For today’s art column I had to try a new way of doing coloring.
So, last week’s Dude on a Walrus piece took about 6 hours. I really wanted to take it easier this week and try a style of coloring that takes far less time.
The two following pics I did took about 2 hours each. I focused more on lines and bright colors rather than a lot of minute details and lighting.
The first one is a popular enemy from Rainslick3, called in the game, “Epochosaurus.” (or Epochasaurus?)
You may recognize this character as Rex Ready, the Bond-esque time travelling action hero from Penny Arcade.
He’s awesome! So I drew him like James Bond. The way he should be. I also put him in the Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness Episode 3 game.
Since Rex Ready doesn’t exist in that universe, we changed his name to Chronosaur. Turns out there’s already a game company with a character called Chronosaur who does, happen to be, a time travelling T-rex. We and PA decided to change the name of our enemy character to Epochosaurus as a result.
But at PAX, someone from the company who had been working on the Chronosaur game came up to talk to us. She said that they were actually really excited to see a time travelling T-rex named Chronosaur in our game, and would have liked if it made it into the final version. It’s good to know that not everyone is ready to attack any other dev who coincidentally comes up with the same basic concept for a character 
Anyway we changed the name just to be safe, of course.
People love this enemy in the game though, so that was another reason I wanted to draw him!
OK next I basically tried a new style of drawing and coloring. I wanted to do this one quick so I redrew the bromide for Elona / Elonalina from CSTW:
Elona, aka Elonalina, is an arrogant member of the hero team that seeks to save the world from the terrifying monster, Cthulhu. You get her on your team in the Cthulhu’s Angel’s mode.
This pic is essentially a high-quality version of the bromide I did for the game…
I used a simpler, quicker drawing/inking style on this and did a much quicker coloring job. I was trying to see how quick I could produce something in a decent style semi-quickly. Still need practice though.
Anyway I’m still practicing and trying different styles and techniques. Hope you enjoy these weekly art columns I do!
-B
My browser only let me see the top of the first picture at first.
And let me tell you, the top of that Epochosaurus picture, when seen completely out of context, makes it look like it will be a picture of GIYGAS from Earthbound.
Seriously, scroll up until you can only see the first centimeter (or thereabouts) of the image. Your brain will fool you into thinking it’s a picture of Giygas.
Sure.
So generally speaking the process for drawing/coloring goes like this:
1. Rough sketch
2. Detail sketch
3. Inking
4. Base colors (flats)
5. shadows
6. highlights
7. minor details & polishing
8. additional special effects
With my previous drawing, Dude on a Walrus, it took about 6 hours. The main reason for this was that I focused heavily on details when doing the detail sketch, and a ton of time on shadows and highlights. I wasn’t going for realism or anything, but I spent a lot more time drawing in folds of clothing and details to the face and clothing; afterwards it meant I had to spend a lot of time putting proper shadowing and highlights on all the folds and details.
With these two above, I just drew the basic shapes and a few major folds in clothing, and then went with mostly flat colors and a few shadows.
For each of them I drew a more basic, more comic-y style to their faces and shapes. In doing so I used thicker lines, which make them look cleaner and nicer from a sort of comic style standpoint than thin lines. Thin lines were great for adding a ton of detail but that obviously takes a lot longer on sketching, inking, and coloring.* Drawing the sketch and detail using a simpler, bolder comic style requires fewer nuanced details,** and the inking takes less time because there’s less to go over. Inking with bolder, larger and more varied strokes gives it a nice clean feeling too without taking much time.
Coloring was simple on these compared to the last drawing. Coloring here I basically laid down a few darker shades of color for the shadows, then blended them where the shadows faded off. Same for highlights. In the previous, time consuming drawing, I laid down as many shades and variations of shadow and highlight until all of the details of the picture made sense; and then I blended pretty much all of them so it wouldn’t look overly sketchy with so many shades/variations of shadow/highlight.
I guess generally the difference that saved me time was drawing a less realistic and more comic style and putting in fewer but more focused details; and then doing basic coloring with blending focused on the important stuff.
* thin lines are good for simple styles too, just talking about what I did re: the previous pic
** you can have really detailed comic-y style pictures with varying and bold lines too
Hope that makes some sense!
Nice drawings, maybe you could go into a little more detail on how this different technique works and why it could be faster?
Grtz, Niels