|
||||
|
Hooray! My Cintiq has been returned to me, just two weeks after it was shipped out. It’s as good as new! Now to get back to work. I tried messing around with my pencils and markers, but didn’t come up with anything worth posting, although I managed to at least keep up with a little bit of doodling. *happydance*
My beloved Cintiq has been sent to the shop. Over the last few months, it developed an odd shadowing effect that was starting to get really distracting and annoying. After trying to work it out through emails with the tech crew, it was finally decided that whatever was wrong with it was not something we could fix, and so off to WA it goes. So now that leaves me with one less tool, but many others to play with that I’ve neglected lately, mainly real pens and markers. I also still have my Intuos 3. I don’t really intend to do a lot of lineart type stuff with it, but should be fine for coloring. To test that, I pulled out an old pic of Dezzia that I had doodled when I first got my batch of Copic markers. This had been done in all grey tones, so I pulled it into Painter and had some fun. A lot of fun, actually. I may give this treatment to a few other pics. And here’s the original markered pic: http://lenneth.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d1puy5w
So I wanted to practice some more inking. I didn’t really feel like coming up with an idea entirely from scratch. So I dug through some old stuff, found something I always rather liked but never really got back to, and decided to go for it. This was the original image, posted in November ‘07, but squinting at my sig, it looks as though I actually doodled it in August ‘07. So, three years later, this is how I’ve managed to clean it up. I think this is one of my first before/after/look at a few years of progress images, and I’m actually pretty happy to see it. Even when I started inking this a week or two ago, I didn’t think I’d put so much effort into it. I picked up a book called “The Grammar of Architecture” from the sale books section of Barnes and Nobles last month, and it gave me a good amount of inspiration for the window (which started out much more blah), and even some of the bg elements. I still have a long way to go (I’m still very shy of using big blocks of black for instance), but I’m having fun getting there, and taking a break to look back to see how far I’ve come was nice. —- This is Vale and her sister, Virosia, from my original story concept, Astray. The original sketch was doodled in Painter, and the inked version was done in Manga Studio 4 EX. I cannot say it enough, I think I am in love with MS4EX. Astray – Nigel and Morgan by ~lenneth on deviantART Kind of Valentine’s Day-ish… some Morgan and Nigel fluff. … it means NOTHING! Nothing, I tell you. Speed pencil doodle, done in Painter. I haven’t used the grainy cover pencils much, I really liked using it here. Nigel’s hair got a bit.. poofy. And I think I need to fix the bridge of his nose, but this was mostly done for speed and emotion. Felt good to do something after doing practically nothing the last few weeks. This was also much, much pinker up until the last minute. Fun with inking hair by ~lenneth on deviantART More inking experimentation… this time very much inspired by Adam Hughes’ style of hair inking. Also tried a few different tricks with coloring while I was at it. For a quick and simple pic, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out… I was afraid for a while the hair was going to look horrible Someday my inking will not be rubbish! Astray – Dezzia inking fun by ~lenneth on deviantART I wanted to recreate a nice inking pen I found for Photoshop in Painter, so I started messing around with a custom brush. This started out as a quick inking attempt that I liked, so I tossed some color on, too. Dezzia is demanding that way. I’m still not a very good (comic style) inker, but I’m trying! XD This is probably one of my best attempts. I really like my custom inking pen that I have dubbed “inking smoothie”. Mmm, smoooooth. Astray – Vale alt. doodle by ~lenneth on deviantART Just a doodle I did tonight in Photoshop, messing around with some inking brushes from the latest Imagine FX mag, plus some colors tossed on for fun. I haven’t done any doodles for a while, been pretty exhausted. As the title suggests, this is an alternate outfit idea for Vale, something a bit sassier than what she’s usually allowed to wear. I doubt it’ll be as low-cut if it makes it into the story, that was a bit of anime-esque flair tossed in for funsies. …for better or worse.   Two doodles I attempted yesterday – both fairly quick and unpolished. I think I spent so much time trying to make the colors nice, smooth and blendy I forgot how to draw decent faces. >_> On the left is Vail from Astray, and on the right is my blood elf huntress, Cithara.  full size at dA My computer was down for the count for almost a week due to hard drive failure.. thankfully most of my data survived! So while I was trying to live w/out my beautiful pc, I pulled out my Copics. A little while back I bought a Copics brand sketchpad for markers use (obviously ^^; ) but I hadn’t doodled in it yet so… I finally did. Feels quite a bit different from my normal sketch book, and from cardboard stock printer paper for sure! Using the blender really has a different effect on color already put down. Was not expecting that. The full-sized scan looks pretty neat actually, I may upload a chunk for detail funsies.  full size at dA dA commentary for the b&w found here: This was the original test page I started when I first got Manga Studio a few months back… I did the rough sketching (which feels very weird in MS for some reason), then did Vail and 98% of Morgan, and .. stopped. Anyway, tonight I popped open MS on a whim (wasn’t used to using it with my Cintiq yet, so been trying to practice with it a bit here and there). I polished off Morgan, then whipped up Hrace and Nigel from very, very rough sketches into something I’m very happy with! Wralley was a little tougher, but I’m very happy with how she turned out, too – though I admit I did exaggerate her ponytail a bit. Hrace is still slightly evolving, in fact he has slowly been increasing in age as Nigel gets slightly younger >_> Oh well, it’ll all work out. Hrace was actually drawn in the reverse direction, but I flipped him when I decided I didn’t need him and Nigel looking off page in the same direction. As for the tones… Vail’s is nice, the others I was just messing around. MS is really nice.. I’m hoping to use it more in the future, possibly for Everstreets dA commentary for the colored version: I’m pleased with the shading on the faces and skin tones in general, I feel I did some good work here in a relatively short time. |
||||
|
Copyright © 2010 Ammo's Art (dot com) - All Rights Reserved |
||||
I liked this test, I’ll probably mess around with this idea more in the future.