runnersuniverse.com

The shading is where the image really starts to take shape. For each flat base color, I add darker areas where things would be in shade, so every color ends up having two tones. I know some artists do a third tone on everything for a highlight color. Personally, for reasons of time management, I just stick with the shadow areas and forego the highlights. I usually only do highlights for certain effects, like shiny materials, reflective surfaces, or rim lighting.

This is also the stage where I’ll use a few gradients here and there to add a little variety to the shaded look. I try not to go overboard with the gradients and blending, since I really do like that clean and cartoony, cel-shaded look. But for something like sky, a gradient works really well in conveying that transition to haze at the horizon.

Next up, mist effects…

Here we have the color flat stage. At this point, I’m just dropping in all the base colors and defining those areas. Just so I don’t kill myself with a ton of different colors on each character, I try to stick to something like 3 main colors per character. For instance, with Roka, I could have made his gloves a different color from his boots and his hat a different color from his jacket, but that would get to be a real pain over time to keep doing on every panel and every page. So for simplicity’s sake, I just use a few main colors on each character and just move them around on that character’s various elements. As another example, with Cember, he has light blue, light purple, and dark purple (with the same dark purple distributed around his body on the neck, gloves, and lower skirt panel). Characters then have some additional embellishing colors as well, but at least the main colors are simplified that way.

A little coloring tip: there are a lot of areas that look white on this page, but when I drop them in at this stage, I drop in a very slightly different white for grouped features. For instance, the sky is one white, the snow on the rocks is another white, the ground snow is another, the white on Sky’s outfit is another, and all the other white bits on the various characters is another. The differences can be as little as 1 value difference in any of the C, M, Y, or K values. The importance is just that it’s different enough that a Magic Wand tool in Photoshop (set to a Tolerance of 1) will pick up one but not the other. That way, if I want to select all the ground snow, I just use the Magic Wand on it, and it will only select that particular white (the ground snow) and not any of the others.

Sometimes I’ll do something similar with other features, like the rock wall. In the Color Flats stage, I might make all the lower rock one shade of brown and the upper rock just a very slightly different shade. The eye may not pick it up, but the Wand will, which makes selection much easier for the next stage.

Next up, color shading…

For the next batch of Bonus Content, I thought it would be fun to show my art process. I’ll probably do this every now and then and have each installment run over several posts, with each post showing one step of the process. I figured the cover to “The Big Snow Job” #1 would make a good page for the inaugural Process content…

Here we have the thumbnails that I did for the cover. As far as thumbnails go, these are MUCH more polished than what I usually do. My typical thumbnails are really loose scribbles that only I can decipher. And I kinda have to get them into pencils within a few days or so. Anything longer than that and even I have a hard time remembering what was what. Anyway, these thumbnails are a bit more legible.

The main thing I wanted to do was showcase the cast in their snow outfits. I wanted the characters to be a bit static and very prominent since I knew I’d be using the image as a costume reference guide for myself in drawing the story arc. Plus, I figured the other covers could deal with the action. I thought a solid group shot would be a nice way to showcase the characters again after a bit of a long hiatus.

The bulk of the concepts just revolve around different angles and standing order. I briefly toyed with the idea of working in the frozen goat alien to add a little drama to the scene, but ultimately, I decided that since that was going to be the opening image of the issue itself, I didn’t want to duplicate it right on the cover.

I ended up going with a mix of #3 (upper right) and #5 (lower middle), with the characters standing by a rock wall, but without Sky standing apart from the others. I kinda felt like Roka should be the clear focus of the cover since he’s the leader. The prominence of Sky in #3 felt like it was splitting the focus a bit, so I worked her in with the rest of the crew.

Next up, the inking stage…