#atowncalledbedlam

I might still go back and color the other two. It’s just that it ended up being a bit more time consuming than I had originally thought. I opened this post with me saying I needed to get the source files from Dil before hand, and here’s why.

Dil has a light touch with his art. This is a style, not a shortcoming. When he’s not expecting something to be colored, he’ll leave open lines that help attribute to his sketching style. I personally enjoy it as its kind of interesting how the mind completes the line for us. We hardly even notice the lines unless you end up coloring for the guy for over a year. But that’s not hard to overcome. You just complete the line with color and fill in the rest.

Well, the issue came more for me wanting to change the line color from the light blue to something more show accurate. A darker hue of the colors they contained. Well, Dil’s sketching brush has some soft edges to it so every time I tried to delete all the white it would alias (make blocky lines) the sketch if not outright delete some of the lines. It didn’t look good, and what’s the point of coloring Dilarus’ sketch if it doesn’t highlight his wonderful line work?

I tried a bunch of different ways to get it to work. None of the quicker ways were working, so I had to go with the slower rout.

Putting the original sketch as a Multiply Layer keeps you from killing the lines when you color over them, but it will also kind of blend with them as well. Above is the original blue lines, but coloring them with the body and hair colors made them dark enough to seem like a black outline instead of a clashing blue one. Of course this meant carefully covering the edges by hand instead of using the myriad shortcuts that digital art provides us.

Of course it’s likely he has the layers separate in the source files rather than the .jpg that I ripped from the site. It would have been quick and easy then. Welp, that ones on me. Another learning experience, no?

I love these character’s of Tri’s. Erica is the big pone, Pebble is the little one. There’s a story behind these two, but the end result is a adorable duo of a strong character with military training ending up as a surrogate mother as well.  Too really cute to properly explain. As with the other posts, I did end up coloring this one, but I made a large amount of mistakes. Finally, after learning about everything I could about what I did wrong and what I could do better, I called it good and decided to move on.

This taught me how important it is to work with a base color. even if it’s pure white. Relying on the aesthetic of brushes will just end up causing pain in the when working with a piece like this. It doesn’t look horrible, but see… I tried making a background. 

This is what happens when you have no idea what you’re doing. I couldn’t make it look like there was depth. The layers were screwed up so there is horrible cohesion between the bad color choice. I tried to help things along by adding a white ‘halo’ around the characters but it did little in distinguishing them from the background. Even the halo, I found, should have been a brush instead of an eraser. And the soft brushes I used for the base color wasn’t doing me any favors. The trick with the halo works for @meetthepones, in case you haven’t noticed it yourself.