#color separations

I found myself bored and listless over the weekend and after several hours of stressing over what to do, I finally asked a friend of mine if he had an uncolored line work. He sent me a penciled image of Six Gun Gorilla that he claimed was still rough and needed inks.

This artist's pencils are usually pretty polished, so if I'm truthful, there wasn't a tone of polishing it needed. In the inking process, I mainly traced his lines and cleaned others up where necessary. Most of the heavy lifting occurred between the belts and the boots. My biggest contribution in the inks is probably just the personality from the brush I chose.

I'd recently learned how to paint with old-fashioned color separations and was eager to use a set of brushes that would make the process easier. The result was four separate layers, one for each CMYK printing color. Here they are independently so you can see the differences in each.

And here's where we arrived with all of the colors aligned correctly:

One of the cool benefits of painting the colors separately like this meant I could easily mimic a printing registration error by dragging the layers slightly out of sync.

From there, I only had a few other effects I wanted to incorporate. Paper texture along with various ink blots, stains, and scuffs on the ink brought this piece home.

Digital flower porn collages.

Here is the cover to Unexpected issue #162. The final cover is in the middle. Around the frame in the corners are the results from each of the separate color plates.