I feel pretty, oh sooo pretty. No, wait. I feel shitty. Didn’t sleep at all and there is no one to blame but myself. I never went to bed but stayed in front of my computer screen, painting my way through the night, then the whole morning and now I have dragged myself to the office for some reason. It’s gloomy and empty and I also got a new background from Tobias. He is upset about the coat one character is wearing and by using MS paint he has expressed his feelings about this matter. That poor boy needs my attention, as always.

So you might be wondering what I painted this night. Well, last Friday I started sketching on a new concept for the third character and that’s what I’ve been trying to finish during the whole day.

I think I’m going in the right direction and I feel quite confident with the design. I had a little different approach than I usually have. On my previous concepts I feel that I move too quickly from making line art to the coloring process. This time I really tried to be more accurate by starting with a rough sketch of the pose then moving on to the anatomy by adding layers and painting over the previous one until I got a nice and clean line art. Sure it takes time but I really felt that it helped me. I added a layer, made some rough sketches and when I was happy with the design, I refined the lineart just like I did with the anatomy.

So now I have a much clearer picture which makes it a lot easier to define the shadows, midtones and highlights. I create a new layer that I stack behind the line art and then I just fill in the values, without any shadows or highlights. When I’m done with that I copy the layer, change the brightness to a darker value and add a layer mask. By using a layer mask I can use black or white to hide or reveal the layer which the mask is covering, in this case the shadows. This is a good way to keep the consistency of the values.

When I feel done with that I simply add a color layer on top and start coloring. I will continue that tomorrow.

Tags: Coloring, Friday, high lights, line art, mask, md tomes, MS paint, office, painting

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Development, art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.