Tag Archives: coloring

Sketchbook Sunday #27 – Requests

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Last week I asked you readers to suggest something for me to draw. I got  four suggestions via the comments, and I’m really thankful for all of the responses to my request! I also got two more from my private Facebook-friends when I linked to my blog post, so that makes a total of six VERY different challenges.

In short, here’s a simplified list of the suggestions:

  • “Killer coffee!” Literally just these two words…. If you read further, you’ll see in this post how I interpreted it. Submitted by Josh.
  • American lady tourist pointing at some goats in the open air area of the Norwegian museum “Maihaugen” at Lillehammer, saying: “Look at the kind of sheep they got here!” Submitted by Persijn.
  • Illustrate an abstract idea, more specifically a question like the kind you would find in language learning books. Examples are “Where do you live?”, “What’s your favorite color?” and “How old are you?”. Submitted by Brian.
  • “A juice carton going rampage around a city, (a big ass juice carton) and you can see some heads and hands in the air screaming while the killer juice goes “Blubb blubb rawwwr”. Submitted by Mariann.
  • “Moose in the sunset”. Submitted by Siri & Kurt.
  • “Something related to surfing and ukulele’s”. Submitted by Ole Bertil.

So, I had not anticipated this many requests. Again, I’m really stoked by the amount of responses, but this also means that I had to abandon my goal of finishing all of them by today. However, I’ve drawn three sketches/illustrations, and they’ve all been processed slightly different in regard to time spent drawing and coloring. Here they are:

1. Killer coffee
I went for really simplified coffee-related things and made them anthropomorphic. And they’re ninjas simply because ninjas are very good at killing… right? I think you can safely assume that this is also inspired by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (hence the weapons). This is based on a really small pencil sketch, inked with Sakura Micron pens, which I then scanned and colored with Photoshop.

 


2. “Typical” American tourist (click to zoom)
There are quite a few stories going around about tourists who’ve said something weird or remarkably ignorant during their stay in Norway. For example “When does the Fjords close?” and “I’ve been ripped off! We went to see the midnight sun, but it’s just the same old sun we’ve all seen before!”.

This is the illustration I spent the most time on of the three I’ve finished today. Both before scanning and doing touch-ups with my Wacom tablet. I actually had to partly redraw the man’s face, because he turned out to resemble how I draw myself (unintentional, of course). I also did some really simple shading with a single grey color.

3. Moose in the sunset (click to zoom)
This was a challenge in a few ways, as I had to illustrate a lot of things that I’ve never had a clue how to draw before. I also worked very small, with the surrounding frame measuring about 16 x 9 cm (6.2 x 3.5 inches). I only colored parts of it because of time limitations.

In an attempt to bring something funny to such a “classic” motif, I added the laptop and hinted to that Mr. Moose M. Bingley just updated his Facebook-status… (not that I think that this hasn’t been done before, because someone must’ve thought of it by now).
To the people whose suggestion I’ve illustrated in this post, what do you think? Leave a comment and tell me what you liked or disliked (or just say “Hi!”, if you want). I hope you enjoyed these, because there’ll be three more coming soon!

Sunday Sketchbook #24 – Marker coloring process

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I decided to try my hand at coloring with Promarkers again. I drew the lineart of this character a while ago, and then I forgot about it until I recently found it in a pile of half finished stuff. I try to keep my work area organized and tidy, but sometimes unfinished drawings just end up in the WIP stack and stays there for a long while…

Anyway, I took some photos along the way, thinking that I might as well share how I tend to go through the coloring process. Keep in mind that I’m a total newbie. I’m not saying that this is the way to do it, as I’m just documenting my own learning process here.

Step 1: Skin color

I begin with the palest skin color. Here I went with Vanilla for the base color, and added Soft Peach for her cheeks, elbows, knee-area and ears. I used Putty for some of the darker shadows on her neck and below the skirt.

Step 2: Hair color and skirt

I went with a rather cold color for her hair to compliment the warmth of the skin color. Her hair is a made up with a combo of Tea Green, Cool Aqua and a hint of Denim Blue. I also used Tea Green on the shadow part on the inside hem of her skirt. The skirt is colored with Pear Green and Marsh Green.

Step 3: Leaf, Eyes and green shadows

This step is pretty straightforward. I used the pale green named Meadow Green to indicate folds and shadows on her top. I also layered Meadow Green in combination with Lime Green and Leaf Green for the leaf (duh!). The eyes are colored with Amethyst.

Step 4: Details, schmetails

Not much new in this step, just some final touches. I added highlights in her eyes and on the cheeks with a white gel-pen. The eye highlights are almost compulsory in anime-style illustrations, but I’ve also seen some artists use highlights on several parts of the face and body, so I thought I’d try it out. I used Sunflower and Lemon on the various accessories, and added some more shadows with Ice Grey 1 on the “faux” leafy part of the clothes.

And here it is, the finalized version. Well, finalized as in that I’ve taken a photo, boosted the colors and removed the bakground color. As always, colored drawings like this looks best on paper (and I can just forget about scanning it with my sad excuse of a scanner). Any comments and tips would be most appreciated.

WIP – Collaboration comic

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Fellow artist and friend, Mariann Eriksen, colored the half-finished comic I posted before. I think the result is awesome. The coloring generally makes it much more interesting to look at, and her choice of bright colors and subtle shading is very energetic. I can recommend visiting her blog, MREdesign, where she shows off her creativity in many different ways. Among other things, she’s making a cute and charming children’s book about “Howard the duck”.

Colored WIP comic

I spliced the two pages so that it’s easier to get an overall feel of the coloring (click the image to view it in full size). It might look a little weird, but that’s because there’s supposed to be six panels per page, and the last two on the second page were intentionally left blank. It has been a couple of weeks since I sat down to draw this comic, and seeing it again now makes me want to draw a lot more comics!