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COMICS 101 for 08/29/2002
Star Wars Gamer #6 - Battle Droids!
Week 4: Digital Painting over Pencils Part Two
With the majority of Wertsnik rendered (save for his weapons, belt and backpack), I shift gears and move to the background. I often work back and forth between foreground and background at times to build up both simultaneously. This usually helps me keep my color choices balanced between the two areas and allows me more clarity in my mind's eye on how the final will eventually look.
To render the background with my 'brownish-orange to yellow' gradient I chose, I create a new layer above the background canvas layer (and under my previous color art layer) and then use the gradient tool in the tools pallete by dragging from the top of the canvas to the bottom. This knocks out the background very quickly and effectively for me. The next step in coloring the background for the piece involves selecting and masking off the background line work.
By using the polygon lasso selection tool from my tools pallete, I carefully make rough selections around all the background line work of the walls, crates and rest of the factory. With this line work roughly surrounded by selections, I then cut (Edit>Cut) and paste (Edit>Paste) the linework onto a new layer and I make sure it's under the color art layer. On this new layer, I then select all the pixels (Edit>Select All) and go back to my gradient tool. I adjust the same gradient to slightly darker values of the ones I used to block in the background previously and then render the actual selected line work as a darker gradient.
The final technique in completing the background I use is applying the Blur effect in my Filters menu choices. First, I flatten the background line work to the background color layer underneath it. With these two layers now combined on one layer, I go to Filter>Blur>Guassian Blur and increase the blur to '.5' pixels. The background is now complete (Ex.I).
I return to my color art layer and begin to render Mynnic and Pal-Hans-Das next (Ex.J). I'm also adding shading and highlights to some of the battle droids and the weapons here as well. I go back down to Wertsnik and complete the rendering on his backpack and weapons also.
Moving on to the 'special effects' aspect to this action scene in the next step (Ex.K), I select the pixels of the 'blast' linework and use the same technique in rendering on top of the actual line with gradients as well. Underneath the color art layer (on a different layer) I make a new selection outlining each blast carefully behind the colored linework on the layer above. I then use the 'radial gradient' option from the gradient tools pallete to create the intense white to yellow bursts.
I'll see you next week as we move on to rendering the special effect of Mynnic's lightsaber.
-Joe
<< 08/22/2002 | 08/29/2002 | 09/05/2002 >>
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