What I Did Today 07/06/15

  • On July 6, 2015 ·
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Hope everybody had/is having a great summer vacation. Today was my first day back in the studio after two weeks in San Diego with my mom. Returned to the comics I’d flat-filled hoping to start posting some. Still trying to decide how I want to handle the shading. Didn’t get much time to experiment with it before leaving. The last two days before the trip were kind of a blur of packing and making sure everything was sorted out.

I’m at the point stylistically where I’m trying to decide what works best for the comic. I could leave things flat but I’d like to carve out the forms a little bit. Plus I’m not 100% sure I like the colors I’ve used yet. I can fiddle with their saturation and some correcting layers or even rework them if I feel they need it. Drawing shadows on a multiply layer is kind of bothering me. I need to get better at picking my shade colors or else it just looks like the figure has dirt smeared everywhere. I could use a sharp brush, a soft brush, or something with some texture in it. Or I could forgo a brush entirely and work with gradients or halftones. Some people like to mix different techniques but I like to stay consistent across a piece to hold it together. I also have a habit of running into the issue of mid-tones muddying everything up, washing out the light shades and pushing the darks too far. Then there’s the issue of making the shadows work in black and white but dropping them on color ruins it.

Basically I need to experiment but not make something so elaborate it eats time away from later updates. Usually the best solution comes after spending time trying another approach and realizing the simplicity of doing it another way.