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 Art tips and techniques, reviews and interviews from my studio. Archived here and at World Famous Comics. Comics 101 for 08/26/2004 Star Wars Gamer #6 - Battle Droids! Week 3: Digital Painting over Pencils Part One The trick to painting over pencils is to keep the drawing intact as much as possible to allow the original artwork to keep it's energy, form and details. I plan on doing this by starting off in Painter and building up basic washes of color using the watercolor brushes which allow the linework to remain intact while rendering. In some cases I like the grayscale pencil line showing through but for the majority of this piece I plan to recreate the link work by 'digitally inking' or painting on top of the line and refining it. I've opened the cleaned up line drawing in Painter now and will begin the first stages of coloring in that program. After spending a few hours blocking in the colors of the battle droids and the skin tones and costuming on the main characters along with weapons using the Watercolor brush at a medium opacity (40-60%), I decide I'm now finished with Painter for the moment. I dry the canvas via the Painter menu (Canvas>Dry), saving the file as a TIFF so that it will open in Photoshop since I plan on doing the gradients of the floor and smoke in the program. Once in Photoshop, I use the magic wand, lasso and other selection tools to mask off the areas that represent the floor and smoke. With those selections saved using the Photoshop menu (Select>Save Selection), I create a new layer (Layer>Create New Layer) behind this color artwork. I go to my Layers pallete and drag this new layer down behind my current color layer. This will only work if you first copy the art on your Background layer and make it a new layer as well (don't forget to delete the art on your canvas and make the background white or empty once your work is on a new layer). I then fill the smoke and floor areas using the gradient tool on my new layer (behind the color art layer) with my selections active (Select>Load Selection). I pick cooler tones for the smoke and floor in the middleground since I know I'll be using warmer, more vibrant tones for the background of this action piece and want the depth of fields to separate. With the gradients finished and inital blocking in of the battle droids and some of the characters completed the first step (Ex.G) is complete. I now have a confident feel of direction with my simple color choices begun in Painter and taker further with Photoshop. 
Now I begin to experiment a little. I feel like mixing the media, so to speak, of the two programs and decide to complete the rendering of my first character, Wertsnik, now using Photoshop. Even though I won't continue using Painter's watercolors now and using Photoshop's airbrush tool instead, I can still get away with keeping my line drawing intact. Remember that I adjusted and strengthened the line (making it darker, almost like ink) using the Adjust Contrast/Brightness and Levels feature earlier in Photoshop before I began to render. Now I can use my 'Darken' Airbrush tool to add value and more tones to the character over the basic flat tones I 'washed' in with my Painter watercolor brush. Using the Darken option of my Airbrush tool (Brush Options>Mode>Darken) I can apply paint of a darker value on top of my lighter value paint without disrupting my (almost) black pencil line. That is, as long as the value of color I'm now painting with isn't darker than the linework's value that I'm hoping to keep intact (for the most part). This is working out pretty successfully for me so then it's time for the Dodge and Burn tools to add highlights and shading to the character. I then select a very dark brown, almost black color, from the colors pallete and a smaller size tip for my airbrush (Brush Options>Size) and begin to paint over my pencil line and digitally inking my Trandoshan character (Ex.H). 
See you next week as we look into Part Two of my digital painting techniques for this illustration. - Joe Recent Columns:
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