It’s been a little while since I tackled something from @atowncalledbedlam. I believe the lesson from this one should be ‘always ask the artist for the source files’, but a part of me always likes to make these a surprise. There are three poses from the original sketch, and I wanted to color them all. I figured them to be pretty easy with my improved skills, but I ran into a problem on my part. I’ll get into it more down below. Right now, a brief summary.
This scootaloo is from some concept sketches for @southernbelleaj‘s current running comic The Only One. Dilarus has been one to advocate differing body types for these canon characters and has done wonderful things as a result. Giving our beloved cast more personality and depth without them having to say a single word. One of many marks that makes a good cartoonist which Dil aspires to be.
Original sketch and more writing below the Keep Reading line.
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’m still satisfied how this turned out. I want to see more of this style of scoots in color. I’ll get to the rest of them eventually.
