It's All a Process!

I finished that picture of Yukio I was working on yesterday. I had a lot of fun, even if the background was super lame and made up on the spot. My roommate Leah says it reminds her of Christmas, and that this is Yukio celebrating Christmas time magic!

I'm sure that's the case.

It looks a little strange on my LCD monitor, but I'm still okay with it. As I predicted, even though there are some elements that bother me, like the fact that his head is too large and his vest looks a little odd (but I fixed it up a bit on photoshop so I liked it a little more) I am happy with it.

I forgot, however, to cover him in oodles and oodles of mud! Oh noes! This is an example of his better taken care of clothes; even if his vest clearly can't function the way it was meant to.

I quite like his boots!

Still fooling around with different techniques to cleaning up my line art. I think I like the way I was doing earlier, just erasing the red lines in my sketchbook so they're fainter, and then scanning in the image as black and white. Just by making the red lines fainter, the scanner fails to pick them up. Only thing I don't like about that technique is that the lines are rough and pixely. Not that you can tell when I downsize the image, but I can see it while I'm working and it just eats away at me.

This time around I scanned it in as a colour and removed the red channel and did clean up work and all that bull, and I still had spotty remains of my red lines left behind. You shouldn't be able to see them from the smaller image, but I could see them while I was zoomed in colouring in the flats.

Next time I scan in colour, I'm going to try the method I used to remove my blue lines; I'm going to use the hue/saturation slider and work with the magenta's, red's and whatever other sliders I have to use and see if I prefer that method or not.

Problem I have with those two techniques (with blue, or red, or whatever other colour I use) is that my lines are ever so slightly translucent, and you can see when I colour underneath them, especially with lighter colours like flesh tones, or whites and yellows. I think I can get around that by working with the curves slider though, so I'm going to experiment with that too, I think.

It's all a process right? Just need to figure out which of the many techniques I want to use! I would like to eventually learn to ink directly in photoshop with my tablet, but as of yet, I haven't figured out a way of doing that I like. Other than the pen tool, which I'm very practiced in and would like to step away from. I sort of like inking things in my sketchbook anyways, as it's something I was never very good at until about halfway through the summer where I started making a point of inking everything.

It's all a process!