[Rinaldo]

I coloured the sketch I posted in another thread. It's an SD Mecha Samurai
I thought the texturing of the paper on top of the colours was interesting. I can post line art as well if anyone wants to give it a go. Only for a while tho. I'm runnung outa web space need to find some more. I might have to take down some olds stuff....hmmmm..

Anyway heres the pic and original sketch.

[Chapel]

That looks cool Rinaldo. Nice job on the coloring. Cool color choices too.

[Rinaldo]

Hmmmm... a bit hard to see what I'm talking about in terms of texture of the paper. too small.

here's a bigger crop so you can all se what I mean



The colours are also a bit saturated here. and that white on the sword looks a bit worse than it did in PS.
oh well

[Rinaldo]

Thanks Chapel

[Rinaldo]

Thanks guys

[Jenn]

Running out of space? I was.. Then I rang up my friend who owns the box and got another 50mb Hehehe...

Nice pics... I love sharp stuff

-pulls out her meat cleaver- On Guard </bad french accent>

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DarkChyld

[Superbug]

Hahha, cute!! SD is cool, but not in crap kiddy shows where its oversused

[Rinaldo]

Jenn-50 meg!...mmmmmmmm....:]~~~


Superbug-yeah

[Sedul]

SD is really cute guy. This one looks pretty cool. Not the cleanest but . hrm looks good.

U got any other SD stuff you could post up eh?

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<|--Sedul--|>
Amateur Graphix Artist

"What the hell! I don't believe ah!!"

[dEATH.Tool]

Heheheh! Tiz is a very cool little guy man! That blade rocks.....you actually gave him facial hair....heheheee! Cool work Rinaldo.

[Rinaldo]

Updated the image. sword is now betta

[Isric]

Wow, this is great! Can't wait to show my brother this, he'll love it i'm sure. Great color choices, and i really dig the style

[Bizarde]

rinaldo you are cool man,i like your designe,those macanical arms and everything...just looks great !


~bizarde.

[Rinaldo]

Sedul-I haven't done much SD up until now but It's a lot of fun so I'll be doing some more

dEATH.Tool- Thanks

[Bilbo]

Cool stuff, Rinaldo..

[sfr]

Wow, your sketches look really nice. Got any more on a webpage somewhere? I'd love to see them

About the colored version, hmm... The fairly flat colors make the scanned lines look dirty, and they looked so nicely controlled on the original drawing, so that's sort of a shame. I'm also not sure what's up with those few graphic cuts on his otherwise smoothly colored face - they don't really register as anything in my eyes, especially when there's the strong contrast of the black lines so near.

I do like the translucent feel of his mechanical arm though, but on the whole this coloring style strikes me as pretty weird. Maybe I'll get used to it though, as usually happens with weird stuff

Saffron / Sunflower

[sfr]

[oops, somehow posted the same thing twice]

[This message has been edited by sfr (edited September 21, 2000).]

[micke]

Rinaldo, you're getting better and better all the time.
I really enjoy watching your work
keep it up!

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-Mikael Noguchi-

http://www.katode.org/noguchi/

[This message has been edited by micke (edited September 21, 2000).]

[nova]

Wow.. I've always loved shiny colouring like that. The contrast between the crinkly linework and the smooth colouring is beautiful! You're sketches show an excellent ability in.. well, sketching. It seems as if you know exactly what you're going to put on paper before it gets there. I wish i could do that

By the way, how DO you do colouring like that? Give me a quick rundown please.. I would be very much obliged, and thankful because I'm working on that kind of thing these days.

Gracias,



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* * * ** Nova
!

[Rinaldo]

sfr-Thanks
Interesting what you say about the colouring. I was trying to get a comic book look. The cuts are something you see often with that technique. I'm not sure I like them all that much, at the moment I'm just messing around with differnt looks so your comments are greatly welcome. It helps me figure out what's not working etc. the sketch was originaly about 10cm high, so It's blown up a lot and I've kept the grain of the paper instead of cleaning up and posterising the lines. It was just something I wanted to try out. I kinda like the look of the blown up lines done on textured paper. Not somehting I'd do all the time but interesting nonetheless. I'm gonna play with it a bit more and see what happens

I have no site. but In may last thread I listed a bunch of links to my index/image dump thing, The top ones are done earlier and are thus a bit worse for wear I'm gonna get a site up soon tho.
http://dove.net.au/~jbrasted/Mysticsket.jpg http://dove.net.au/~jbrasted/Robosketch.jpg http://dove.net.au/~jbrasted/Sketches.jpg http://dove.net.au/~jbrasted/FP1.jpg http://dove.net.au/~jbrasted/chunks.jpg http://dove.net.au/~jbrasted/Girlwalk2.jpg http://dove.net.au/~jbrasted/Elf.jpg http://dove.net.au/~jbrasted/mecharmskla.jpg (large)


micke- Thanks

[Rinaldo]

Nova- Thanks, Glad you like the contrast Doing things purely in pen without an underdrawing helps a lot with confidence. You have to get it right first time. Strange that it should work like this but when using a pencil I tend to make more mistakes, it all gets a bit smudgy.

"How to" well I've been thinking about workflow in this regard. And this is what I'm doing at the moment. The idea is to separate the line art onto a transparent layer so you can paint underneath it. I'm not sure how much you know so I'll just do a brief run down. I've been thinking of doing a big tut on this but I need to work out a few things first. I've managed to make it all pretty quick. I�m using Photoshop 5.5 and I�m not sure if the magic wand tools works as good as in previous versions because I noticed that things were working out better now that I upgraded from 5.
First I scan (duh) in greyscale. Then In the case of a sketch like this I'll do a bit of clean up. I can either use a light table to do another cleaner drawing of I can clean up in PS. It depends on which I think is going to be better and faster. On this occasion I go around with the rubber stamp tool. And get rid of all the construction lines. And stuff I don�t want. I use the RS tool because I want to keep the texture of the paper. If I wanted a cleaner line traditional of most comic books and the scan was a bit messy like this one there are other ways of cleaning up. You can use a brush set to Overlay as a blending mode. Set your colours to the default B+W. Now if you go over a sketchy line with black it will make everything darker. If I use white it will posturise the lines. If I play with tis a bit I can get a cleaner line that is solid Black. It won�t be as nice and clean as an inked line but it will look ok. (If this is unclear then I�ll explain more, use the tools and you will probably see what I mean). When you have the lines as you want them. I use an action that separates lines onto a layer, makes more layers and names them as I want). You can make your own by following the steps. But the action allows everything to work very fast.
First I go into the channels palette. Hold down control (I�m on a PC so all you MAC peps make any translations, shouldn�t be hard). And click on the single greyscale channel that should be there (I have anti alised unchecked in my magic wand options but I�m not sure what effect this has, I remember doing it a while ago and it worked better). This selects all the white on the page. Then inverse the selection. This selects all the lines and shading. Then make a new layer and name it lines. With your selection still active select this layer and fill with black. Get rid of the selection. You should now have some lines on a new layer. Then I make another layer and fill it with white. I call this �flats�. I make another layer and call it �shading�. Make another one and call it �cuts�. The layer order should be from the bottom; your original lines on your background (these don�t matter any more and can be hidden or deleted. Then your flats layer. Then your shading layer. Then your cuts layer. then on the very top your lines layer. You can also have a layer on top of this, which you put stuff like shines on and stuff but I don�t do this all the time.
All this is done via an action. I scan, clean up if required, and then play the action.

Now I can start painting. The idea is to use the flats layer to put down the base colours, you can then use these colours as a selection tool. This saves lots of file space that would otherwise be taken up with channel saved selections etc, and makes it easy to select areas. Have a look at the pic to see what I mean. I tend to work from dark to light. Or maybe a bit more of a dark middle tone and then put in some shadows. Once I've got all the colours on the flats layer I play around with the colours a bit. Using the paintbucket tool I can change the flat colours by clicking on them with the colour I want selected. The colours will change a bit because as I said before I�m working from light to dark. But I can get an idea. Put in a BG colour now if you�re going to have one.
Then I use the shading layer to do�well�shading. I select an area like the face for example by using the magic wand, making sure the flats layer is selected and then clicking on the bit I want to work on. It is important to do the shading right. I avoid actually rendering on this layer. No definition here. I use a big airbrush or the gradient tool. The shading gives visual interest. Even if it�s just a tiny colour variation it will make the difference. I�ve done a bit of modelling on the guy in the pic but not much. The face gets a bit more attention here because it is a lot smoother, and thus needs modelling with the airbrush. Use the selections to your advantage.
It actually looks pretty good at the moment. And some of the cut�s I�ve done are not quite right in the example (I�m still learning).
But now I go to the cuts layer and put in all the little bits. The highlights on all the greblies etc. You also do the cuts here. This refers to when I make a selection with the lasso tool (or if you want a precise line use the pen tool and convert to selection) and then airbrush it. You don�t have to airbrush the whole lot. play around with only airbrushing parts of the selection so some of it fades off. The cuts are where you define the sharper edges etc.

I don�t really know what else to say. This is what I�m doing at the moment. I don�t think it�s perfect. I�m also thinking about organising the layers differently. Maybe have a flats, shadows, highlights setup. Or whatever. Different things for different purposes. For Manga style colouring use a flats and shadows setup of whatever. The reason it�s important to work this way with layers is that if you have bits everywhere, it wastes time and makes editing harder. I can easily erase a cut or something without effecting the rest. Change the flats colour, delete some lines that are looking wrong. It�s hard to make a habit of changing to the right layer. I always start doing stuff on the flats layer because I�m on it from selecting. But it�s better to undo and swap layers than to leave it and be unable to select from that layer.
Have a look at comic books to see how they have handled different things. I can�t really go into great detail about everything.

This is the way that I do it, not the �right way�. I haven�t been doing it for all that long so I�m no authority.

Hope this helps. Any questions just ask


[This message has been edited by Rinaldo (edited September 21, 2000).]