CGTalk - Painting with Wacom

chewedon

07-26-2008, 11:38 AM

Hi guys, just a short question - when you guys do a full character concept art, do you draw the outline in black ink and then fill in colours on top of it ?

Currently that's what I'm doing, but the final result doesn't look very clean.

I see others paint using colours specific to the areas they're painting e.g. when they paint skin they change the colour to skin colour, when they paint clothes, they paint using colours that are on the clothes.

Which way is easier most of the time - to paint a black outline of the character then colour it in or just paint the colours as you go ?

I'm talking about painting with a Wacom not a real paint brush :P

Thank you in advance.

Lunatique

07-29-2008, 09:34 AM

Even if you are painting something that has no outlines, you'd still need to do some kind of a sketch--whether it's blocking in general shapes and lighting, or using brushstrokes (which would be similar to doing a line drawing, but a lot simpler).

There are many ways to skin a cat, and I usually do this:

1) Do a rough sketch (line sketch).

2) Fade that sketch layer to about 20% opacity.

3) Add a new layer. Using the faint sketch on the bottom layer as a guide and draw a cleaner drawing on the new layer.

4) Delete the rough sketch if no longer needed.

5) Fade the clean drawing to anywhere between 20%~50% opacity.

6) Add new layer underneath the clean drawing layer for the coloring/painting. Get overall shapes, values, colors blocked in.

7) Either flatten everything and just paint on the same flattened layer, or add new layers on top of all other layers to start adding details.

I have some step-by-step and tutorials at my site that might help explain things more.

chewedon

07-29-2008, 02:51 PM

Right, just the answer I was after :)

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