A painting and inking test.

super.crunch.bravo

Hey, this a character I'm working on for an animation I'm currently making. I wanted to get some practice at digital painting, so I tired my hand at colouring her in.



Any feedback on my inking and painting would be greatly appreciated.

Greg Westphal

Hey man. Not sure where you're starting but not bad work. One thing to keep in mind when you're painting or doing anything 2D is the ability to create the illusion of 3D. Sometimes this is from line art, sometimes this is from value, like in painting. When you're asking for a critique on this you may want to either want to ask for one thing at a time because if I try to critique both at the same time my advice would over lap. So I'll do both of them separately this time just so you can pick which style you want to focus on.

I'm way better at line art so I'll start there for you. The base drawing you're inking over has some interesting forms but you're lacking any sort of perspective. You could argue that this is a front ortho but if thats the case I would need to see the other orthos to really turn form. You're also generally very heavy with your line weight and from the looks of this you started with a very small canvas. You can tell because you get some weird stuff happening with the pixels where it starts to become aliased around contours. When I do line art I don't draw on anything less than a 10000 pixel canvas and with a very small brush, usually around 15. Later I'll go over and add extra line weight where it needs it. Lastly for line art the key is to break up silhouette. You're not taking advantage of form changes in areas like where the legs are going into the boots. One of the tricks i've learned to help with this is to create a layer under my line art and fill the form with solid black. I ask myself "Does it read? Does it look interesting." If so I keep the silhouette. If not I try to push it more.

As for painting. One of the ultimate goals for painting is to actually lose the line. The quickest way to tell if you've painted something well is to drop out the line art and see if it holds up. If it doesn't you've probably either forgotten or messed up on one of the effects you get by having an object get hit by light. In your case it looks like you've applied a rough core shadow and a color. In order to push it to a higher level you could add AO, Specular, Bounce Light and Material but before you do you would really have to make sure your core shadow holds up without line art.

Last you could always leave line art in, obviously, but make sure when you do that it mimics the effect of whatever you're leaving out. I like to use line art as AO and my material pass. If you look at people who do cross hatching they are usually replacing painted core shadow with line. If you ever get the chance to check out drawings done on a valued paper and people using a white pen generally a white pen/pencil replaces painted specular. I've added a sketch I did recently with and without line art so you can see what I mean about using the line art for AO.

Hope this helps