Goodbyes Kiriban Progress

This will be scrapped!


Man, I hate to do this.

I'm really not satisfied with how my coloring job is turning out with this. I mean, it's so bad that I am embarassed by my poor rendering skills, of which I had been only mildly ashamed of before. So, I will continue to work on it. I just cannot bring myself to post the version I have right now. I just can't. I'm so sorry guys! I know this sounds so pathetic, but I honestly didn't allow enough time for this final step, because I didn't anticipate how badly I would suck! There is a reason I don't take the time to add backgrounds to most of my drawings. I blow chunks. I spent I really long time planning out how this was going to be laid out (dozens of thumbnails and a few roughs) but I thought I could color it in a day or two. Ugh. How stupid was that?

So I feel really bad about not having this done by my deadline. Lowest of the low.

To make up for it, I've compiled pics of the piece in a few stages to show people how I work. I've gotten more than a few notes asking about my process, so here it is.

1. Really crappy pic, sorry! This is the piece roughed out in non-photo blue col-erase pencil. You can see that I draw through a lot. Kagome and Inuyasha are mostly complete, but Sango and Miroku have just been laid out. Those shapes are how I build all human figures. There's a circle for the head, the shoulder line, the hip line, leg lines with some sense of a knee, and then arm lines. I've never been one for the "box and cube" method, which is why my figures tend to look more illustrative rather than 3-dimensional.

2. This is the dirty scan. I've done the lineart with a 2B mechanical pencil and scanned the whole sucker into Photoshop. I tweaked the colors so that you can see the background that will eventually complete the piece. This is what all my drawings start out looking like!

3. This is the clean lineart. I've used levels excessively, as well as the "replace color" tool in Photoshop.

Well, that's it. That's how most of my drawings are done now-a-days. So, now you know. And knowing is half the battle.




Inu and crew are © to Rumiko Takahashi

PS: I'm still really sorry about being a louse!