unique portrait or a unique expression. If there was a moment where Giovanni was yelling at someone, I would add "GIOVANNI POINTING" to the list. The goal was to cover the maximum number of needs with the minimum number of portraits, so I tried to find ways to use a single pose in multiple instances.

For example, two of Bugsy's portraits were "PUSHING SOMEONE OUT OF THE WAY" and "SHOOTING SOMETHING OUT OF HIS MOUTH". By drawing him with his arm out in a specific action pose, we could use one portrait for both of these.

Each character was then assigned to a specific artist on the team to do the line art. Here is a set of Arnold expressions by Serina Hernandez.

After the initial sketches were drawn, the artist would post them in our Lineart discord channel for notes and touch ups. I would make necessary changes and sometimes if an artist was having a particularly difficult time with a certain pose, one of the other team members could hop in and help. There's a Howie portrait of him sitting that about five different people worked on, haha.

After a portrait was approved, the line artist would upload it to a folder where any available Colorist would take it and fill in the colors. We had five line artists and three colorists.

Colorist approval was mostly about making sure colors of small details were consistent from portrait to portrait (Percy's badge was a bad offender of this, sometimes being white and other times ivory). The biggest issue was colors leaking outside of lines, which would become SUPER visible once the animators started using them.

The artists were also on call to help the animation team whenever they needed portrait edits, like an additional expression (i.e. winking) or sometimes frankensteining the arm from one portrait onto the body of another to make an entirely "new" pose.

That was the basic flow! I wrote out the portrait descriptions for the first episode or two, but starting some time around EP3/4 I began filming myself and sending the artists screencaps of myself in various poses. It was honestly faster than correcting issues when my descriptions weren't enough to get the pose I needed across. Because I didn't do this in Episode 1, there's no poses for Giovanni's boys. Sorry! Those descriptors were done in text.

I'll post this batch for now and do the rest at a later date. I imagine this will be somewhere between 3-6 batches of posts. Some of these characters like Zora, Percy, and Ramsey have an absolute buttload of reference images. Hopefully you guys find these interesting!

Also, for the record, almost every portrait presented here had at least two possible reference images, sometimes up to six or seven. I just took the one that looks the most like the final portrait to make things a little easier on myself. The extra poses aren't uploaded unless I think they're really funny.