Fan Art

[Jabberwonky]

Here is a WIP of what I'm working on. I'll make the SVG available when finished (which I probably already would be if Inkscape wasn't so slow with spastic controls on my computer ).

@Jabberwonky,
I just noticed you seem to have accidentally colored in the spike on Nudge's right shoulder as part of the background.

Yeah, when I was working on it, I couldn't decide if it was a spike or not. I guess I went the wrong way...

How are you making the line art you're doing? I have tried copying lines with the pen tool, but don't get the sharp points your work there has...

More fartin' around with Atomic's methods...

[Atomic]

Ok! Took some digging, but here's a little something I made for Jwhouk long ago to show my layer highlighting methods. It's from the 10 October 2007 comic here. Zipped Gimp XCF file here (right click, Save Link As).

The 50% gray was applied with airbrush.

Divide, Screen = Lighten
Multiply, Burn = Darken, Deepen color

Hues were pushed with Burn and Screen, and it behaves differently than Multiply and Divide. Since Divide and Screen both push toward white, I've changed methods to mainly use a Divide layer only for highlights, and then Multiply and Burn layers for shading or color enhancement respectively.

Since this was all airbrush, you can see the softer blending compared to the harder edges of the Brandi picture. Hope this helps!

[Jabberwonky]

Ok! Took some digging, but here's a little something I made for Jwhouk long ago to show my layer highlighting methods. It's from the 10 October 2007 comic here. Zipped Gimp XCF file here (right click, Save Link As).
Edit: Image
The 50% gray was applied with airbrush.
Divide, Screen = Lighten
Multiply, Burn = Darken, Deepen color

Hues were pushed with Burn and Screen, and it behaves differently than Multiply and Divide. Since Divide and Screen both push toward white, I've changed methods to mainly use a Divide layer only for highlights, and then Multiply and Burn layers for shading or color enhancement respectively.

Since this was all airbrush, you can see the softer blending compared to the harder edges of the Brandi picture. Hope this helps!

Any sort of advice helps. I'm always looking for more information. I haven't had any formal training, and I think I'm going to rememdy that as I can over here. I think I'm going to at least order some anatomy for artists books so I know how the muscles should look, not just how I think they should look. (Although I will admit to some intense amature studying of the female form...)

[Atomic]

Any sort of advice helps. I'm always looking for more information. I haven't had any formal training, and I think I'm going to rememdy that as I can over here. I think I'm going to at least order some anatomy for artists books so I know how the muscles should look, not just how I think they should look. (Although I will admit to some intense amature studying of the female form...)

Cornerstones of my library - For drawing

Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair -- Fantasia, Tom and Jerry, Droopy Dog
Figure Drawing for All It's Worth by Andrew Loomis -- Another Disney master
The Mad Art of Caricature by Tom Richmond -- Mad Magazine. Say no more!
The Art of Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai -- Art, construction examples, and lots more

For Anatomy:

The Nude Figure - A visual reference for the artist by Mark Smith -- Pose book of classical, motion, and other poses
Facial Expressions by Mark Simon -- Visual reference of emotions and heads
Drawing Cutting Edge Anatomy by Christopher Hart
Simplified Anatomy for the Comic Book Artist by Christopher Hart
Action Cartooning by Ben Caldwell -- Construction with focus on anatomy

For design, construction, and comic making:

How to Draw Stupid by Kyle Baker -- Putting personality onto paper
How to Make Webcomics by Guigar, et al. -- Design, scanning and coloring, marketing and more.
Creating Characters with Personalilty by Tom Bancroft -- Making a toon interesting
Character Mentor by Tom Bancroft -- Refining a character and the environment
S Curves - The Art of Shane Glines -- Broad collection of final products and buildup pencils

Reference Collections:

The Art of Harvey Kurtzman by Kitchen and Buhle -- History, examples, and layout/construction examples
Will Elder - The Mad Playboy of Art by Groth and Sadowski -- Ditto
Playboy's Little Annie Fanny by Kurtzman and Elder, Vol 1 and 2 -- The collection, also layout/construction and pencils
The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker by Mankoff -- Hundreds of styles from 1925 to 2006, plus all 70,363 toons on DVD!

Amazon is your friend. Happy shopping!

[shadowinthelight]

What I've done so far is a simple vector trace with the line width set to 2.0 and 50% opacity so I can still see the bitmap underneath while working. The sharp corners are a natural byproduct except for when the corner angle is too sharp and gets cut off. To fix that I had to raise the default miter limit from 4 to 20 to be on the safe side.

[Leak]

Well, since Atomic posted his way of shading I thought I'd share mine...

Since I don't really often do this my most recent example would be the image from the 6th of June 2011, which I also happened to grab off eBay.

Anyway, I used a combination of AviSynth, the NNEDI3 plugin for AviSynth, VirtualDub, GIMP and Inkscape to trace the original comic image I linked to above and blow it up to 5972x8192 which, in retrospect, was maybe a tad excessive; in hindsight half the resolution in both directions would have also been plenty and opening the final image wouldn't balloon GIMP to use 2GB of RAM...

Anyway, since this is about shading I'll simply include four images here:


These are the inks, the base colors and a 50% gray background so my lighting will also work without the base colors.


This are areas at 0, 25, 50, 75 and 100% black/gray/white that define my highlights and shadows (light coming from roughly above them and from behind the camera), painstakingly drawn on an extra layer with the regular paintbrush tool, a round brush and selections to prevent me from painting outside or over already painted sections.


This is the same layer after I went over it with a huge round brush (adjusted to the size of the feature I was working on) with rather low opacity (10% or so) and the smudge tool; just slightly wiggle your mouse over the shading perpendicular to the general direction of an area until it is smooth.


Now here's that layer set to Overlay mode, which is what I use for shading - anything that's lighter than 50% gray will lighten the image below the layer, while anything darker than 50% gray will darken it.


Here's the result on the base colors instead of the gray background.


Then I added another layer for places where more shading was neccessary, mainly for self-shadowing and lip-gloss.


I set that layer to Overlay, toned it's opacity down to about 50% to lessen it's impact and turned the other layers back on.


And here's the final image with all the bells and whistles I also added, minus any kind of background.

A few different sizes of the final image (including a background based on a photo I took at a local venue) and the GIMP XCF file (warning: will eat RAM for breakfast on opening it) can be found here - it (along with the images above) resides on my home server behind my cable modem that's only got 0.5MB/sec upload so please be patient...

np: Pig & Dan - Liberation (Decade)

[Jabberwonky]

Any sort of advice helps. I'm always looking for more information. I haven't had any formal training, and I think I'm going to rememdy that as I can over here. I think I'm going to at least order some anatomy for artists books so I know how the muscles should look, not just how I think they should look. (Although I will admit to some intense amature studying of the female form...)

Cornerstones of my library - For drawing
Edit: List
Amazon is your friend. Happy shopping!

Thanks for the list, it's going to help. I had already looked at putting the Hart books on my list, and Hogarth's anatomy books. And I actually owned the Preston Blair book in the distant past.

What I've done so far is a simple vector trace with the line width set to 2.0 and 50% opacity so I can still see the bitmap underneath while working. The sharp corners are a natural byproduct except for when the corner angle is too sharp and gets cut off. To fix that I had to raise the default miter limit from 4 to 20 to be on the safe side.

I'll have to play with the miter limits. I always get blocky lines with no sharp edges...

...And here's the final image with all the bells and whistles I also added, minus any kind of background.

Wow, thanks for the insight. Nice tutorial, I remember you putting up the final and a WIP later when I, and others, asked about your technique. I also think your's was the best of the lot done from 'Cerberus Nights'. Very nice.
Plus, I'll have to admit to never having heard of 'Pig & Dan'...

[shadowinthelight]

Done.



I finally opened a Deviantart account for the rare thing like this I feel is good enough to share beyond forums. The SVG can be downloaded here.

[Wdot]

Man, I love how many of you are willing to share your techniques on how you make such wonderful colorings and such. Thank you all. While I'm not very good yet, I'm going to share someone else's tutorial on how to color and prepare a drawing for coloring. I've used all her techniques at least once in everyone I did and while I've changed some things and experimented on my own and other tutorials she is the best one I found to follow to get started if you are so inclined. I don't learn as well from reading tutorials as well as watching them. This girl got me started to where I wasn't ashamed of my work. She goes by Shadowlight 456 on Youtube. I'm giving her a shoutout because she really helped. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm5gQ7gH4jE&feature=plcp

[Wdot]

Phix has been looking a little ferral lately, so here she is looking good. Hope you guys like.

[Graybeard]

Very appealing -- I would say "reassuring." One small criticism: the eyelashes are rather too long, and give her a little too much of what Monica would call a "bimbo" look. (Hey, she's used the term, just quoting here. ) Phix is about as anti-bimbo as it's possible to get, so I'd recommend playing the lashes down. Otherwise this is marvelous; thanks for sharing it.

[Atomic]

Excellent Wdot! And thank for the Gimp Tutorial link. It led me to a video which finally explained the Dockable Tab this in a way I understood.

Film at eleven...

[Wdot]

Very appealing -- I would say "reassuring." One small criticism: the eyelashes are rather too long, and give her a little too much of what Monica would call a "bimbo" look. (Hey, she's used the term, just quoting here. ) Phix is about as anti-bimbo as it's possible to get, so I'd recommend playing the lashes down. Otherwise this is marvelous; thanks for sharing it.

I'm glad you liked it Graybeard, however, about the lashes, I just basically colored a panel from this strip. I colored Phix from the strip before this one and used it for my icon, and then Paul went and made her even more lovely. So I got around to doing it today and posted it because right now Phix is going through a "rough" spot.

[Jabberwonky]

Nice work, Wdot, I like it. But the background, is that a little dig at what's happening in the strip right now?
I'm curious about the yootoob vid, but these grumpy folks won't let us go there on company computers...you know how Employer's can be...
I hope you'll share more of your work with us, I've enjoyed your past offerings.

[Jabberwonky]

Just a quick experiment with Leak's shading technique. Interesting results, I think I'm going to play with it some more...

[Graybeard]

Very appealing -- I would say "reassuring." One small criticism: the eyelashes are rather too long, and give her a little too much of what Monica would call a "bimbo" look. (Hey, she's used the term, just quoting here. ) Phix is about as anti-bimbo as it's possible to get, so I'd recommend playing the lashes down. Otherwise this is marvelous; thanks for sharing it.

I'm glad you liked it Graybeard, however, about the lashes, I just basically colored a panel from this strip. I colored Phix from the strip before this one and used it for my icon, and then Paul went and made her even more lovely. So I got around to doing it today and posted it because right now Phix is going through a "rough" spot.

Right, got that. I think the bimboization of Phix there is the result of three things: the colorizing itself (which can have unpredictable effects on B&W renderings), the removal of context, and the fact (or at least my opinion) that the lashes were a touch too long in the original. Anyway, once-and-future Phix does need some love right now.

[Wdot]

Nice work, Wdot, I like it. But the background, is that a little dig at what's happening in the strip right now?
I'm curious about the yootoob vid, but these grumpy folks won't let us go there on company computers...you know how Employer's can be...
I hope you'll share more of your work with us, I've enjoyed your past offerings.

Thank you for your kind words Jabberwonky. You're the reason I first posted a colorization in the first place, so it's all your fault.

As to the background, well, it's complicated. While I like Phix a lot, it was almost too syrupy, (I like her "spicy") so I wanted a background that would mitigate it somewhat, but not too much. I wanted a contrast with how she's being shown at the moment without denying it. I had colored the background a long time ago, because it affected me deeply, a depiction of a defiant wounded dying lioness from too long ago to actually process. It seemed to fit the situation Phix is going through. She has been struck by some stunning revalations and is in the process of being stung by Nudge. All these things are hurting her gravely, she just might not be aware of how injurious they are to her sense of self; the arrows in the lioness reflect this. Or it could just be because I thought it was cool. Take that art historians and literature professors everywhere!!!! As to the Youtube stuff, there are ways around that, and if that doesn't work, usually the public library has internet that you can watch it on, and it is worth watching; lotsa good tutorials on there.

[Wdot]

Excellent Wdot! And thank for the Gimp Tutorial link. It led me to a video which finally explained the Dockable Tab this in a way I understood.

Film at eleven...

Thanks, Atomic! Gimp Tricks is a good tutor for most anything Gimp. A tad outdated(She's gravely ill) but still very useful.

[Jabberwonky]

Nice work, Wdot, I like it. But the background, is that a little dig at what's happening in the strip right now?
I'm curious about the yootoob vid, but these grumpy folks won't let us go there on company computers...you know how Employer's can be...
I hope you'll share more of your work with us, I've enjoyed your past offerings.

Thank you for your kind words Jabberwonky. You're the reason I first posted a colorization in the first place, so it's all your fault.

As to the background, well, it's complicated. While I like Phix a lot, it was almost too syrupy, (I like her "spicy") so I wanted a background that would mitigate it somewhat, but not too much. I wanted a contrast with how she's being shown at the moment without denying it. I had colored the background a long time ago, because it affected me deeply, a depiction of a defiant wounded dying lioness from too long ago to actually process. It seemed to fit the situation Phix is going through. She has been struck by some stunning revalations and is in the process of being stung by Nudge. All these things are hurting her gravely, she just might not be aware of how injurious they are to her sense of self; the arrows in the lioness reflect this. Or it could just be because I thought it was cool. Take that art historians and literature professors everywhere!!!! As to the Youtube stuff, there are ways around that, and if that doesn't work, usually the public library has internet that you can watch it on, and it is worth watching; lotsa good tutorials on there.

Okay, you'll have to blame somebody else, I got four friends that'll swear I was playing poker with them that night...
I liked that you used a very contrasting image as the background. I recently made some wallpapers with some of the more uncomfortable images from the strip, just as a contrast to the generally silliness I usually gravitate towards. I have them in a folder that the screen saver pulls from. Not really sure why.
If I could get to a public library, I might use that to check out the yootoob stuff. I'm on a Dept. of State base in Iraq, the leisure offerings are a bit limited. When I get home for RnR, I'm going to look those up...
Keep posting stuff, I'm enjoying everyone's offerings.

[Leak]

Just a quick experiment with Leak's shading technique. Interesting results, I think I'm going to play with it some more...

*all thumbs up*

Looks great - you just missed her elbow...