More digital doodles
Mar. 22nd, 2006 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jkcarrier
So I've been futzing around with these digital toys -- DAZ Studio, Adobe Illustrator, and a Wacom Tablet -- and trying to figure out how to incorporate them into my comics work. I've had some luck with single illustrations, so I decided to bite the bullet and try to do an entire strip digitally.
This is the first page of my contribution to "Serial: Killer", a jam strip that's running in the UFO newsletter.
1. Ok, so it wasn't quite 100% digital -- I did do a quick thumbnail layout with good ol' fashioned pencil and paper first.
2. Opening up DAZ Studio, I take a couple of generic male and female figures and modify them to look more like the characters that artist Marc Haines drew in the first chapter of the jam. The gunman is a new character -- I decide to make him a heavyset guy, for contrast. I happened to have 3d props of a briefcase and gun, so I add them in -- if I hadn't had them, I could've just created generic "box" shapes to put in their place. I also put some high-heeled shoes on the girl, so her feet would be properly positioned. I could've put complete outfits on them, but Daz/Poser clothing (and hair) tends to look kind of "fake", and thus not that useful as a drawing reference. My main concerns here are perspective, proportion, and lighting, not necessarily creating a complete 3D "scene" for it's own sake.
With my 3D images complete, I import them into Adobe Illustrator and begin laying out the page. I mark out the panel borders, and type in a rough draft of the lettering, to make sure everything fits and flows together well.
3. Now I can actually start drawing! With Wacom tablet in hand, I use Illustrator's brush tool to draw on top of my reference picture -- not meticulously "tracing", but using it as a starting point and hopefully maintaining some spontaneity and personal style.
Here's the finished piece, with the reference underlay removed and all the lettering, balloons, and logos composited in. The real advantage here is that each of these elements is a separate "object" that can be individually adjusted. For instance, I ended up moving the guy up slightly, to avoid an awkward tangent where the corner of his briefcase intersected with the horizon line in the background.
Looking over the page, I'm reasonably pleased with it, but aware that I still have more to learn. Drawing with the tablet in my lap while looking up at the computer screen is going to take some getting used to! And I need to play with the brush settings more to get the kind of line quality I want -- even at this stage, though, I'm pleasantly surprised at how much it looks like something I inked by hand.
I can also see that I need to exaggerate the poses and expressions more in the 3D stage. The girl's cocky/unconcerned attitude comes across ok, but the guy doesn't look scared enough. It might be that I need to do an intermediate, "pencilling" stage to work out some of these issues before laying down the final brushstrokes.
I'm not ready to totally abandon my analog tools yet, but this is shaping up to be a viable alternative. Stay tuned for further experiments. ;-)
This is the first page of my contribution to "Serial: Killer", a jam strip that's running in the UFO newsletter.
1. Ok, so it wasn't quite 100% digital -- I did do a quick thumbnail layout with good ol' fashioned pencil and paper first.
2. Opening up DAZ Studio, I take a couple of generic male and female figures and modify them to look more like the characters that artist Marc Haines drew in the first chapter of the jam. The gunman is a new character -- I decide to make him a heavyset guy, for contrast. I happened to have 3d props of a briefcase and gun, so I add them in -- if I hadn't had them, I could've just created generic "box" shapes to put in their place. I also put some high-heeled shoes on the girl, so her feet would be properly positioned. I could've put complete outfits on them, but Daz/Poser clothing (and hair) tends to look kind of "fake", and thus not that useful as a drawing reference. My main concerns here are perspective, proportion, and lighting, not necessarily creating a complete 3D "scene" for it's own sake.
With my 3D images complete, I import them into Adobe Illustrator and begin laying out the page. I mark out the panel borders, and type in a rough draft of the lettering, to make sure everything fits and flows together well.
3. Now I can actually start drawing! With Wacom tablet in hand, I use Illustrator's brush tool to draw on top of my reference picture -- not meticulously "tracing", but using it as a starting point and hopefully maintaining some spontaneity and personal style.
Here's the finished piece, with the reference underlay removed and all the lettering, balloons, and logos composited in. The real advantage here is that each of these elements is a separate "object" that can be individually adjusted. For instance, I ended up moving the guy up slightly, to avoid an awkward tangent where the corner of his briefcase intersected with the horizon line in the background.
Looking over the page, I'm reasonably pleased with it, but aware that I still have more to learn. Drawing with the tablet in my lap while looking up at the computer screen is going to take some getting used to! And I need to play with the brush settings more to get the kind of line quality I want -- even at this stage, though, I'm pleasantly surprised at how much it looks like something I inked by hand.
I can also see that I need to exaggerate the poses and expressions more in the 3D stage. The girl's cocky/unconcerned attitude comes across ok, but the guy doesn't look scared enough. It might be that I need to do an intermediate, "pencilling" stage to work out some of these issues before laying down the final brushstrokes.
I'm not ready to totally abandon my analog tools yet, but this is shaping up to be a viable alternative. Stay tuned for further experiments. ;-)
