@Leontine said:
@Bobby-Aquitania Nice work Bobby, how nice of you to join in the fun! I Really like the pose and the composition, What bothers me a bit is the linework, It seems out of place. Maybe you can push the rendering So you can get rid of the lines? Than the character can sart speaking for it self. If you do have time watch the Youtube video's of Istebrak-art instructor for tips and critiques.one that really helped me is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7EpXCnN0lo
Good Luck!
Thank you very much for commenting Leontine. Yeah I feel I didn't follow the " mostly blue with 1 complimentary " color challenge very well, as I was using the challenge to do a warm up. For me, my piece is just a coloring mood warm up. I used the black line intentionally, because I come from a US Comic Book industry background. That's the art I grew up on and wanted to emulate as an adult. It's traditionally done with black ink lines over pencil, in the industry we use a non-photographic blue pencil to sketch with instead of a normal pencil, because that can have black india applied to it and the final image won't show any of the pre-drawing when reproduced in print. Normal pencil would photograph of course.
Jake Parker, Will Terry's partner here at SVS also teaches a course here on just Inking, and several others on Comic Book style artwork.
So this is why the black line is used, to define form. It is essentially the same as the classic ink and watercolor method, only the lines have more purpose than providing a shape to color. They define where the light is hitting the form, the anatomy, all the things a heavy pencil line would do. The style was primarily done with a brush from the 30s - 90s, but is now done digitally as well. I have better programs to do it, but I like Mischief which gives you an infinite canvas to draw on...
Thank you for your video, some of it was useful, I prefer this style which oddly enough is the style I evolved to as I had grown tired of the traditional comic book look in my work. I still do it as a warm up, to keep myself loose, and work on my muscle memory as I will always love this style. But now I work like...
This and this... each stage in the article is clickable to see larger.
Where I build my values up in " painted " tones before applying color. But that's what I do for my personal work. I joined SVS because I liked many of the digital techniques Will was using over his pencils, which he sometimes does digitally as well, and I applied some of that in this challenge. He uses a " color dodge " layer to brighten up color values, I think in mine I went too far and it looks over saturated. Last night I was watching his Mixed Media course and I saw him bring down the saturation of his whole piece and then just build up the color on his figure using this same method of color dodging.
I had a layer like that on mine, but again I went too far trying to keep more blue. If I applied Will's class to my piece it would look like this, where I only color dodged the skin and hair, and left the background less saturated.
I could paint this out in my normal style, but again I was only trying to warm up... I may go back to it with more blues like the challenged called for, but I've got to get cracking on that 3rd Thursday piece, in which I'm using a totally new style, more cartoony. If you've never done pen and ink, it is an art form all it's own, I suggest looking at artists like Wrightson, Barry Windsor-Smith and Jeffrey Jones they all knew each other in the UK, and worked at a place called The Studio in 1975 along with artist Michael Kaluta. Their work heavily influences comicbook creators till this very day...
Thanks again for your help.