|
| Inking, computerising and colouring
To demonstrate the process of converting my drawings into coloured, digital form, I will use the example of the Java sandcrawler.
|
| The interesting thing for me was how much the cartoons evolved from the pencilling stage to the final stage. Usually once I've pencilled a cartoon, that's it. However, this time when I started tracing the rough pencil drawings, I decided to add heaps more detail and make the poster a real feast for the eyes. The "Java Machine" is the perfect example. Here is a scan of the initial pencil drawing.
|
| As explained earlier, I pencilled the poster as 2 A3 pages stuck together and enlarged this on a photocopier to A1 size. I then traced all the individual bits and pieces of the poster onto separate A4 sheets (filling up over 20 A4 sheets in the end). I can't draw on any bigger than A4 as that's the size of my scanner! While tracing, I would often add little details and jokes that would spontaneously come into my head while drawing - this tends to add a lot of character and depth to the overall poster. Here is a scan of the inked original artwork - you'll be able to win this signed original artwork in the poster competition starting March 27 (see the What's New Page for more details on the competition).
|
| I scan in the artwork at 1000 dpi and use CorelTrace to convert it into Coreldraw vector format. This allows me to colour and play around with the cartoon in Coreldraw afterwards. I did this with every little character of the Sev Wars poster (when you have an A1 sized poster containing hundreds of different elements, this is a very laborious and lengthy job) and then placed each individual cartoon in a single A1 Coreldraw file. Using layers, I moved and pushed every little element around like a jigsaw puzzle until it all fit together nicely. Here is a sample of the finished Java sandcrawler.
|
|
| | | |
