Sunday, August 14, 2005

Icons - part two



One of the projects I've been working on lately has been a big ol' pile of icons. Meaning: Lots and Lots. More literally: A gajillion.

It's been fun, I'm getting some good practice doing things start to finish digitally, since no time to bother with sketching on paper and scanning and all that nonsense.

Quick process: rough sketch on one layer, once that's kinda worked out, I drop the opacity pretty low, then on another layer do a rough tracing. Under that sorta nice line drawing, I block in colors, some quick shading. I might do a little coloring to the line layer, and then I merge it all. Then I clean it up and add details, working on it more like I used to paint with acrylics. Haven't been using any fancy brushes or anything, just the defualt psd ones at varying levels of size and opacity. I did have to reset my Wacom tablet to a firmer pen tip setting though, to get a little more control over thick and thins.

The cats and girl probably took me about an hour and a half each start to finish (at 600x600 dpi) which is still a bit too long. (Duck I think was under an hour.) I'm spending a bit too much time fussing with the details. I'm hoping to get these things down to a half hour/45 minutes max. This week I'm supposedly going to get a nice demo on working in Painter, so we'll see how that goes. Kinda excited about it.

3 comments:

Marsha Loftis said...

These are adorable. My daughter is also a digital artist.

Mralebrije said...

very awesome work, painter is a freat program but very dificult and time consuming for illustrators working in photoshop, but at time you understand layers and customised brushes you will loveit
saludos from mexico
oscar carreƱo

Kactiguy said...

Icon-o-riffic! But are you done yet?