A robot saves a girl in the desert

Need I say more? When I get the edits done, I will upload that too.

BFA page 2 Process

I decided to document the process that I go through when I draw and finish a comic page.  I don't necessarily feel like I'm one to be giving tutorials or showing people how to draw/color/make art, but I do think that someone might be interested to see the process.


First I start with the blue line drawing.  I use two steps at this part where I draw the gestures and basic shapes using my 2mm lead holder with the Turquoise brand lead.  It's not as soft, and it's really waxy, so it's hard to get dark lines.  It's also actually turquoise colored, so when I go over the gestures with my .5 mm blue mechanical pencil, it doesn't show through much.

After that, it's inking.  It's pretty self explanatory, but I try to make sure I get as much line weight as I can.  I also try to make sure that there's a balance of black in the pages because I don't want the structure of the forms and the drawings to rely on the coloring to be completed.
 On coloring, establishing the color scheme takes the most time.  I tend to use a gamut masking technique where I keep things desaturated unless it's very important.  This page is very desaturated without the high point because I wanted it to have a very particular tone.  The flats are also useful because you can select all the colors and change them as you need to.  This is the second page, so I didn't actually do that, but on the first page, I just copied the original character design colors and adjusted them to fit this tone and color scheme. 
After the flats, I add a multiply layer and establish the values and shadows.  I usually try to have pretty sharp lines on the shadows, but for these pages, there's sand blowing and ambient light, so there isn't a strong light source casting strong shadows.  Another thing I did a little less on this page was framing the panels with the values.  If I were going to make something into a silhouette, I would be doing it at this stage.  I do add a layer that is a black gradient to help direct the eye around the page.  If I don't want the viewer to look at the outer parts of the panel, then I will make that part a little darker so it's less noticeable.  After that, adding the textures helps make the page look a little more lively, as well as avoiding that airbrushed-I-colored-this-in-photoshop look that so many comics have.  It can really ruin good pencils or inks to have crappy flat colors and gradients.  I've made very high resolution watercolor textures that I apply on top on the overlay setting at about 35% opacity.  Finally, I add the effects and some halftones.

 And there's a finished page :)

Cintiq!

 Thanks to the generosity of my parents, I am now the proud owner of the 22HD Cintiq.  For a long time I had been using a tablet pc (the HP tm2t, which was pretty good) as my main digital drawing tool.  Tablet pc's are nice because they are full on laptops, and therefore portable and convenient, and I thought more than good enough for doing art.  I figured that using a cintiq couldn't be that different from using my laptop for drawing and painting, but I was totally wrong.  The Cintiq is so sensitive, way more so than the tablet pc.  It has so many functions as well, including the sixteen buttons and two touchstrips on the back.

When I opened the box, I realized why these things are so expensive (they are overpriced, even though they're totally awesome); it's the highest end professional tool an artist can buy.  The intuos tablets would probably be, since it's the same technology, but the Cintiq is simply on a different level from that. The one thing I can definitely say about it, is that it makes the process much faster.  Coloring takes a lot less time than it would with any other tablet, and it's easier to make it look better.  Because the screen is so big, I can zoom in more without having to constantly reposition the picture or move around a ton.  I also have a ton of hotkeys, not to mention the two buttons on the pen and the eraser.  And, unlike my laptop, I can have a keyboard available at anytime, so I can use any hotkey that I don't have programmed.
It is a fantastic piece of technology... and I don't think anyone would regret buying it, though it is such a huge investment.

And here is some samples of what I've done with it.  Most of them are just coloring, but there's a couple drawings as well :)