Saturday, January 12, 2008

More Process

In an attempt to harsh on my own work and to hopefully elicit outside critiques, here is more process work. I enlarged the original sketch and re-pencilled the entire thing. Then, on the recommendation of Sweet Enemy , I then traced the pencil over in blue, refining the shading a bit more. Then I inked the entire thing by hand. I could ave just done the outlines and filled in in Photoshop, but I really like inking large areas. It's meditative to me, like sweeping. Then a dash of color. This is a really basic color job. I'm going to hit colorist Steve Hamaker's blog for some of his coloring tutorials. He'd done the entire Bone series and Jeff Smith's Shazam! as well. So, he just might know his stuff.

Blue. Man, I do like how blue pencil looks:


Ink. I think I really got the fur, and solved the breast problem this time. Now, the doctor's face is a bit off:


Color. Yup. color. Very basic, just enough to show the characters:





Listening to while posting: "Charles Darwin" by Artichoke from the album 26 Scientists Volume One Anning-Malthus . It was listened to on Pandora the coolest online radio station. It is the result of the Music Genome Project . IPandora = cool. Songs about scientists = cool. Go! Go now!

7 comments:

Dean Wormer said...

Dude, that is beautiful!

I like it better b&w but it's all good.

Arkonbey said...

Hey, Dean, thanks for visiting.

Yeah,the color is not that great. Yet. Maybe it'll be better after I hit those Hamaker tutorials...

Andre Messier said...

I think the only "flaw" I see with your process is you have no half-tones. All of your shadows appear 100% black. For example, in your pencil's the skirt is putting a light shadow on the scientists legs. In your inked version the light shadow isn't light.

Now that I think about it, you don't have any highlights either...

Arkonbey said...

AndreZero: you're right. I think the problem is that I didn't count on reduction. I did do some lines to simulate gradients and they are visible in the original (about 11" tall), but I made them too small and they didn't translate.

One more lesson!

Things may look out with the color, but I was trying for a classic 'comic book style'.

Swinebread said...

andrezero makes a good point but I think it's a very good start.

better than anything I could do.

Love that bear!

Thomas Fummo said...

Amazing!

though I do agree about the shading.
why don't you try colouring in by hand?

Arkonbey said...

Smoke: Yeah. That's what my SO said to do. But, she's a painter so it's easy for her so say :)

Swine: "better than anything I could do." Whether that's true or not, don't let it stop you from saying what does and doesn't work. Please.