Category: Art

Digital Watercolour – Chinese Opera Singer

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This was a gift, done in digital watercolour in Clip Studio Paint. I like the brushes in CSP, but unfortunately, even now, I can’t really get used to the way that you need to press down hard on the drawing tablet to get the watercolour function to behave the way it’s supposed to. Believe it or not, it tires out my hand, and I much prefer just using the airbrush function in Photoshop CS to colour.

This was also the first colour picture I’ve done that I inked digitally. It was a disaster – I hate digital inking and it seems that nothing has changed. It’s much faster to ink by hand, so that’s what I’ll continue to do. I inked it based off the sketch below.

CategoriesArt

New Art Style & Character Designs

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As you may all know, I’ve been working on doing colour art, and as such, has been shaping my artstyle to suit a more simple, streamlined way of colouring.

This has been an interest process – the colour tests for Chapter 1 of “Fabled Kingdom” may have turned out looking lovely, but that kind of colouring just took too long. The colouring style matched the linework, so if I need a simpler style of colouring, I need a simpler style of linework.

So, here are my first attempts – it’s a pretty established style already, since it seemed to have grown fully-formed from my head due to the number of other artistic influences I’ve had over the years. It leaves the “manga” look somewhat, but not by actually as much as it seems. The character on the left looks Disney-influenced, while the character on the right is influenced by lesser-seen but distinctive anime styles like “Kill la Kill” and “Gurren Lagaan“. The one in the middle is a mix of both.

Also, I’m grappling with the RGB vs CMYK issue. I can’t seem to grasp how different RGB vs CMYK is when it comes to how it looks on a screen, and how it looks on print. This is something I need to investigate more, but I have another project apart from the one above which I’m working on, so I’ll be doing that too.

Here’s a colour test attempt for Simon, the character on the right.

Celebrating a 20 year reunion

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My old high school reunion happened the other day, with the class of ’97 from Meriden celebrating at a local cafe. As a gift to a bunch of 20-year old friendships, I decided to draw a reunion picture of everyone, using a style I haven’t tried before. It’s a soft watercolour look, which is a first for me – most of my other work has very strong colours. This went for deliberately soft and feminine.

This is a cute, super cartoony style which I thought my friends would like, which they did. I used some tools I haven’t before, namely a Uniball-eye pen from Mitsubishi (ultra-micro). This claims to be a waterproof and fade proof pen, and I used it probably because I was hoping to use watercolours for this picture.

I ended up doing digital water colour, using warm colours like yellow and pink. This was done in Clip Studio Paint with its watercolour function, only the second time I’ve done it (I normally use the airbrush function of Photoshop CS2). The results were nice, which was unexpected – I’ve not done any soft watercolour I’ve liked before, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of this colouring thing. I also worked from very loose sketches – as seen below.

CategoriesArt

Colouring Tests: Fabled Kingdom Chapter 1

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I’ve been doing some colouring tests, with the goal of moving towards doing colour comics. Despite having drawn comics for almost 20 years now, I feel that my biggest weakness has always been my aversion to colour. After drawing manga-style black-and-white (or greyscale like The Dreaming) for so long, I think I’ve done all there is to do on that style of art, and it’s time to move onto something else.

For this reason, I’ve been looking to build a colour palette I’m comfortable, and learning to use it. I started colouring Fabled Kingdom art from Chapter 1 as practise, and so far, it looks surprisingly good. Each took 2-3 hours at the most to do – I deliberately limited myself to the amount of time allowed since colouring is about speed as well as quality.







In the end, I’m actually looking for a more simple colouring style, so my colour comics will probably not look like this. I’ll probably aim to change my drawing style to something more cartoony and western to suit a two-tone colour palette, unlike this one which has 3-4 tones for each colour.

Bizarre Note: I’ve shown my colouring to a number of people, and while most agree that the colours look beautiful, some openly preferred the greyscale version. Interesting to see why they do that, but hey, everyone has their preferences. At the end of the day, what matters is the story and characters.