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 The latest art tips and techniques, reviews and interviews from my studio. Updated here and at World Famous Comics! Comics 101 for 08/15/2002 Star Wars Gamer #6 - Battle Droids! Week 2: Rough Sketch and Final Composition Design The following drawing is a rough sketch (Ex. E) I presented to my art director and Lucasfilm for approval. I really wanted to go all out and exaggerate the chaos and action and make it seem like these characters had such overwhelming odds against them. I also wanted to play up as much tension and excitement in this one illustration as possible. 
I started off drawing in the middle of the page making the heroes, particularly Mynnic and Wertsnik, the focus of the battle. I constructed the rest of the poses to draw the eye inward to the hero group since the most vibrant colors would be in their costumes anyway. Once the Jedi and the Trandoshan are drawn I began cramming in as many battle droids as possible, having them swarm the heros from all directions. By not showing every part of each droid it gives the feel that there are many more in the scene than acutally shown. Almost as if you can feel there are an endless number just outside the frame of reference waiting to ambush the heroes. Having the most dominant form in the illustration be the battle droid in the right hand corner helps break up the space and also work as a compositional device which leads the viewer's eye inward. This droid is actually the only foreground character with much of the action taking place in the middle ground. I planned to have the background only consist of the wharehouse environment to simplify it from the chaos and characters in the middle ground. I knew with the battle droids muted off-white tones it would offset them from the colorful main characters as well and add to the separation. The next piece of art is my line drawing (Ex.F) completed in pencil after enlarging the rough sketch via xerox and drawing over it on fresh bristol board using a lightbox. Since I knew I didn't want to ink my self this time out and wanted to paint directly over my own pencils I made sure the line art was especially tight to separate the many forms and characters in the scene. This process takes abit longer than my usual penciling technique when I tend to ink myself since in this case I wanted to allow most of the pencil line to show through the layers of paint. This way I could still see them and strengthen them if need be in the painting process. 
After scanning the line art (at 300 d.p.i in Grayscale mode) I adjust the brightness and contrast of the line quality in Photoshop (Image>Adjust>Brightness & Contrast and Image>Adjust>Levels) to make it look even tighter and abit more like an inked drawing which will only help me more when I begin to paint. Next week we'll look at the digital coloring process as I paint directly over my pencil line art using Painter and Photoshop. -Joe Discuss this column with me at my Message Board. Recent Columns:
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