Holiday Cheer

nother part of gaming I hope to share from time to time is game development, something that I dabble in from time to time and hope to dive into much stronger in the future. However one of my favorite parts of game design is character design which stems from an interest in drawing that I've had as a child.

Eventually I would like to share with you some things I've learned about character design and share with you the development of a character that I've been working on for years. But today, I just want to share with you an exciting new tool I've received as a Christmas present from my mother-in-law. She got me this graphics tablet, which is basically a pad that allows the user to draw with a pen rather than a difficult to use mouse on the computer.

I've had some experience coloring my drawings using Photoshop and the Gimp before, one of my least favorite parts was having to draw the picture, scan it and then either having to find single whit pixels in the middle of black lines or having to retrace the drawing. When I draw th image directly on the computer I instantly have an inked drawing, which cuts out a whole extra step in the drawing process. Here is the inked drawing:

Another thing that I liked about drawing in The Gimp directly with a graphics table was that I could draw a light rough sketch on one layer, and then draw the image on top. This means instead of having to erase a bunch of pencil marked circles and guidelines, all I have to do is delete the layer.

Some of my past experiments with coloring that you can see on my website involved basically coloring everything flat, and then creating a highlight and shadow color for each color on the image. Recently I've been looking at a lot of american comic drawings, and was really impressed with their "airbrush" style coloring, which was actually using lots of gradients to blend highlights, shadows, and then to create brighter highlights and darker shadows on top of those. I think it makes the image pop more. Here is my attempt at that type of coloring:

Unfortunately, before learning how to use gradients to color I first tried using the airbrush, which is how I colored the hair and her black leotard. I feel it made the hair look more like a blob, and the black clothes look too shiny. But for the most part, I feel happy with the way it turned out. I was specifically excited about the way the highlights turned out on the bow on her back, and the way I was able to shade the back leg so the it literally looks below and behind her.

Looking at it now, I feel like I could have spent some more time lightening some of the highlights and darkening some of the shadows. I've also seen some images that have some really good examples of secondary lighting, that can add even more dimension to a drawing, but for now, I'm pretty happy with this first attempt and coloring with gradients.