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.