First attempt at colouring

bombidol

I only recently (last few days) started getting into colouring, im still rough as hell at it but i thought id lash up my first attempt and let you see. tell me what you think.


This is it uncoloured



This is my first attempt at colouring it. As you can see, i messed up some of the layers so theres some bleed etc.

bombidol

its saved as a jpg here for the net so you know the quality is crap

Briony Noh

Hope you aren't too disheartened. I saw this over a week ago, I think, and had a few observations, but I didn't reply cos I thought a few more experienced and/or professional people might say something first, then I might learn a thing or two for myself.

But since they haven't, and I won't, here's my thoughts:

I'm assuming Photoshop (or similar). I'm assuming colouring over an inked original line drawing (though it looks like a pencil line to me on the jpg). You're right, of course, to use layers, and if your inkline is continuous it's easy enough to select the area you need to colour, so I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "i messed up some of the layers so theres some bleed". If you've magic-wanded the selected area and made a new layer of it, you should still have the unbroken black lines on your background layer. Adjusting the new Layer 1 with the HUE/SATURATION control, darkening it so the colour shows up (I know you know this, but others may not) should leave you with a red (or whatever) layer, completely separate from the background. This you can texture with the paintbrush and smudge tool, keeping the marquee active if necessary so you don't extend over the edges.

But you asked us to tell you what we thought: I thought nice attempt. I thought, not sure where the light source is and I thought 'is that black or very dark red on his shoulder?' Dark red, of course, but a little on the circular side to give any true impression of shadow and on the apparently wrong side of the light source to be a shadow, anyway.

Don't be afraid to smudge shadows and highlights in a bit or perhaps even, with judicious selection of the various layer areas to be treated, use the RENDER - LIGHTING EFFECTS menu options (Photoshop).

Is what's happening on the wall in any way connected with the light and dark areas of the figure? If so, you might emphasise this with a starker contrast on the figure. There doesn't at the moment seem to be any co-relationship between the light behind and the light in front of the figure.

So much for the colour. The draftsmanship seems excellent to me. The drawing is quite convincing as it stands and is of a considerably high standard. Use plastic toy figures to find out what light will do to them or try a program like POSER, which I think is still available somewhere. I got my copy off a cover disk on PC World or something. It's like one of those posable wooden figures you can get in artshops if you have huge amounts of money to throw away, only in a PC/Mac program. A full version of the prog is free, while the extended version that includes --- I'm not doing a sales pitch. Make up your own mind, but I've found the Free version of the prog to be perfectly adequate to my needs.

Keep doing, keep trying, keep learning.

Briony Noh

Sorry, everything seems to be getting sent twice today.

bombidol

thanks for the reply. to be honest i wasnt even thinking of a light source i was messing with shadow and highlights. this was actually coloured in paint shop pro. but im getting trained in on photoshop by a guy who was trained by olyoptics in the next few weeks so im sure ill improve drastically.
The drawing was done quickly and simply so i could colour some big sections. Theres some bleed from the charactor into the bricks that i only noticed after i'd flattened it. but it was a rough attempt. ive got some more stuff that ive been messing with that ill get around to soon.
Theres some basic colouring jobs by Paul Duffy up on www.mahbrain.net if you wanna check em out. Hes the guy who worked for Marvel and was trained by olyoptics.

bombidol

theres one or two of his quickys