Dug around in my old drawing graveyard and found a face I liked. With a little tweaking he’ll make for a lovely Santa.
Pity the poor boy who ends up as his reindeer.
Some random WIP sketches. Top one is me trying to limp on with my existing tablet (not the cintiq). I love the body on the bottom-most one. I think I have a fetish for cute tummy pooches.
Preview of coming attractions…
I seem to be posting mostly answers to asks lately. Not that I mind hearing from you lot. Just leaves me feeling unproductive.
Here is some proof that I’m working on something.
Completed pic and story behind it are still a few days away.
The other pic I was working on for my tutorial is kind of on indefinite hold until I figure out what I really want to do with it.
So here is a quickie show of how I color.
All of my work is done in Corel Painter, to whom I am married.
I use tons of layers. The lineart itself can be multiple layers just for characters, props, whatever. When it comes to coloring I do a layer for every color - all placed beneath the lineart layer. I coloring it by hand with the stylus rather than selecting areas and using the paint bucket.
Once I’ve mapped out all of the colors I do some final tweaking with saturation and color shades. Then its time for shading. Most of my shading is simply done with a smooth round pen brush, each on their own layer. Some times I set the layer to multiply and simply adjust the opacity to get the shading I want. Other times I consult some of my color pallets. A general rule for me is that shading should be less saturated than the parent color and also be a shift towards blue or purple. I like cold shadows.
Some areas need airbrushing to get the vague hint at 3d. I just use the digital airbrush for that. The airbrush is also useful for doing highlights. I tend to cheat for highlights and just set the layer to screen and turn the opacity down. Highlights are only for raised areas - pecs, shoulders, cheeks, etc.
The penultimate highlights - my little balls of white, are just haphazardly thrown about at places that seem to look best. This is a technique I stole from Sarath. I just like the glossy, smooth effect it gives skin.
And that is pretty much it. I don’t do much in the way of uniform “light sources.”
Hopefully this was somewhat informative :p