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Art tips and techniques and some reviews by illustrator Joe Corroney.
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COMICS 101 for 09/05/2002
Star Wars Gamer #6 - Battle Droids!
Week 5: Digital Painting over Pencils Part Three - Lightsaber Rendering
Moving on, the next 'special effect' for me to render will be Mynnic's weapon, the lightsaber. There's a technique I use in most of my full color digital Star Wars art to illustrate these weapons that I'll share with you here.
The first step is to make a precise selection (using the polygon selection tool) from the very hilt of the saber handle around the pencil lines for the sides and tip of the glowing blade. I'm taking my time here using this tool, making sure my selection is the exact length and width of the blade that I want (which is what I originally indicated in pencil) and the tip is curved and not too flat.
With that selection active, I make a new layer and call it the 'Saber Layer' (you can rename layers in Layers Pallete when you first create a 'New Layer' or by dragging down from the arrow menu in the right hand corner of the pallete and choosing 'Layer Properties').
I then fill that selection with pure white from my color window using my paint bucket tool or 'Fill' command in my Edit menu choices.
Before deselecting, I create a new layer and call it the 'Glow Layer'.
Next, I go to Select>Feather in my menu and choose to feather this now empty selection which exists on this new layer by 15 to 25 pixels. The amount of feathering really is optional and depends on the actual size of the saber and the glow effect your trying to render in your illustration.
With the selection now feathered you will see the size of it shrink or decrease somewhat. This will allow me to paint inside the selection with whatever color for the blade's glow (in this case blue) as well as allowing the pixels of paint to fade outside and beyond the selection those number of pixels I previously declared to feather.
On this 'Glow Layer' I use my larger tip for my airbrush at full opacity and make several passes until the glow of my saber is bright enough and looks to fade just enough around the edges.
I then drag this 'Glow Layer' behind the 'Saber Layer' which allows the inner, hard-edged white blade to be viewed on top now.
While still on the 'Glow Layer' I decrease the opacity (in the Layers Pallete) of that layer somewhere between 80-90% which allows for some even more subtle transparency of my color art to show through the glowing energy blade and also softens it's glow sligthly more.
With my newly constructed lightsaber, my Jedi skills are now complete (Ex. L). I return to my color art layer and finish the rendering on Mynnic and Pal-Hans-Das now and begin to block in more color on Vinto. I'll be 'flattening' or compressing all of the layers together used to create my lightsaber, blast effects, background and characters once I'm finished with rendering the other characters on my color art layer.
Next week we'll discuss the last steps in completing this illustration.
See you next time,
-Joe
<< 08/29/2002 | 09/05/2002 | 09/12/2002 >>
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