Here’s the full process post for yesterday’s intended daily practice piece, started shortly before midnight, worked on intermittently, and finished this afternoon. All images are clickable for much larger versions.
In this case, I wanted to try out a new trick that Rooth shared with me for pulling the linework out of of an image that had been brought from Manga Studio into Photoshop. I opted to do something a bit more cartoon-stylized, and didn’t want to fuck with the feet, so I just worked under the auspice that something would be in front of them.
1) Linework, via Manga Studio, cleaned up in Photoshop.
2) Ported to ArtRage, did a quick paint-in of the background (under 2 minutes, as it wasn’t important).
3) Did a quick, rough render of the foreground.
4) Painted in figure color underlayers.
5) Subtle figure color tweaking/cooling via various layer types and opacities, with selective erasing.
6) Painted in face. More color tweaking/cooling.
7) Dropped face opacity to bring in linework subtly from underneath, and to soften the face a bit. Painted in midground.
8) Added various quick details to the foreground. Fleshed out face and bodysuit interior.
9) Ported it back into Photoshop. Used a mix of filter, overlay-type, and varied opacity layers of the image to help push/pull the depth and detail, with selective erasing.
10) Rendered in figure shadow via varied opacity black layers and a little bit of varied opacity mulitply.
Finally, I brought in a copy of the post-filtered, pre-shadowed image at a 13% opacity over the top, to soften the shadowing a bit. Drew in some quick lights inside the headgear/helmet, tweaked the in-helmet lighting, and called it "done"
Roughly 5 hours. More than I intended, really. At the point that I finished it, I was a couple of hours past the time I’d planned on investing in it, so as far as I was concerned, I was done. Lighting/shadowing is nowhere near perfect, but for a practice piece, I’m good with it. Aside from the linework being done in Manga Studio, this is all raw ArtRage with Photoshop finishing. No photo aspects pulled for texture or anything else.
I need to do some minor cleanup on the ones from last week, and then I’ll post them. Later this week, you’ll get a post on a relatively unknown, free piece of open source graphic/art software.
Time to make the donuts.
