Quick Anatomy of the Back

One of my good friends was kind enough to create and send me this brilliant guide to the Anatomy of the Back. We are not allowed to perv over the images... it's all in the name of research you know! Enjoy!

Jungle Boy: Part 3

The third and final installment. To eliminate the hard edges between colours I do the following in Photoshop. Using the colour picker, I pick one of the two colours next to each other (or hold down Alt while in brush mode to toggle between brush and picker). Now the brush gives me a value in between the two colours which can be used to blend them together. The next part involves colour picking and blending like crazy until the transitions between colours are smoother but still looks "painted" (image 1). Some more detail gets added to the background (image 2) and I am done with the small version of this image. The image is scaled back up to its original dimensions. Some pixelation will occur but I am left with a good guide to start painting on at a higher resolution. Now the real work starts. I delete the line art layer and replace it with the clean line art from the original file. The next part is hard to describe but basically involves lots of colour picking, blending and smudging to make it a lot smoother and remove any pixelation. More detail is added and working in other colours for reflective lights and shadows. Working in Photoshop also allows me to play around with different filters and effects. The final version will be posted soon...

Jungle Boy: Part 2

Next I need to decide where the light will be coming from and what my basic pallete will be. On seperate layers, I start defining the areas for the dark, mid and light tones using a hard round brush (images 1 - 3). No mystery here, just use common sense or some reference photos to guide you. The lighting does not have to be 100% accurate. The "cartoon" style of this drawing is very forgiving and you can get away with a lot more than you would be able to normally. Our eyes are easily fooled... Adding another light source also help to make the forms seem more "rounded". The reason the tones are done on different layers is so that I can easily adjust the colours for each. Just "Lock Transparent Pixels" on each layer in Photoshop, choose a colour and use "Alt+Backspace" to fill the layer until colour tones emerge that work together. I also play around with the "Opacity" slider on each layer to harmonize the tones (image 4). On the last image you can see I have added some highlights and tested some pinks and greens which I may later use to add reflective light and shadows (image 5). After this all the layers for the character gets merged to a single layer. So now I am left with only three layers - the background, the jungle dude and the line art on top of him. This process may seem elaborate, but it helps me to solve problems early which later makes it easier to work on the final large scale version. NEXT INSTALLMENT: Blending the character and adding detail to the background.

Jungle Boy: Part 1

The next project... a wild young man, before he was king. In an attempt to share my process, I will be taking you step by step through my digital coloring methodology. It is by no means cast in stone, in fact, it changes regularly. Each piece seems to demand its own approach. Maybe it will be useful to others, else it will at least be amusing...

	The pencil drawing comes first. This was done on A4 paper with a medium pencil and as you can see I still suck at drawing hands. The drawing gets traced with a black fineliner on a new sheet and scanned at 300dpi in greyscale. To get the line art pure black on white I adjust the values "Image, Adjustments, Levels..." in Photoshop, it also removes the paper texture. Next any unwanted marks are erased manually.
	Use the "Channels" tab and click on the "Load channel as selection" circle at the bottom. Create a new layer, invert the selection and fill it with 100% black. Deselect and go back to the original layer. Fill it with 100% white - you now should have a layer with clean line art and a seperate background layer. Change the file "Image, Mode, RGB or CMYK Color" and save it.
	Loverboys taught me not to work on a large scale early on. I get lost in the detail and take too long - but that could just be me! For this I resize the image and reduce it to a more manageable scale. On a seperate layer below the line art I create a base colour using a large round brush and trim it to match the outlines. I choose a basic palette for the background, and lay down a few rough brush strokes (brush set to 50% opacity). Save often!

MORE LATER...