Here’s the finished piece off of the work in progress I posted last night. Figure I might as well show off the three stages that I had with the ‘painting’, as it were. I’m not saying what the picture is for but I’m sure it will show up somewhere soon!

Just a little something I’m working on for a SEKRET PROJEKT for myself. I’ll be showing work in progesses as we go along, and of course the final product when done…
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Just a little something I’m working on for a SEKRET PROJEKT for myself. I’ll be showing work in progesses as we go along, and of course the final product when done…

So this is the ‘Work In Progress’ getting a little more looking finished. This is stage 2 - inking.

I have a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet that I bought in the Apple Store in Glasgow one shopping trip. I hadn’t even counted on buying something like that as I had a… well… mostly working graphics tablet (OK, it was a £20 piece of crap from Trust, but still) but as an impulse purchase, it’s definitely been my favorite. I do any digital artwork in Photoshop. I originally found Photoshop such a cumbersome program (cumbersome, dunno why but it seems to be my word of the moment…) to do any drawing in, but the Bamboo makes it so much easier. That’s the great thing about the Wacom tablet - pressure sensitivity, no need for batteries in the pen, flip it over and you don’t even need to activate the eraser tool. It’s awesome.

I tend to do all inking on a clear layer with the scanned-in picture as the background layer. In this instance (mostly to help me in the next step) I have also made a layer mask with the lineart so I have just the pencil lines - no white space at all. It’s so bloody useful to see the pencil lineart by itself, especially when you’re like me and you do little visual cues for where there’s going to be shading and the like.

On this piece, I’m using a normal brush with a 5px diameter, and 3px for finer details. I don’t tend to use custom brushes unless I really need to, as I feel it gives my stuff the look I’m wanting. I’m not going for photo-realistic after all. And anyways, with the pressure sensitivity I can vary the line weight as if I’m inking in real life anyways.

Up next, we’ll give this sucka some colour!

So, this is what I call a ‘work in progress’. This is a developmental promo piece for a project that I’ve got brewing in the old noggin’ which I’m going to post part by part as I complete each section of the piece. So here we have part one - pencils. As I’m sure you can see, I’m not exactly the neatest wielder of a pencil. I don’t tend to rub out construction lines or much else when I’m sketching something out. This isn’t necessarily bad technique, especially when I’m inking digitally which I will be with this piece. For the vast majority of artwork I do, I draw things out in an A4 sketchbook. I seem to have a preference for WH Smith sketchbooks, which seem to give me an amazing quality of paper for a relatively low price (costs about £4 for 50 pages – 8p a page, or 13c for the North Americans out there). I also use a .5 HB mechanical pencil, mostly for convenience, and a Staedtler rubber as they give me the best quality when erasing stray lines. As you can see, I’m a fan of construction lines when it comes to building up a decent picture, however if I’m feeling really good in a day I might find myself winging it. I have a habit of doing this when I’m doing the pencils on a comic page. I then tend to put in quite a lot of detail onto the page at the pencilling stage. Apart from making myself sure of small details like costuming and shading, there’s no real reason I do this – just a personal preference I guess. Once I have a picture that I feel I can work with, I digitise the picture. We have a small HP all-in-one printer scanner that does the trick for me. I fire up Photoshop on my Windows install and scan in the picture to start editing – in this case 300dpi in greyscale mode. I’ll be changing it in to RGB mode once I start editing, but I bring it in greyscale as so to get no stray colours in the pencil layer. Next up is part two – inking, which will be followed by part three – colouring and part four – finishing touches. I’ll be picking this up later in the week, once I’ve finished inking the above piece.
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So, this is what I call a ‘work in progress’. This is a developmental promo piece for a project that I’ve got brewing in the old noggin’ which I’m going to post part by part as I complete each section of the piece.

So here we have part one - pencils.

As I’m sure you can see, I’m not exactly the neatest wielder of a pencil. I don’t tend to rub out construction lines or much else when I’m sketching something out. This isn’t necessarily bad technique, especially when I’m inking digitally which I will be with this piece. For the vast majority of artwork I do, I draw things out in an A4 sketchbook. I seem to have a preference for WH Smith sketchbooks, which seem to give me an amazing quality of paper for a relatively low price (costs about £4 for 50 pages – 8p a page, or 13c for the North Americans out there). I also use a .5 HB mechanical pencil, mostly for convenience, and a Staedtler rubber as they give me the best quality when erasing stray lines.

As you can see, I’m a fan of construction lines when it comes to building up a decent picture, however if I’m feeling really good in a day I might find myself winging it. I have a habit of doing this when I’m doing the pencils on a comic page. I then tend to put in quite a lot of detail onto the page at the pencilling stage. Apart from making myself sure of small details like costuming and shading, there’s no real reason I do this – just a personal preference I guess.

Once I have a picture that I feel I can work with, I digitise the picture. We have a small HP all-in-one printer scanner that does the trick for me. I fire up Photoshop on my Windows install and scan in the picture to start editing – in this case 300dpi in greyscale mode. I’ll be changing it in to RGB mode once I start editing, but I bring it in greyscale as so to get no stray colours in the pencil layer.

Next up is part two – inking, which will be followed by part three – colouring and part four – finishing touches. I’ll be picking this up later in the week, once I’ve finished inking the above piece.

As you may (or may not) know, I’m going to be doing my comic ‘Alienated Youth’ again starting a week on Monday. Now, that obviously means I’ll have to draw comics. Normally this means lining out an A4 page, pencils, pens, etc, but because I’m on holiday from my work this week, I decided to try and do a full comic on the computer using Photoshop and my Bamboo tablet. I think the results so far are pretty good, if I don’t say so myself. For the record, this also shows my normal work progress quite well - the blue line work is the sketch (which looks this rough when I do pencil and paper as well) and I work over that. I’ve done the first panel in it’s entirety, so I’ll have to get the rest of it finished later today. Alienated Youth resumes January 17th (that’s a week on Monday) and can be found at http://alienatedyouth.project-42.co.uk. Note: I don’t work that small - I’ve reduced the image size so it doesn’t engulf your browsers. The actual size I work at is a file over 3000px in length - it’s about 3 normal screen sizes side to side if I wanted to see it all at full size in one shot.
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As you may (or may not) know, I’m going to be doing my comic ‘Alienated Youth’ again starting a week on Monday. Now, that obviously means I’ll have to draw comics. Normally this means lining out an A4 page, pencils, pens, etc, but because I’m on holiday from my work this week, I decided to try and do a full comic on the computer using Photoshop and my Bamboo tablet.

I think the results so far are pretty good, if I don’t say so myself.

For the record, this also shows my normal work progress quite well - the blue line work is the sketch (which looks this rough when I do pencil and paper as well) and I work over that. I’ve done the first panel in it’s entirety, so I’ll have to get the rest of it finished later today.

Alienated Youth resumes January 17th (that’s a week on Monday) and can be found at http://alienatedyouth.project-42.co.uk.

Note: I don’t work that small - I’ve reduced the image size so it doesn’t engulf your browsers. The actual size I work at is a file over 3000px in length - it’s about 3 normal screen sizes side to side if I wanted to see it all at full size in one shot.