This week wraps up the final version for my panel on the club t-shirt. I'm still playing around with an alternate version that has a single focus to make better use of the limited print size, but at least now there's no looming deadline.
One thing this proved to me is that application is worth a million times more than theory when it comes to art. The process I worked out in my head didn't go anywhere near as smoothly as I thought. I ended up making the same mistake a lot of the tutorial hosts I follow make switching to the wrong layer and having touch ups where they weren't supposed to be.
During the filling process I found out that Manga Studio's edge sense isn't too keen on gray toned drawings. So every time I tried to add whites or background colors it would eat up some of my line thickness. I tried to auto correct it using the line correction tool, but it had the same problem. Some lines would blow up to four or five times the original size and other lines wouldn't change at all.
I need to either spend more time darkening my lines or figure out how to get a threshold setting on my scanner that gives me dark lines without turning the page brown. If I had done that up front I probably would have shaved several hours off this project.
Left is the original pencil work (Pentel Graph Gear 1000 w/ .7 lead with Col-Erase base lines). I scanned and removed some of the noise before importing it into Manga Studio and shifting the hue to make it easier to work over.
I was going for an ukiyo-e look for the clouds to give my panel a different feel from the sci-fi and noir styles I'd already seen in some of the other submissions. I had the option to break the bottom panel, but ended up staying in the frame. When I dropped the lower guy's elbow and extended the spear butt off the bottom it didn't look as good on paper as it did in my head.
More inks and background. I didn't like a solid black field on the bottom, so I copied the long cloud on top and inverted the colors. I'm not sure if it looks like a shadow or a river, but I was aiming for shadow.
Looks like
Read, Watch, Draw has passed the
1k page view milestone! Thanks to all the early viewers who are putting up with the low quality posts and wonky writing style. It kind of snuck up on me so I don't have one of those snazzy thank you pin ups. I'll work on having one ready for when we hit the 5k mark.
| Pages Read This Week |
0 |
| Total Pages Read Since Launch |
1456 |
| Books Completed Since Launch |
13 |
| Total Tutorial Run-time |
12 hours 52 minutes |
| Days Since Launch |
127 |
| - Active Days (1 hour or more of practice) |
122 |
| Drawing Time This Week |
8 hours |
| Drawing Time Total |
119 hours |
* I'm considering Friday to be the end of the week for tracking metrics so that it lines up with my summary posts.
** I had to use a some fuzzy math to figure the page count for some of my Kindle books since they only have location tagging.
