Fish-followers

Still trying to just power on through with my laughable attempts at colouring. Shitty as they are, I'm finding that colour makes the characters seem a lot more substantial than they do as linearts. Besides, you can't keep crying over every mistake; you just keep on trying until you run out of the will to continue.

These are cultists of some kind. I intended them to be members of the elder fish-god cult, but they came out looking a little generic, bar the odd skin tone. That book they all carry is the blasphemous and eldritch text of their cult.

I don't know what I was thinking giving them torches - a light source (coloured one even!) being carried by a character really makes life harder. I mostly managed by ignoring it, which makes thes guys look slightly worse than usual. I like the polished bronze effect on the torches and the censer (in case you were wondering what Charlie was carrying) but it makes the rest of them look even worse by comparisson.

I'm not sure about them all having the exact same shade of robe. I might go back and tint two of them a little. Probably desaturate the oddly colourful elritch texts too. But that's stuff to ponder later - these aren't meant to be usable-quality after all, they're a learning experience.

One thing I am happy about is how much better these guys look than my first cultist attempt. He had an open book, whcih was pretty neat, and a decent-looking hood. Unfortunately he was looking straight into the camera with a perfectly symmetrical pose. It looked terrible. I'm trying (not necessarily succeeding) to avoid cheaty boring symmetrical poses. I figure it's good discipline to try and get a little motion into the stances, or at least a 3/4 viewpoint. I figure I should confront bad habbits and crutches - although maybe just one at a time, eh?

The rope-belts are weird. They have volume, when I usually "paint" details like that on for the sake of simplicity. But it actually turned out "cheaper" in terms of lines and nodes to do them that way. I discovered the same thing when I wanted to give a dog a collar. I doubt anyone other than me will notice though. Maybe the rope belts need trailing ends to look more ropy. it would also add a little more interest to the big flat boring robe areas.

Other stuff that I'm sort-of working on:
A hungry velociraptor. A mad doctor's assistant (nurse maybe?) if I can ever work out what they should be holding. A many-armed surgical frankenstein. Some kind of gorilla, or possibly just burly man-thing. - I don't know, all I have is a silhouette so far, but I like it.