Calibrate It

Thanks to a good friend and a little saved money I treated myself to a Intuos3 graphic tablet! Oh Joy! I'm terrible at drawing with graphic tablets but I don't care, I'm determined to get good with this bad boy. Here's a sketch I did trying to calibrate the pressure sensitivity in Painter and Photoshop. It's a bit flat on one side and the eyes are wonky but its a start I guess.

Gosh darn Batgirl we're done!

When colouring I always ref particular artists to remind myself of the sort of finish I want. Mainly because I'm a major procrastinator who ponders what to add next all the time. This time a had a Jay Bone itch I had to take care of. A slight "Dark Before Light" layer was added. You rarely see this with cell artwork and I've only done this when painting. I was less subtle than Bones but I found the results quite interesting. Check out J.Bones work here: http://gobukan.blogspot.com/

The background is the most fun part. It lets me know I can finish any time and play with brushes. I use a photographed texture as a base and just paint over it like a hooligan in ArtRage. Then paste it into Photoshop and adjust the levels and whatnot, all done!

I would have liked to have done this much more to Yvonne Craig’s likeness but when I toon stuff it all seems to disappear. Two things I need to do in the future is to learn how to caricature and how to water colour.

Adorable!

Supa Flats

Me, as an animator and graphic designer, I dislike overworked, over rendered images (unless I’m painting anyway). I tend to prefer an animation cell style for my pieces soooo…I drop flats and call it quits lol. Well there’s more to it than that, colour balance is key, if your unlike me and know your colour theory you can do this very quickly.

Illustrator CS3 finally has a decent eraser tool but its still a poopy program if you want to work at speed. Here’s a vid how to use it provided by some kind YouTube dude: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnu8Rb4I7os&watch_response. You don’t have to go into the actual tab to do this, just select a line and hit “ctrl + E” to expand the lines.

At this stage my brain says “its done!” for some reason. I really want to get stated on another idea but conformity insists I add shading and lighting and other garbage to show I’m not lazy. When colouring the line art I very rarely make the lines brighter than the flats. It works for Sleeping Beauty but not for me.

I’ll explain how to use these tools properly another time but, here for shading or lighting I’ll use the pen tool. By the way if you don’t like hard edges use the blur tool not the blur filter. Blur filter much like gradients stinks of cheapness.

Lets Follow Through

In Illustrator I usually put the sketch or scribble locked on the top layer with its opacity set to around 40%. Then below it the line art layer, this is so I can still see the sketch clearly.

I'll dash around the image dropping lines with overshoot/follow through where I can. I think this applies to inking in any program. It's by no means law though.

Batgirl Process Part 2

After I've scanned it in I'll usually mirror the image and sort out any nit picks I don't like quite quickly. Not sure why, but the moment I mirror something I can see all the major mistakes. You can spend all day sorting all the nooks and crannies but as time flies so does its energy.

I know the conformist design choice is to have a very strait line where the red line is marked, but strait lines only work for me in action poses.


Look a me trying my hand at a caricature of a famous person. Don't think I've ever tried a caricature before, can you guess who it is? It doesn't seem exaggerated at all. I need to study more.

Batgirl Process Part 1

This is for the few people that want to know my process.

I won’t talk about how I do it in depth just yet cause right now my style is fluctuating a bit too much. When I get my own voice and I’m sure I’m not talking to myself I’ll give y’all the whole low down.

This is a 10 or 20 minute scribble done right after the warm up at the bottom there. I don’t know why I drew this on the back of an envelope but that’s just how it started. It’s has a tonne of mistakes but that’s what photoshop’s for.

I can always see my mistakes but I hate using erasers.

King Kittan

Few oldies and a semi-real Kittan which is part of a bigger piece.

The below one is an old embarrassment but it like the big head!

Another Test

Just wanted to see how large I could post pics here so you all can see my dirty little mistakes. Oh, and an old brush pen scribble too. I love the Pentel brush pen and its edgy line breakage, I really do.

Blogger seems to have changed it to blue somehow.....fascinating.

Testing

Hello Darkness my old friend.