Latest illustrations

Finally got these illustrations finished!

I'm really happy with them - not just "well, it'll do", as I feel some of my recent work has been. (Though of course I can still see bits where it could have been better). It's good to try new things.

click to see big

I took the time to shade them - not a lot of time, but makes a big difference.

My new 'inking' technique really worked well - I'll do that again. It completely missed out the middle step - so I went straight from the rough roughs below to final linework.

Not just quicker, but also gives a livelier effect. And since pencil's a more forgiving medium than ink, easier to get a decent result 😀

So the time constraint was a blessing in disguise, as otherwise I would just have done what I usually do.

I tried to hold each story together with a colour scheme - not something I usually do, but I thought I'd try it. Each lesson has two complementary colours, which I've tried to use quite a lot in the picture (not so bright, though!).

And, to finish it off, I added an overlay of one of the colours over the foreground and the other colour over the background. Tbh, I'm not sure how this works, but it subtly changes the colours and helps to separate foreground and background.

how I did it

showing the difference: foreground redder, background cyan-er

Not quite what I was looking for...

I was wanting a picture of a cute little middle eastern lamb, so I Googled it.

Not quite what I was looking for...

Though I guess that's how it ended up :-(

This is why you should walk, not drive

Fake inks

Working on a freelance project with a tight deadline that's going to be hard to meet.
I suggested I could just do finished pencils (quicker), but the art editor wanted inks.

Then, in the middle of the night, I remembered that Jason Brubaker just pencilled most of his reMIND comic, and then tweaked the levels in photoshop to look like ink.

After a bit of trial and error (I needed a much smoother pencil* than I usually use) this is what I got.

It's a small background figure, which is why the lines are so thick.

I think this is going to work!

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* By 'pencil' I mean pencil tool in Clip Studio. I usually use 15 point 'chalk', with its standard settings, for pencilling, but for this I used a 25 point 'rough pencil' and put the texture density way down to 29.

Happy New Year!

I was going to post this song anyway, but we sang it on Hogmanay, so that's another reason.