A collaboration between Dianne Hernandez and I for fun.
Tool: Adobe Photoshop (10 or CS)

It started with me posting a blog entry on a on-line community, looking for coloring task as a warm-up. Dianne approached me with the pencil drawing of one of her original characters, which she already colored using vectored-based technique. She would like to see how others would interpretate it.

Her color version is very nice, stylish and sleek. However when I first saw the drawing, the first think that came to my mind is “exoticness”. I decided that I would go for bold colors and strong contrast.

My first step is enhancing the contrast of the original drawing, making it easier to read:

I adjusted the drawing’s colour in curve to make the line red instead of black, and set the layer mode into “multiply”. Then I open a new layer, placing it under the drawing layer, and do a quick gradient job to decide where I’d be going with the overall tone.

Once the decision is made, I merged the two layers, and the resulting layer would now serve as the underpainting.

I proceeded by adding different color of lights to the overly dark area.

The lighting is roughly decided. I than started painting in the base colours. From time to time, I would open a new layer in “overlay” mode, and filled in some gradient at various area. I also used adjustment layers from time to time to achieve the desire contrast. At this stage I was not worry about the details. I just wanted to get the colours the way I wanted them to be before I went further.

When I think I liked the colours, I proceeded to add in or fix all the details according to the colour and lighting I decided.

One useful tool here is to use the vector tool to make precise and clean mask and painting with the mask on. The edges would be shaper, which would make defining shapes easier.

Please click on the thumbnails to view the details in the orignal resolution:

The piece ended up with a totally different look to her original color design, but I’m glad that both Dianne and myself were very happy with the result!

Posted on Saturday, November 24th, 2007 at 8:48 am under Features
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