Milestone 4

From where I last left off I was working on making the computer concept art of Tanwen. Below I separated the working process details in the Illustrator half and the Photoshop half.

Adobe Illustrator

After finishing the outlines in Adobe Illustrator I zoom in and check over them making whatever little finishing edits that I see fit from details like the eye size, lips shape, exc. While the style of the art I do is intended to be somewhat anime like I try to keep all the portions correct and realistic, I never cared for the cartoonie over sized eyes or the tiny triangular shaped noses and mouths not to mention the lack of muscle details in the characters' bodies. Proportions wouldn't be as big a deal if the character I was illustrating wasn't a human since you can always make your own proportions to your own races, why keep them the exact same as human ones after all? When making another race it should be very different and unique, say for example Tanwen was an elf rather than a human. Some portraying of elves look just like humans but with pointy ears, that's so lack of creativity in my opinion, why stop there? I like my elves ears not only pointy but long, give them thin and tall faces and heads, silk like textured hair, more slender and lanky like body builds than humans, smoother skin and body curves, larger eye proportions, insect antenna like eye brows, colored eye balls, (not just the irises but the eye balls as well), and sparkled skin that glows in the dark like what the Navi had in "Avatar". Anyways though that's all just an example and enough of my rambling on that. I separated the outlines in a few layers below, one for Tanwen, one for the tattoo markings and flames on the eye patch, (note this layer is simply just for guides to paint over in Photoshop), and one for the background.

Above, these are the separate layers I made for the outlines. Below is the result after all the layers are visible, as you can see, the outlines with Tanwen and the pilot seat overlap with one another though this won't matter in Photoshop as long as the layers remain separated, the coloring can be done in layers in between to hide this.

Below I made copies of these outlines in color figuring I'd experiment with it in Photoshop to see which would look better in the end.

Adobe Photoshop

Once the outlines are finished I make a separate save file for each layer visible then import them into Photoshop through File, Place and load the file. The outlines are now open in Photoshop as seen below.

Now comes the really fun part, (sarcasm), making lasso selections around the individually colored areas. Why do this?, so when it comes to painting the areas you don't have to constantly erase the little areas afterwords where the paint can easily overlap the intended areas and that editing takes a LOT of time when you've got numerous details and colors going on in the artwork. Fortunately doing all this on the outlines layers makes this much easier. There are several different types of lasso selecting methods available in Photoshop, personally I find the magnetic and polygonal lasso tools to be most useful for this approach. I usually keep making little selections then adding to them when selecting again until I have all of the intended area selected, doing a quick zoom in and subtracting or adding any little areas you might have missed out on before is always a good idea. Once the selection is done I save and name the selection as can be seen below.

Once all the selections are done and saved I start painting in the selected area and layer, it's best make lots of layers for this and keep them named and organized, I like to make a separate layer for each of the colors used. I like to get everything colored in with full solid hard brush colors before getting to shading/lighting exc., the results are below.

After doing some experimenting with the shading I ended up making copies of each colored layer, making the above layer of each colored section a darker shade or displayed as "Multiply" rather than "Normal" for the shading layers. The copied color layers intended for shading viewed in "Multiply" are displayed below.

From here I load the selections of the colored areas on the "Multiply" viewed layers and use the eraser tool with a airbrush soft round stroke to get that more blending feel with the shading and lighting and start erasing the shadowed areas where the lighting is intended to show. Think ahead of time where the light will be coming from and the direction it's facing and go from there. Below are some of the lighting and shading results on Tanwens' skin and hair in progress. The light is coming a bit from the left in the image so most of the shadows are shown to the right.

Below is a result of some further progress taking place, there are still some little details that need to be filled in before this is done but this gives off a good idea of where the final result is headed.