But now everything’s out in the open and I can show some stuff off!

Like Vapor Trails!

Hit the jump for more info and a process article!

The site is fully up and running, with some new features being added over the coming months. I’ll be doing updates Tuesdays and Thursdays.

As promised, here’s the process I used to make the cover for chapter 1…

I started with red Colorerase pencil, like I always do. I love the color it gives and it’s really easy to wipe out when you scan in. Lately I’ve been inking with a Tachikawa G-Nib and Kuretake Manga Black Ink that I got from JetPens.com. I’ve been using mine for about 3 months now and I really like the line variation you get from it.

I scan at 400 dpi, then use levels and the Channel Mixer (Black & White w/ Red Filter) setting to sharpen up the blacks and remove all my pencil marks. I’ll generally do these on Adjustment Layers so that I can fiddle with them later if I find a problem. Next step is to create a layer mask so that I can color the outlines later (thanks for the trick Mr. Sheldon). With only the black & white visible, go to the Channels tab and hit “Load Channel as Selection”. Go back to layers, create a new layer, inverse your selection, and hit the Add Vector Mask button. Now you can paint all over the layer and it will only show up where your outlines are.

Next up it’s flatting time! In this case I just paint in with my tablet and then adjust colors later once i’ve got all the areas filled. There’s also a simple gradient in the background. At this point I’ve also got a white vector mask on the outside of the picture so that I don’t have to worry about overcoloring.

Now it’s time for shading…for some reason I did the background elements separately from the characters in this one. Not what I would normally do but it’s what happened. I selected a realistic brush with a lot of texture, set the opacity low, and started scrubbing away with colors from the gradient I’d dropped in during the flats. I also took this chance to color the outlines so that it wouldn’t stick out so much. That included whiting over the outlines to the smoke silhouettes.

Now the characters get shaded. I wanted to have a pinkish lightsource just offscreen to the right where Pancake is running, so I made sure to add a lot of lighting on his front side as well as a lower level on Jared’s face. The shadows are pretty much the same color as the darkest parts of the background. I didn’t really change brushes at all on this, except at the very end where I went over Pancakes face to smooth the texture out. Once that was done, I added a low-opacity Multiply layer of a texture from Bittbox, and lightened it up to where it wasn’t messing with the colors.

And that’s about it. I added text for the finished product and a cover was made. Hope you like it! And more importantly, go read the comic!!

To some MF’in FANART! I’ve done a whoole lot of drawing over the last couple of months, but nothing I can post right now. So this weekend I decided to put together some fanart for my favorite new obsession: Muramasa! I decided on Kisuke, since I haven’t finished Momohime’s story yet. I promise I’ll draw pretty ninja girls too.

As an added bonus and an apology for being away so long, I’ll walk you through some process. Since I am, however, entirely into instant gratification, here’s the finished piece first. You can hit the jump below if you want to see how I put things together.

Kisuke from Muramasa, lookin all stabby. Click for big!

Yay now for some self indulgence!

First off, I scanned the pencils since I always forget to do that before I go in with the ink. I keep mine pretty tight to the finished product so that I can remember what it is i was trying to get across when I started drawing. Red Prismacolor Colorerase are way better than those nasty old light blues and that is a fact.

I started with my nib pen and realized that the paper i was using bled when ink so much as got near it. So I switched over to a Prismacolor ink pen and just tried to vary my line weights. The nice thing about the red pencil is that once you’ve got your lineart scanned, you can play with Levels to make the black and white standout, then use Channel Mixer on the Black/White w/ Red Filter setting. It’ll pull the pencils out entirely and leave you with clean art.

After that I flatted in some colors. I actually flatted Kisuke in purple but I guess I merged his skintone layer onto the flat layer before I could save it so you’ll notice his skin actually has some detail on it. I wanted to keep his gi or whatever a single color so it’s all based on the same purple except for the stripe on the front. All his other colors are pretty much just the ones from his original game art. I threw a simple circle gradient in the background.

I did all the shadow in a blue that I made from the snow color and then Hue/Saturated down since it needed to be a little darker. It’s all done with a paintbrush tip with Opacity Jitter control turned on. I set that layer to Multiply and shadows appear! I started with Kisuke because I wanted him to be darker than his surroundings. Then I did a separate layer for the background.

Next I worked on the highlights and ground texture. The colors are pulled directly from the sky, drawn in with the same opacity-jitter paintbrush tip. I then went over with a very low opacity light grey to add some extra ambient light. Finally I stuck in a spotty texture on the ground in its own separate Color Burn layer so it would look a little more icy.

The final act was changing the outline layer to a dark purplish-blue because it looked radical. Throw all that stuff together and you got a ninja! bam.