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— Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Monday, November 1st, 2004
I'll have some more material tonight after work; for now, I'll talk a bit about the technique I used to produce last entry's drawing.
I started by drawing the foreground characters, using a basic sketchpad and a standard, unsophisticated and cheap Bic mechanical #2 pencil. Aubrey and Davan were drawn on one sheet, and PeeJee and her captives on another. I originally planned to draw full figures but decided to leave them unfinished below the knees and crop the final image accordingly; a compromise spurred by laziness, lack of skill and being behind deadline. %?)
I made the sketches using several cartoons from Something Positive and a Google image search as a reference; everything was drawn freehand and not traced.
Once the sketches were complete, I scanned them into Adobe Photoshop and adjusted the contrast to darken the pencil lines. I had to balance things so that the tones in PeeJee and Aubrey's burglar outfits did not become too dark. I then masked the figures so that the white background of the image would be clipped off outside the boundaries of the figures - this was to let me place the figures on top of a separately drawn background without an awkward white rectangle messing things up.
I then brought the images into Adobe Illustrator and drew the machine as a background, using separate layers with transparency to create foreground images such as the glassware that passes in front of Davan's hand.
I'm working on a good method to color the art; I may wind up 'inking' the outer lines in Illustrator, then doing the coloring in Photoshop. I'll discuss the process here when I do it.
I'll add some Bune related material later tonight... Until!
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