Additional progress on the Something Positive piece. I'll describe another issue I had to resolve recently.

To the right is the character of Aubrey, showing the pencil shadings I had created in the original sketch, which are overlaying the colored shapes (flats) I've been drawing. Note that the flats no longer line up with the pencils; I took the opportunity to move things around a bit.

The issue was how to best recreate the effect of the pencil sketches while staying true to the intent of the piece, which is to create an accurate pastiche of the Something Positive characters.

Here we see the flats without the sketch. It looks okay, but it would be much better with some definition to give it an appearance of depth.

Here I started to use Illustrator's gradient and blending tools to replicate the pencil shadings on Aubrey's right shoulder. I can make arbitrary shapes of different colors, and create a set of inbetween shapes and colors to create complex gradient effects.

Before I got carried away with this, I reflected that such painstaking shading rarely appears in Something Positive, which is optimized to be a web comic. Images created without complex gradients keep graphics small in size and easily downloadable, and are easier and quicker to produce.

The compromise I finally arrived at - creating extra flats to show the highlights. It's quick, economical in terms of file size, and truer to the source.

That's all for this entry. Until!