Thursday, October 12, 2006

Trying again.


Okay, here's another attempt at coloring. Thanks to Rick, Ellis, and Jeff for the tips. I tried the gray value under-drawing first then built the color layers on top of that.

Go ahead and have at it. I want to hear comments on what's working and what's not. Mind you, I'll hang myself if any one of you says anything that sounds remotely negative...

... ah the hell with it. I anticipate some negativity, so I'm off to find Ellis, kill him, and THEN hang myself. Sorry man.

7 comments:

  1. Sweet. The main principle you're getting right here is that you've surrounded your saturated Hulk with de saturated. He pops that way. You appreciate that he is in color. You might try desaturating the Blue rectangle a bit and making it a darker color ramp. Scott, there is an evn bigger game outfit the floor above where I work called WEBZEN.

    http://www.webzengames.com/Game/Huxley/default.asp

    That web page is just to let you know of the global outfit. It's worthless for local info. See if you can do some searching, find the local web page , find out if there are some jobs. I'll snoop a little too.

    In the mean time, download the student version of Maya and start goofing around modeling and texturing.

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  2. Yes, much better. My only advice on this one is perahps a broader range of values in your color... most of the color starts in this image starts at about a medium value and goes up from there. I think I'd like to see some darker greens in there, especially in the chest and right arm to make the front/left arm come forward a bit.

    Nice work!

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  3. Another thing you can try, Scott (and your drawing is terrific by the way) is to lose your black lines altogether so your drawing isn't "just" colored in. If you have this image in Photoshop (or even better, Painter!)try selecting your black line and then coloring THAT with some dark green colored pencil or pastel type digital tool. You can use various greens (and purples make great shadows with green)to model your darkest areas, blend them more into the parts you've already colored -- also add detail where you've now got it all blacked out by shadow.

    A great exercise -- one that really helped me when I first realized I needed to go beyond black and white -- was to temporarily ban black from my palette. The most wonderful thing for me about moving to painting on the computer was it allowed me to experiment with color and lose the fear that I'd ruin my original drawing. (I moved to full color and computer painting at the same time. A coincidence? I don't think so.)

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  4. Hey Maurie! I brought up that exact idea 2 days ago with Jeff. I asked him if he knew how to change the color values of the black line to make it look less comic booky. Weird. I should have asked you first, because as you know asking Jeff Ranjo for advice is like asking a dog to sing karaeoke: you're not going to hear anything good and he'll just sit there and lick himself.

    Actually Jeff is Jesus.

    By the way, what makes Painter better than Photoshop? I have a version of Painter, I've just never used it.

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  5. Scott, think full featured art store at your fingertips with no more effort than picking a tool out of the menu and starting to draw . . . I'd love to see what you can do with it.

    I usually start with a pencil layer drawn in digital 2b (light blue) pencil. Then I "ink" on another layer with the scratchboard tool. The digital "simple watercolor" does wonderful washes -- I even like it better than the more realistic watercolor tool (which you need a lot of RAM to best utilize.) They also have a set of "liquid ink" tools which pool and act like real ink.

    I'll have to put up one of my digital oil paintings to show you how cool the impasto effects are too. I swear, when I use them I can smell turpentine. (I have also been known to try to blow the dust off my digital pastels.)

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  6. Ha! I'm going in the other direction... when I sit down and use a pencil I will sometimes look for an Undo button before remebering that I need to use an eraser.

    MJM... I may have asked you this already but are you using a Cintiq yet?

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  7. Rick, Ellis asked about Cintiq in the Painter vs Photoshop spread. I answered there! ;)

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