Prepare Yourself

The Word Smith episode 3, page 3 is now up on my sorry excuse for a website.  It is also in colour and seeing as we're now half-way through the episode, I'll probably just finish up the whole episode using colour.  So, yay for that?  This page includes some gradients so it's kind of fancy.

From the sketchbook, today we have The Pen in fencing regalia:

Of course, she should really be wearing a full fencing mask rather than just her visor, but that would hide her face so I took some liberties.  Drew this whilst at the first CTRL-A show of the term and had a small audience for part of it which was, different, I guess (they were quiet so it didn't bother me much).  Can't imagine it was overly interesting to watch me draw, but who am I to judge?

Until next week,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Flattened

Page 2 of episode 3 of the Word Smith is now available.  As fate would have it, I ended up colouring this page too, due to continued insanity.  Actually, I downloaded a couple of plug-ins that handle some of the more tedious aspects of doing the flatting and they sped up the process considerably.  They're not perfect, mind you, as you have the same basic problem as flood filling:  if there are any holes in the line work, the colour for an area escapes into connected areas.  This means I have to go and make sure there are no gaps in the linework which is still a tedious and error-prone proccess, though still faster than flatting by hand to the point where it's at least twice as fast.  This means I may actually be colouring a lot more pages than I had intended - or, at least, I'll probably do episode 3 fully in colour now (I have page 3 nearly coloured already).  Adding shading is still laborious though, so I may just use flat colours in the future to save time if I decide to keep colouring things, unless I come up with some better way to handle shading.

Here's how the flatting for page 1 looks like compared to what I did by hand:

It doesn't really handle hand-shaded areas very well and can produce lots of little areas, but still faster than doing things by hand, at least so far.

The sketchbook has, sadly, been a bit neglected of late due to my focus on the Word Smith stuff, but here's one of the more recent sketchbook drawings which may have some relevance to page 4 of episode 3:

Those are suppose to be swimming trunks, by the way, not boxers.

Anywho, that's all for now.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Behind the Lines

Page one of episode three of The Word Smith has now gone on-line.  As an added bonus, I, for reasons I cannot fathom, decided to colour this page which was very time consuming!  Thus, do not expect to see many coloured pages in the future (unless I get much faster at it) and do make sure to go look at the final coloured page because it was kind of a pain to do.

I also figured I'd take a few moments to talk about how I went about colouring the page.  For those familiar with Photoshop or colouring comics in general, this is probably all old hat.  For those who aren't terribly familiar with either of those things it might still be a bit dull, but go and read it anyway.

So, naturally, I started with the scanned in inked pages.  One could, of course, do everything digitally, but I'm still doing thing drawing/inking the old fashion way, at least for now.  Here's the black and white page:

Yay!  The first step is to put the line art on a new layer (leaving the background blank) and set the layer to multiply.  This makes the white parts transparent, allowing you to draw underneath.

The first step is a technique called "flatting".  I'm not going to go over this in excrutiating details (tutorials exist on the weeb for the terminally curious), but the basic idea, is that you outline each area (in my case using the polygonal lasso tool) and fill each area with a solid colour.  Generally, the outlines should be created under the inked lines so that, when filled, there are no gaps betwixt the lines and the coloured areas.  This is all done on the background layer (or, I suppose, any layer underneath the line layer) with all forms of anti-aliasing, feathering and so on turned off.  The idea is to create areas of solid colour that a colourist can easily select when doing their colouring.  With the line layer turned off, the flats will look something like the following:

See?  Kind of a neat looking effect, in and of itself.  You  can actually use any colours you want at the flatting stage, but since I'm doing my own colouring, I just flatted with the final colours.  As you might imagine, doing all of this by hand is a bit tedious.  I understand there are plug-ins that can help with this so I will probably look into that the next time I decide I'm crazy enough to do some colouring.

Now, one can leave things as flat colours, but I decided to go a little further and add some shadows.  I actually did this fairly similarly to flatting.  I created a shadow layer between the flat and line layers set to multiply with about 80% opacity.  Then I just created my shadow areas in a similar manner to flatting, except there were a lot fewer areas so it didn't take quite as long.  With the line art turned off, it looks like the following:

Similar to above, except now with shadows.

Well, that was basically it.  One can add hilights and other effects, but I decided to stop with shadows.  And don't forget that you can see the final, full colour version here.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Ripe Tomatoes

Today, I am starting to post episode three of The Word Smith.  I know, I know, I'll bet you can hardly contain yourself for joy so I'll just get to the point.

Added some toning in photoshop for something a bit different.

The plan is to post one page per week, probably Tuesdays.  I'm fairly close to being done drawing/inking episode 3 so that should be doable.  I'm not sure if I'm going to post these to my blog or just to my website (such as it is), but at the least I'll link to each episode from here.

In other news, I have now harvested four tomatoes (one of which became part of today's sandwich, so far with no ill effects) from my garden so I suppose I can consider that part of the garden a success.

Freak Out,
-TFitC