Hindsight

I’ve been playing around with Manga Studio, which is a drawing program specifically tailored to drawing comics. It’s got a lot of crazy features, and I’ve barely scratched the surface, but here’s a quick inking test I did. The pens have a nice feel to them, and this is drawn with vectors, so it’s resolution-independent and fairly easy to scale or manipulate line-by-line.

I finally got around to watching the last POTC movie. The plot and editing were a complete mess, but of course it was visually very cool. I drew these in OpenCanvas 1.1, which is a fabulous freeware drawing program. It’s not very feature-rich, but there’s a lot of control over the behavior of the pencil/pen tool, and I think it gives better results for digital “inking” than any other program I’ve used. I tried coloring the shot of Geoffrey Rush with both OpenCanvas and ArtRage for comparison.

I forgot how neat the Harvard Museum of Natural History is. Or to be more precise, I forgot how FULL it is. I remembered the awesome glass plant collection, the mineral room, and some cool fossils. But the collection of animals is MUCH bigger than I remembered. It’s a shame that a few of the large mammals are literally coming apart at the seams, but they have some really awesome dinosaur skeletons. Here’s one example, the Glyptodont.

(ink + Photoshop)

Just playing around with more techniques for digital coloring.

I’m not quite sure who these two guys are, but they may show up in a story at some point.

(ArtRage and Photoshop)

As part of my practice drawing horses and painting digitally, I did this Celtic gladiator piece:

Mustn’t leave out men’s fashion, by which of course I mean James Bond. This was done with Photoshop and ArtRage.

I don’t like this one as much as the girl with the coat, but I’m still enjoying this technique for working with ArtRage.

I’ve got it into my head to do some kind of fashiony illustrations. Why?

1. It’s something completely different.

2. I’m messing around with techniques, some of which seemed to evoke this sort of subject matter.

3. It involves pretty girls, which (as a subject for drawing) is a weakness of mine in both senses of the phrase.

Here’s one. This was done with ArtRage.

The dramatic lighting went away while I was working, but the colors still came out okay, I think. This was done with ArtRage.