[Liquid!]

Haven't been around for quite some time, however wanted to stop by and put in a quick plug for the upcoming EVE trade...

Any comments welcome as always.

Image was drawn by Ale Garza and colored by us, however, there were some tweaks from the original. Maybe I'll post the original if you guys are interested.

-chris



Closer Face:


Original:



[This message has been edited by Liquid! (edited January 19, 2001).]

[Jenn]

Of course we are interested!

------------------
DarkChyld
http://asylum.wibble.net


[This message has been edited by Jenn (edited January 19, 2001).]

[ToasT 01]

daammmnnnn... nice bit grey on the skin but its awesome

------------------
ToasT ( the world made me the monster i am - thanks! )

[CapnPyro]

Nice to see ya around man!

Of course were interested in seeing the original! I dont suppose theres a Soul Saga tradepaperback in the works?

Thats some crazy looking chrome you have there, the wings looks really cool too, like neon lights runing through glass or something, great effect. Skins a bit grey, but then again she is cold and robotic



------------------
http://home1.gte.net/capnpyro

[Joachim]

yeah, what ever did happen to you liquid. You were so very active and then faded away. . . I guess did get a sijun-forum overdose ?
Nice coloring job btw. Very fresh.
When you say us, who and how many takes part in the liquid empire ?
I bought Battle Chaser the other day, and saw that three people has colored. Are they all from liquid studios ?
Anyway, just wanted to praise you for that one. Battle-chasers is very well done in all ways. Even though the linework is awesome, I still think the coloring takes it to an even higher level and makes the whole thing more consistent in quality. One question, I've seen some line drawings of the main character (the little girl) in these extremely detailed backgrounds with a lot of faces coming up from the ground. But, I didn't see any of them in the one I had. Are they newer ones that wasn't included in first book ?

------------------
www.JoachimArt.com


[This message has been edited by Joachim (edited January 19, 2001).]

[Glondus]

I'd be really interested in seeing the original to that!
Your colors are extreme as always...
How long does it take for you guys to color a pic like this?

Oh, yeah. Joachim, the one with lots of ghastly faces behind Gully is one of the covers to Battle Chasers #7.
------------------
The dwarf 'as struck again!


[This message has been edited by Glondus (edited January 19, 2001).]

[Liquid!]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Joachim:
yeah, what ever did happen to you liquid. You were so very active and then faded away. . . I guess did get a sijun-forum overdose ?

Hey Joachim,

No, I love the forum. But I tried REALLY hard to stay on top of it and the speed of it made it really frustrating. I can see that he finally changed it, so I might be coming by more often as work allows, however its difficult with work and all.


Nice coloring job btw. Very fresh.
When you say us, who and how many takes part in the liquid empire ?
I bought Battle Chaser the other day, and saw that three people has colored. Are they all from liquid studios ?


Interesting, we're usually only credited as Liquid. So I doubt "they" are from "liquid". I usually say "us" because liquid is owned by Aron and myself, however this piece was done by me, since I never post pics here that I didn't do.


Anyway, just wanted to praise you for that one. Battle-chasers is very well done in all ways. Even though the linework is awesome, I still think the coloring takes it to an even higher level and makes the whole thing more consistent in quality. One question, I've seen some line drawings of the main character (the little girl) in these extremely detailed backgrounds with a lot of faces coming up from the ground. But, I didn't see any of them in the one I had. Are they newer ones that wasn't included in first book ?


Thanks for the kind words! Not sure which image you're referring to... You might be referring to a page from issue 8 (the faces coming up)... so that wouldn't be in issue 1.

---

[Liquid!]

quote:

---

Originally posted by CapnPyro:
Nice to see ya around man!

Of course were interested in seeing the original! I dont suppose theres a Soul Saga tradepaperback in the works?

Thats some crazy looking chrome you have there, the wings looks really cool too, like neon lights runing through glass or something, great effect. Skins a bit grey, but then again she is cold and robotic

---

Hey Cap!

We might be doing a Trade for SoulSaga 1-6, but we haven't made up our minds yet. It may just be done internationally. Reason being that it's not really a natural capping point for the story, however we also want to make sure that people who would like to get on board have a chance to. As I said, we're discussing it, however there are no plans in the works as of yet.

Personally, I can't wait for us to tell more of the story, I think people will be truly suprised when they find out some of the background stories...

Skin is purposely grey. She was supposed to have "white" skin from the beginning, since she's really a robot. Sort of a Patrick Nagel painting come to life.

Thanks for the nice words.

-c

[This message has been edited by Liquid! (edited January 19, 2001).]

[Cuddly]

WOW!!!! Oh, wowowowowowowowowowowwww.....

Ahem. Sorry.

Excellent coloring job (as usual). Great seeing Liquid! posting here again after so long. Also interesting to note that Liquid! is two guys. Did I get that right?

Forgive a stupid question but do you guys have a web site we call all check out and drool over?

[Joachim]

Liquid, I bought a issue, but it's quite many pages, the cover is with the girls standing with her glowes and rocks coming up around, very akira inspired. And, in the end, there's a lot of full paged pictures, like covers. So, I was wondering if this one was collected issues ? If not, how many of these is there ?


And, the one I was reffering to is the one I saw someone posted here a while ago, screaming faces that comes up. A lot of particles all around....also very akira inspired.

------------------
www.JoachimArt.com

[This message has been edited by Joachim (edited January 19, 2001).]

[Liquid!]

JOACHIM - You have the TradePaperBack, which I think collects something like the first 5 issues, and a "Frank Frazetta illustrated" story in the back, plus covers. Issue 7 just came out, and we're working on issue 8 as we speak.

If someone out there knows which issues are collected in the trade please help me out, I can't really recall right now. You could also go to www.joemadureira.com, I'm sure they would know...

CUDDLY - You could check out www.go-liquid.com, however we rarely update it since it really isn't meant as a site for showcasing our most current work, rather giving people unfamiliar with our work an overview of what we do. Plus truth be told its in a SERIOUS need to be overhauled... the design is 4+ years old, and it SHOWS. Very embarassing indeed...



[This message has been edited by Liquid! (edited January 19, 2001).]

[Rinaldo]

Hey Chris
ohhhh, that's really nice! I saw the promo pice for BC8. Am I mistaken in thinking it was un-inked like this? I'm really interested in the idea of painting over the pencils, sans the ink.

is your approach any diferent to the way you would colour inks? more technicaly speaking as opposed to the way you render it, I can see that from looking at it. I really like the look of it (not saying I don't love the ink).
how much tweaking to you do in terms of the levels? do you try to mimic inks in a way (by making the lines darker etc.) or just leave it?
How would you compare it time wise to colouring something that's inked?

Looking at the face it appears you've coloured the face outline dark. this sort of changes the look a bit from the pencils. It'll be interesting to see what Ale comes up with (heard he was going to play around without the inks). Although this is fantastic I feel a few Things need to be ironed out with this technique.

*sigh* sorry for always bugging you with these Qs

btw-
the BC trade collect issues 1-5 (plus all the extras- promo book, varient covers, and the story that was in FFF)
so you need to get 6,7 and the upcoming 8 Joa.

[Chapel]

Welcome back Chris. Pretty neat pic of EVE there. I like the rendering on her face and pants. The metallics are a little confusing though. Some areas it doesn't look defined enough on the arm. I think the linework on the metal should be a shade darker than the darkest tone, but not black. If that makes sense.

Laura DePuy told me that Adam Hughes told her ... Metal as far as tones usually falls between 0 and 10. 0 being an extreme white and 10 being the darkest tone. Other textures usually fall in between 3 to 8. It is that difference that makes metal look metal. In your pic the pants have darker areas than the metal does.

I'm trying to learn how to render metallics better, so that is the part I noticed in your pic. Sorry, if this is just trivial info.

[This message has been edited by Chapel (edited January 19, 2001).]

[Rage-lion]

Great to see you back on the forum. Even though it has been down for like 3 days.
Always look forward to seeing some good comic art. Being in the biz and all.

[TheMilkMan]

Wow man nice to see you back..we thought you ditched us....( somebody even made a cartoon about it!!! ) Anyways beutiful coloring as usual.

[This message has been edited by TheMilkMan (edited January 19, 2001).]

[Hightop]

WAOW..... it's so damn cool....
i really like the suit color and thewingsare so good...
maybe just a little less grey on the skin.

ones again.... WAOW...

------------------
Hightop

As i turn and look into the sun
the rays burn my eyes
happy happy happy
everybodys happy
now like a turtle the sun looks
-------------------------
dbl design

[agent44]

Glad you're back. I really like the eve picture. Though, I get a little lost in the arm shoulder area. The colors are great, but I agree with Chapel, the pants are really shiney. Regardless, it looks awsome. I am also curious about the how you approach coloring pencils.

------------------
agent44

[Flexible Elf]

Hey Liquid,

Good to see you back. This is definitely my favorite of yours I've seen. That also includes your printed works. I'd love to see what you'd do with my linework, but I think everyone on the board would like to see what you could do with their linework

-Flexible Elf

------------------
http://www.geocities.com/flexible_elf/Main.html

[Merekat]

WOW. Very nice color rendering. I am especially drawn to the force-field wings. Those are extremely cool. I'm always fascinated with unusual light sources, so that is now high on my list.

Forgive my ignorance, but I've been out of the comics industry loop for a bit now, ever since I did a couple comics through Sirius and Dogstar Press, but for this character Eve, are those wings part of her and her character, or are they just a cool thing for her to be wearing for a cover?

Oh, and I do agree with the comments that the metals should be darker than the pants. I can't say I'm very fond of her body type (I know you didn't draw it, it's all good. ;}...) but I am quite impressed with the coloring. Though, perhaps tone it down a bit?

Anyway, welcome back! It's good to see comic stuff here... ;}

[swampbug]

JEEZES ! The color and shading on her is Mind blowing !

[Chapel]

Seraphire: I wasn't suggesting to make all the linework darker.. just spots.

Liquid!: If you wouldn't mind me showing you what I mean I'd love to, but it would be nice if you had a larger version for me to touch up. Just some of the metallic sections. I can understand if you could care less. I'm still pretty amateur at things, so you can disregard my opinions.

[WacoMonkey]

Dude! What's up? Back from holidays... call me we should hook up.

Finally met Ale at Tommy's 'going away from wildstorm' party. Nice guy.

Nice cover... where's her left arm???

Lookin' good!

Phil.

[This message has been edited by WacoMonkey (edited January 19, 2001).]

[Liquid!]

Wow � lotsa comments and questions� let me try to answer and comment on them as best as I can. Hope this isn�t going to make me sound long-winded� 

RINALDO: The BC8 Promo piece? Was that the face of some guy wearing the glove? Sorry, but the problem is that we oftentimes color something without being told what exactly it�s going to be used for, so oftentimes, it�s hard to know exactly what you�re referring to. If it�s the guy with the glove, then the answer is yes. Mostly we do this though because of time constraints, rather than any other reason.

Coloring pencils is much more time consuming for me, even though the technical side really isn�t all that different from doing inks. Mostly, it�s a matter of painting ofer areas you would normally not. Most importantly though, I still don�t have it where I want to, in my own mind, so there is a lot of trial and error involved with the process. While I like to play around with it, I still struggle with trying to meet the balance of painting over the art vs. being true to the original artist. Afterall, I don�t want to steamroll over someone elses work. Secondly, especially if it is going to be printed somewhere you have to keep many pre-press consideration in mind to make sure colors and shades that appear one way on screen print the same way on paper. I also feel that you have to work a lot cleaner since the color defines shapes more distinclty. All in all it is much more work for me. Maybe it�ll get easier with time.

I don�t like to make pencils look as if they were ink. So while I usually end up cleaning them up a bit, and tweaking them to asure they show up in the printed material, I certainly don�t believe in darkening them to the level of ink. My philosophy on the subject is that if you want something to look inked you should really have it inked. Even in the best case scenerio I don�t think you can really reproduce the effect of inking 100%, so why try? To me both techniques have validity, and a distinct feel associated with them. That is to say, I think both coloring off of inks and pencils have merit depending on the look you�re going for. I don�t think one should emulate the other. They should be used depending on your personal preferences and the goal you have for the final product.

CHAPEL:

Points well taken. You�re hitting an interesting point here, so let me try to elaborate on it a bit more. But rest assured that I carefully considered them when I was coloring this piece, and chose to ignore certain �rules�. Adam Hughes is right. Metal has a high degree of reflectivty, and thus tends to have extreme contrast associated with it. Thus, the example of 1 and 10�s rather than huge amounts of mid-tone. However, there are things I tradionally ignore or/and modify to satisfy my own view of what I like. You may have noticed that I like things a bit shinier than they would be in reality. That�s my taste. The pants are black spandex/plastic, thus they fall into the high reflectivity category as well, while technically you�re right that the metal should have the largest amount of contrast I felt strongly that I wanted to have some absolute blacks on it. Given that, putting more black on the metal would have emphasized the look of a �comic� figure being �framed� by black, so I chose to minimize it, to push for a more painted look. Additionally I had to consider that placing more absolut blacks on her would push her into the background rather than have her push off of it. I�m glad you brought it up, because it lets me explain some of my thinking on it.

Okay, some mentioned that the �metal� parts were a bit distracting. I agree. The reason for this has to do ppartially with the intial drawing, and my reluctance to change too much of it. The core shadows, and highlight line isn�t precisely consistent, which in my view, contributes to the difficulty in reading the shapes, however it seemed more important to me to be true to Ale�s drawing than to impose my own on it. I respect Ale�s work tremendously, and know that many of the shapes he drops in sometimes are meant to create compositional depth in the drawing. This is again a point, where I am still trying to find out where I would like to stand on doing this sort of work. I�m still figuring it out for myself. There may be some slight tweaks that I will try to incoporate to clear that arm/upper torso area up a bit, however I think it may still be a bit hard to read. I�ll try.

MILKMAN � Cartoons?!

MEREKAT � Glad you asked!  E.V.E is the first of her kind. A machine that is infused with a soul, when she commits the ultimate sacrifice. A sacrifice so great, that few of us would be willing to do the same. In that one act of kindness, her sins of death and destruction are forgiven, and she ascends to being more human than most of us will ever be. It just so happens that the soul she is given is of heavenly origin, thus the imagery of her wings has significance to her as a character in a spiritual way. So yes, the wings are integral to her as a character, however during the series the logistics of drawing her with wings made for some interesting compromises.

Personally, I like things that are rendered a bit more than not, however please keep in mind that this looks quite a bit more rendered on screen than it will be when it hits dot gain on paper. Thus, when we color we have to keep that in mind and compensate for it� 

AGENT44 � Think I answered your Q�s already�

AKOLYTE � Yup, E.V.E is our character and idea.

BLITZ � I guess that would be the cartoons mentioned earlier�  I wish you could forget about the dreaded vader pic� I swear I can draw better than that� At least I hope I can.

SERAPHIRE � Well we�re planning on having it as the cover to the TRADEPAPERBACK, however that might be changing now I�ve been told. So we�ll see. Personally, I would like to keep it since I like it. But that�s just me.

We�re planning on really stuffing the Trade with a bunch of stuff you wouldn�t get otherwise! So yes, sketches, pinups, in progress pics, etc. Sort of depends on some factors outside of our doing, however we�ll be shooting to make it kick some serious A$$.  So BUY the damn thing and support us!!! 

Phew. Hope that answers them all� Thanks for the nice comments, those are always great to hear and truly appreciated.

-c

PS:PHIL �I�ll call ya� just been super busy as usual.. argh.  And yes, Ale is a super cool guy!

[Liquid!]

Just one more thing...


I think its interesting that no one commented on the changes in proportions, etc from the original sketch...

[DarkGarden]

Well the first thing I really noticed was the "feminization" or softening of the coloured piece compared to the initial sketch.
Rounding out some of the more jagged looking tech/metal areas (such as the shoulder and around the base of the ribcage) gives it a smoother feel, sleeker. Doing the same to the rather sharp edges at the bottom of the wing on my left gives it more of a gossamer quality, and seems less bat-like.

The proportional differences that I noticed mostly though were in the area of her head. First, it's dropped back (left) and down into her body a bit more than the sketch. It changed the pose, to me, from seeming aggressive, to more curiously waiting/posing. Less tense, more liquid (pardon the pun...really..it might get worse ) Her eye and eyebrow shape also seems a bit changed, more liquid again, fluid, and not as sharp. A seductive sort of raised eyebrow/half lidded look than an evil one. Her hair seems to follow the same idea. It looks a bit more full and rounded on top, with more flowing lines and less sharp angles to the strands.

But then again..I could be reading way too far into it...heh.

It's an amazing colour job, of course. The only thing I thought of when looking at it that wasn't spectacular, was that since all the surrounding light sources seem to be casting a blue/white hue, onto almost all blue surfaces, shouldn't her grey skin have caught more of a blue hue?.....Again though, that's probably just me

Gorgeous work.

-------------------
Big Boy's Web Toys - - Pixelflo


[This message has been edited by DarkGarden (edited January 19, 2001).]

[Seraphire]

I didn't notice anything in the body. Are the changes in proportion you mention all in the face? Becuase I did mention that. If only briefly.

I do like this as a cover. Now I'm curious as to what the alternate will be.

------------------
The Groove is in the Heart!

Seraphire
Michael Jon Birkhofer
Seraphire's Cafe/Digital Evolution

[Chapel]

Understandable Mr. Lichtner. I'm glad to hear you color for what you think looks cool and not for what others think. Something I've ran into lately.

Anywho... I did some subtle changes (emphasis on subtle) to your pic to demonstrate what I was rambling about.


Heck you might be the only one that can notice what I did because I imaging you stared at your pic for awhile.

[Flinthawk]

Damn, I knew there was something different between the sketch and the final. I was studying the face and I saw some subtle differences but I chalked that up to your own judgement. At the same time I was also thinking that I was reading too much into it so I didn't say anything. I'm still learning how to trust my first instincts because I'm finding that they're usually right but I'll screw things up by thinking stuff through too much...something I've been accused of by others as well. Nice work though, as usual, Liquid! I love the color scheme for this character, too...all my favorite colors are represented. I'll have to go out and get the books.

And what you're saying, Chapel, is definitely true in fact I was trying to explain that very concept of levels of contrast in materials to somebody a couple days before the forum crash. I see that you darkened some of the darkest areas on the metal armor there or more specifically, turned up the contrast in the armor as a whole, subtle but I can see it...or am I just seeing things again?

-Flinthawk

[This message has been edited by Flinthawk (edited January 19, 2001).]

[LordArioch]

I don't really care for the original line drawing, but the color job completely kicks butt. Wow.

[Chapel]

I just added some darker tones to a few areas to break up the forms and to add more contrast.