A blog about art

So I finished a comic book inking and a digital painting class, and these classes will be the last ones I take for a while. So I’ve been digesting all that I’ve been exposed to and decided that I need to continue on teaching myself and practicing what I saw in the classes. I’ve settled on doing model sheets, as a way of learning about something that I saw in many of my classes. That is, how to take those stick figures everyone tells you about and move them to the next step. Also, just how much detail needs to go into a comic-book/concept drawing, and where does that detail come from.

So above is a drawing that I did using a red line sketch, which was aligned with guides lines at various locations such as the shoulder, crotch and knees. I inked it using micron pens. I was looking at a digital painting in Matt Dixon’s Fantasy Artists Drawing Bible. It isn’t quite a model sheet but it gets at the idea, this looks like two views of the same person.

To summarize, I’ve learned these things, not in any order:

• Reference for details (Matt Dixon
• Reference for style (eg Mike Mignola)
• Thickening lines with the pens works okay
• The alignment for turnarounds should be done all at the same level, its easier to align balls and sticks first, and then use those to guide the drawing
• The guidelines help to locate invariant features like the pinched waist which will be pinched no matter how its viewed.

Overall, it turned out okay. I’m especially happy because I’ve been slowly slugging away at this, and its great to report some progress!

Here’s one of my projects for the end of my digital painting class:

 

This is also related to an inking class I’m taking, as this is my first serious attempt to digitally ink. It turned out okay,  but it’s a bit cartoony. And that background. Progress is in small steps!

Having a devil of a time getting the scanner and Gimp to clean up the red lines. but this is an actual official model sheet. I’ve got just the expression appearance I was looking for!

The line style is too simple for what I have in mind, so I’ll have to work on that. I’m not sure how one renders a graphic novel cat without it looking like something out of Peanuts or Jules Fieffer. But this is real progress. I’m going to do a few more body poses and then on to the next one!!

In painter, I’m taking a class in digital character painting. I want to jot down a blender brush of interest: coarse oily blender 10. More on this later.

Some cat work. I’m moving toward a model sheet. Boy, it’s a challenge!

These are samples of using blender and penciling for graphic arts. This was part of a comic book penciling class, and the assignment was to produce panels with interesting angles. The first image was created in blender as outlined in the previous post, and the second was on vellum bristol. The first image was printed out on typing paper, and the vellum placed over it using a light box.

The cool thing is that you don’t trace, you still have to draw, as the desk and other items are only represented in the model by rectangles. As an experiment, I used a fully modeled chair I had lying around to see how ‘copying’ might work.

This is definitely something that I want to keep trying, and I hope to post more later!

I’m experimenting with using blender to visualize things like rooms and environments. So I wanted to jot down some notes.
I have a texture that is a white rectangle with a black border that I use to UV map on rectangles. So if a room is 14 x 10 x 10. there would be a rectangle per foot and I extrude a cube to get that many edges. To get the UV mapping:

1. create a material
2. add a texture
3. mark it shadeless
4. Invert the UVs if it is a room
5. Set one window open in UVEdit window, the other in 3D window -Edit mode
6. Press ‘U’ over the 3D window and select ‘Reset’

I will add more to this later

More inks, this time with micron fine art marker pens, and a prismacolor marker for the large areas. I’m starting to like this look, though its more what I can do rather than what I want to do. I’m thinking of illustrations in woodcut style for stories by Clark Ashton Smith. I also learned from this that adjusting contrast/clean is easier to do with the software provided by my scanner, at least in the case of the Epson one that I’m using.

Also, just so I have a place for it, here’s something I found on the Corel site for digital inking:
Inking_a_Comic_Book_Page_in_Corel_Painter_11_Tutorial

The first is done with a brush, the others with micron pens, and a prismacolor marker for the large black areas. I’m quite fond of the last two, as they seem to have some real personality.

More inking. I think I’m going to have to work on the scan settings as the upper left corner isn’t white. Some of the edges in the item at the right seem hesitant and uneasy, which is a good example of ‘inking like a wuss’. At least its fixable though, and something to remember for the future.