AK Illustrate

I've been on and off working on another neopets comic, and in it, there is a panel where characters are standing in the Faerieland Library/Bookstore.

I took a look at the reference material (And those butterfly wing railings), and decided this shot would be a good candidate for a 3D modeled, rendered, and re-painted background.

You see, while a lot of people use 3D models to trace over, I'm trying to go a little further and use rendered images as a base to then paint over. This is a common practice in concept art, and I think it could be very useful in comics and illustration as well.

Here is the 3D model

And here are the rendered pieces

These are- SELECTION FLATS - For selecting chunks of various editing for easier editing and paint over. These work similarly to professional comic flats, and can be easily achieved with Blenders "Workbench" render engine. UNSHADED COLORS - Colors with out the lighting so I can remove shadow and light from various areas. I do think I messed these up (They rendered too dark), but they still worked for what I needed. (I adjusted the values in post) SHADED COLORS - The shadows and light rendered with out lines. This is what get's painted over, and works well as a base for your painting. LINE ART - Rendered separately so I can easily edit the lines, since Blender Grease-pencil lines are hard to get perfect, and because we don't want the lines in the way of the painting. COMBINED - Mostly used for reference. Fun to A-B with your final image.

Here is those layers shown cleanly (Sorry the pink highlights on my custom Krita theme are like that. >_> )

Here is the layers after I did a ton of paint over work. (Behold my crappy labeling system and totally intentional typos.)

And here! Is the final outcome!

This isn't the first time I have tried this, but this is definitely, in my opinion, my most successful attempt, and I absolutely want to use blender more in my illustration and comic workflow.

The model took about a day to do. It took about the same amount of time it would have taken if I had drawn it all by hand, and now I have a cool model I can reuse! The actual painting took maybe an hour or two.