Thursday, April 28, 2011

Comic Book Covers

I have two comic book covers that I'm working on, one is pretty much done- I have one or two more things that I need to add and the second one is in the rough draft stages.


Monday, April 25, 2011

Baby Steps Project

I had a project that calls for a baby taking a step (there's a possible walk cycle later). So here's the breakdown for that project.


I started with this pretty cool drawing of a little girl taking her first step. With little kids you have make their heads kinda bigger and give them larger eyes to add to the "cuteness" factor.


Once I scanned in the drawing of the baby I started working on redrawing that image in Freehand. I usually go around the whole drawing and then start looking for good spaces for high lights and shadows.


Then I select my color pallet so I can see if the skin tones I choose will go with the colors of the clothes (or vise versa) and once that's all hashed out, I start to fill in my outlines and add the gradients.


I tweak my color fills until they are just right, sometimes the gradients have to be adjusted so that they are all pointing towards the light source or some times they just look funky until you shift them!


Then I fill in all of my high lights and shadow areas and adjust those. I was going to just use the over lay drawing for the mouth and not have any color beneath it, but I changed my mind and added a mouth any way.


The baby needed a simple background so I added a gradient to a circle and put that behind her. The gradient made her skin tone pop out, so I did pretty good on the color matching! (I'm trying to work on improving my color pallets!)


I brought the color version that I worked on in Freehand into Photoshop to overlay the outline drawing onto it. I like how the rough pencil drawing looks over the color, but it would look crisp if I did the outlines in pen for a clear cut line.


Last, but not least, I added a pink gradient to the "Baby" lettering and put the text on the top layer of the image and that's that!

Friday, April 22, 2011

Squirrelly Squirrel Breakdown

I'm going to post the steps I took in developing the squirrel character I made a few days ago. So check out my Drawing Board for the blow by blows.


So I drew a bunch of Squirrel heads before I finally liked this one (I dig it's buck teeth!)


Next, I worked on a body that I thought would match the head (sometimes that's the way it goes-in pieces! I test drive a few drawings to see if there's a better match.)


Then I ballanced out the sizes of each drawing in Photoshop and put the two together.


In Macromedia Freehand, I redrew the character and filled in the basic colors and gradients.


After that I added the shadows with a darker percentage of the basic colors and put in the shine high lights.


I found a great dot pattern to use for the background, put in a shadow underneath and added the finishing touches to the redraw to make the drawing more 3D.


Finally, I made a PNG of my Freehand Squirrel and brought it into Photoshop to put the line drawing on top of it- which sharpened up the whole character and gave it some depth. And there you have it!

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Story of my Life!

Me losing a round at LOVE (again!) Dang it!

I'm making a comic book for my true love with a bunch of my artwork in it- it's kinda like a journal, but with drawings.

Day 10 Color Finish

OK, last time I just had the outline drawing for this image that I was going to add to my "30 Day FB Challenge".  This is the color finish of that drawing for Day 10.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

My Squirrelly Self!

I finished coloring the squirrel that I'm using for the "30 Day FB Challenge" so here's how it turned out.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Lagging!

I've been lagging on keeping up with my postings!! But I have been busy drawing!!! On Facebook, one of my friends sent me a "30 Day Challenge". You're supposed to post up an assigned photo/image each day for 30 days- you know: favorite this or that, something that scares you, stuff like that. So being the artist that I am, I have a few drawings that I'm going to put into my challenge album.

Here's my self portrait for one of the days (I forget which one), but I still have to color it and add a background.

Here's a squirrel that I did for Day 25- A picture of you last year and how you've changed since then. (Yea, I was kinda "squirrelly" last year!)

I'm only on Day 05 (I have most of my day's photos ready already! Shhh, don't tell!) But it has been a very introspective project even if I do say so!