Sam's Site

So, my mom and a couple of other people have been asking sort of ...what in general terms it is I do, when I

make my art,

and since I

was working on a new piece this weekend, I thought this would be a good time to

break it down and explain it,

since I could take .jpgs of

the process.

This new piece is a companion piece to an earlier thing I did called "Halloween Witch"; both works can be

found over on

mitsuhachi. Um. Also, I

should say right up front that this is pretty basic, because some of the

people who were asking aren't

much for computers, so.

So, um. First off, I'm working in a picture-editing program called photoshop, and using a wacom-tablet to

draw with. (click

that link for a picture if

you don't know what a wacom tablet is.) Photoshop is pretty much

what you'd expect. Like

Microsoft Paint on steroids.

Photoshop lets you set up things called "Layers" that basically... it's like doing the drawing on lots of

different sheets of

tracing paper, so that you

can mess with one part of the drawing without it affecting all of

the other parts, yeah? So I start off

with a couple of layers: A base layer of white

with nothing on it, and a

transparent layer that I do a basic gesture-sketch onto

above it. (again, picture a white sheet of drawing

paper with tracing

paper over it, but on the computer.) Right now, I'm just

blocking out the major shapes of

the piece, thinking about composition, and how things are

balanced in the big picture. This is

also where I

worry about any anatomy issues, which I'm not so good at, so I generally have to spend a kind of

obscene

amount of time on this stage, redoing things, since it's much easier to correct at this stage of things than it

will be later. This

time it was

only about an hour or so. For this piece, it looked like this:

How Misha Makes Her Art

Next thing I do is make this sketch half-way transparent, and do a more detailed, clean line-art over it in a

new layer. A lot of

the time, you'll notice,

I'm just tracing the outlines with a smaller brush and adding in

some details. Also, some things are

deliberately left out of this lineart: since this is

what you'll see in the

final drawing, I've either entirely left things out (like the

hair) or only vaguely blocked things in (like the

grass). These are

things that look better on their own without line-art. At this

stage, it looks like this:

Now that I have my line-art, I don't need my gesture-sketch anymore, so I go ahead and throw that layer away entirely.

Notice how I still have the

background layer and the line-art untouched? That's why layers are neat. The next thing I'm going

to do is add a whole bunch of new layers

underneath my line-art (so I don't accidently color over it, ne?)and lay out plain flat

areas of color, one layer per color. It sounds really simple,

cause it's basically just coloring inside the lines, and you can

always erase if you make a mistake, but this stage always seems to end up taking

FOREVER with me, as I switch the colors

of things over and over again until it looks balanced from a color standpoint. For instance, I spent about

half an hour

switching her skirt between different shades of blue before I decided it just didn't work and switched to yellow. *headdesk*

Yes, I am

that neurotic. Also, I've blocked in the hair and the moon and the grass (ok, I forgot to get rid of the line-art

blocking for where the grass was

supposed to be, but I got rid of it later. It doesn't really matter at this point anyway). After

all of that, it ends up looking like this:

Now all that's left to do is the shading, which is pretty straightforward, if kind of time-consuming. Basically, all of the

problems of color and

composition should have been dealt with way before you got to this stage (and if I missed something, I

usually just leave it, because it's a royal pain

to have to go back and fix, say, the set of the shoulders or whatever once you've

got the shading going.)

What I end up doing is just looking at it and saying, ok, here's my light source, here's my whatever-it-is-I'm-shading, light

travels in straight lines,

so where should be dark? I go over the dark areas, starting with a big brush and a not-so-dark color,

and progress to small areas of really-dark

color. Then I go back and do the opposite: knowing all that stuff, where should it be

lit up? And follow the same process, big areas of sort-of-

lighter color and small highlights.

Also, for things that didn't have line-art for it's detail, I've gone ahead and added that in here too, like the stuff on the moon,

and the grass and stuff.

Which is generally 1)scribbling 2)cursing 3)scribbling again and 4)repeating as necessary until I like

how it looks. And low and behold, four or five

hours later you end up with something that looks like this:

Yay!