Tag: Colouring
Is it good? Is it fun? I’ve been asking myself this lately when I’m drawing in my wee Royal & Langnickel sketchbook. Seems obvious but sometimes you forget y’know, drawing should be fun …otherwise, why bother? Anyway these were fun, not necessarily good but I’m enjoying sketching again… and colouring with Frenden brushes in CSP is always a blast.
I’ve been itchin’ to ink over some more blue line work since writing my Blue no more post back in April. I sketched up a quick marsh man in Clip Studio Paint and converted the line art to Cyan.
I printed it onto an A5 sheet of cold pressed watercolour paper (200gsm) and inked with a Pentel brush pen, Uni Pin fineliners and a Posca paint marker for highlights.
I got to work on this around 2pm and completed it in chunks throughout the day, approx. 2 hours altogether including quick colours in Procreate.
Overall, I really enjoyed inking over this blue line piece, there’s a freedom to it, knowing that you could just print off another page if you messed up the inks and start again without losing your original drawing.
I’m disappointed with the brayer texture and will probably need to look at using another ink next time or practice with the roller on different paper. The masking tape also damaged the page in places so I might use masking fluid or cut out a stencil overlay on any future attempts.
The Posca marker worked really well on solid black ink but tended to mix with the brayer texture and grey wash. It’s really difficult to get a good all-round consistent line with whiteout pens like this but it’s also entirely possible that I just didn’t allow enough time for the inks and wash to dry.
I pretty much gave up on the clip studio workflow to remove the blue lines after scanning, the results looked a little faded/grey and the background wash was lost entirely after edits. The technique seems to work best on clean line art only. It’ll probably need tweaked or approached from a different angle for washes/texture. One solution would be to scan the line art and then add washes/texture using digital brushes. Alternatively, washes and textures could be scanned from separate lightboxed pages and added as multiply layers.
I snapped some quick photos of my sketchbook to try out some Frenden brushes in CSP. I’ve been getting increasingly bored with digital drawing lately (just feels like a slog) but colouring on the iPad is still fun.
The search continues for my go-to textured colouring brush, y’know… the magic brush. I feel like I’ve come close to it on a few things over the years but I colour so infrequently that I can never quite remember the ones I’ve used or the combinations that have worked… I’m old.
I coloured day 2 of PJ Holden’s brilliant holiday comics for the craic:
I flatted the page pretty quickly earlier in the week before adding rendering over the last few days at work. I had about 10 to 30 minutes during my breaks and lunches giving me approximately 10 minutes per panel.
Kinda like PJ’s genius pomodoro technique (which breaks single tasks into 25 minute chunks) 10 minutes is a pretty perfect time limitation to set for a single panel, really keeps you focused.
PJ has collected his holiday comics along with a bunch of other strips on gumroad (it’s pay what you like) and I really enjoyed it!
I’ve uploaded my flats here if you wanna colour the page too.
Liam Sharp recently posted this awesome tribute to Deaths Head II and 90s comics on his twitter:
I simply couldn’t resist colouring the first page and settled on a muted palette with an added paper texture overlay to give it that vintage 90s Marvel UK feel.
I’ve uploaded my flats here if you wanna give it a go.
Just a wee colouring practice page cobbled together from old head sketches in CSP. I inked and coloured the heads individually spending about 20 to 40 mins on each until I filled the page.
PJ Holden kindly offered up some more inks for colouring on his blog and I couldn’t resist. Give it a go too why don’t cha, I’d love to see some more approaches to this sublime wee one pager.
The latest Colorist Jam is Captain America by Brent Schoonover.
I really enjoyed colouring PJ Holden’s work last month and I’ve been looking for similar sketches to practice on. Colorist Jam is always popping up in my timeline so thought I’d give this month’s Cap a go. Spent about 30 mins on it altogether (including flatting for Clip Studio) using a conventional palette with a texture overlay.
