Saturday, July 17, 2010

First time working with screentones

Yesterday I dared to try an experiment!
I wanted to do a complete ink drawing. I usually only work with ink on watercolour paintings and manga pages.

Here is a short description of the process:

I always make sketches with coloured mechanical pencils:

Pilot Color Eno

I bought them at the OCS Shop in Düsseldorf once and they are very useful!
Generally, I have got into the habit of working with colours when I make sketches.
With the lightest colour (in this case pink) I make the wire figure, with the light blue then the pose and with the dark blue or violet then the rough sketch.

It looks something like this:


Pretty messy and sloppy, but that's how I get the basic idea down on paper and smear it around a lot.
After that, everything is traced again, using normal printer paper.
This way the "sketch" is fixed before I get to the final artwork. You should always make several sketches of an artwork, that way most of the mistakes are eliminated.



My process is always quite long
Rough Sketch ► Sketch ► Sketch (Number 2, sometimes) ► clean Sketch► Lineart ► Fine tuning ► Coloration ► Highlights & PC clean up

Finally, I draw the sketch on drawing cardboard (190 g/m²) is sufficient.
The ink I use (Pelikan Drawing Ink) is REALLY great, it is completely opaque and doesn't run when it comes into contact with water! (I also use it for watercolour paintings).
I also use feathers from Deleter: Saji, Maru and G-Pen.



Here's the final inked version of the artwork:



But something was missing and I tried to spice it up with some screentones! (Digitally)
So far I've only used them for manga pages and never for illustrations, but it was fun! *u*
I have quite a lot of screentones (collected from friends XD) Since the motif is very cutesy and girly I've used the very sparkly ones:



I'm very happy with it ^--^ for the first try XD