Sweet Violet

As you've seen in some previous posts, I have been spending a chunk of my time learning about producing digital illustration. Here's a piece that is a little more cartoony than most of what I've been doing recently, produced in SketchBook Pro and Manga Studio 5. A lot of the tutorials and work I've looked at have been by Paris Christou at ToonBox Studio. He has also been very generous with his time in replying to email questions, and this piece is a little bit of an homage to his "Cherry" character. I've named this svelte little sprite Sweet Violet.

When I work on paper I often begin with a blue pencil sketch, and clean up on top of that. This system seems to work for me digitally, as well. I had a sort of Tinkerbell character in mind when began this scribble. She seems to be having a little bit of a wardrobe malfunction...

 Now I need to be a little more focused on expression and body language, clean up some of the details a little and give the whole drawing some character.

 Now to make it more like a traditional pencil drawing by drawing over the layout with black on a new layer, cleaning and tightening up as I go. While my inclination is usually to go for a more "inked" look with my comics and cartoons, this is more like the final pencils for an animation frame. I have to admit, I haven't got a feel yet for digital inking, but this pencil look is not bad.

 Now I can create layers beneath the drawing layer to begin colouring. The lowest layer is simply filled with a neutral midtone. This is a carry-over from painting - it's easier to judge lights and darks against a midtone than againt the blank white of the canvas (or LCD screen.) These are the basic flat colours for Violet; I can add shadow and highlight later, if I want to get that carried away.

 In the end I opted to keep to flat colour. The outlines have all been coloured with a darker version of the colour they surround, to enhance the animation cel look. The background was painted digitally (and very roughly) in a separate document and imported, then made slightly transparent just to push it back a bit, lessening the intensity of the colours. The wings were coloured on their own layer, and again the transparency was adjusted to make them translucent.

I'm reasonably pleased with Sweet Violet - maybe we'll see more of her in the future. Cheers!

Trick or Treat

Well, I continue to play with Photoshop, and I think my skills are improving, to the point, gentle reader, that I am aboutto inflict a step-by-step on you...

This began as an unfocused doodle. At some point it implied the image of a skull, which morphed into, surprise, surprise, the personification of Death. But the tried and true left me a bit cool, so I thought, what if Death took an apprentice, a young woman, perhaps. Would she be angry, vengeful, goofy, mischievous, or just a little unsettling...?

My approach to painting in Ps has been a bit all over the map, so far. I've settled down a bit and decided to go with the grayscale-to-colour approach, really work on the value structure first, and then introduce colour. It worked for the Old Masters, and who am I to argue with long-lived success? I copied the drawing onto a new Multiply layer, so I could see through it, and began painting my values under it onto the Background layer.At this stage, I'm most concerned about simple blocks of only a few values. Mostly, I'm using a chalk brush, with Shape Dynamics off and Opacity set to Pen Pressure.

Following one of the great guiding principles, "work from the large, broad and general to the more refined and specific" I start to define the image a little more clearly. I refine the shape of the body and the hood of the cloak, and begin to paint the suggestions of volume, seperating the darks and lights. I've turned off the upper drawing layer now, so the bits of drawing you still see are from the original background image. Then I creat a new Overlay layer and wash in the first colour notes.

Now I have some base colour to work with, and I can continue to refine the shapes,volumes and edges. For the most part I will use the colour picker and adjust for saturation and value, in an attempt to keep the colour harmony intact. I don't actually introduce any new colour until I add the the rust (or perhaps dried bodily fluids) to blade of the scythe, with a textured brush.

A few more tweaks and fiddles and I think it's enough. It's still a long way from a finished illustration, but this was meant to be a learning exercise, and I think I've learned a lot. The face is still very much a coloured drawing as opposed to a painting, but I'll work on that in my next project.