…Ahem, sorry Outkast reference.

Well kids, I’ve had an interesting week.  How about everybody else?

I didn’t have much time to get around to working on Cole, but when I did I was able to put in a great deal of work.  We stopped last week while I was still working on finishing the lineart inside of illustrator.  I hadn’t even touched Photoshop line-editing and coloring yet.  It was all still a bit rough around the edges, literally.

Well, I decided to play around with the lines a deal more by editing the various line-weights by selecting the major parts since, my design process usually involves larger body parts editable for easy line access.  Once I was finished with that, I exported it into a PSD file at around 500 dpi.  I like my work “XBOX huge.”  It allows me to get all up in there nice and deep.  Yeah, I said it.  Once I exported the lineart, I popped it into Photoshop and began cleaning up some of the lines, erasing various extra lines that I didn’t want inside of the piece and trimming down lines that were essentially creating tangents that were obscuring the overall image.  The result was below:

If you look closely, there were some subtle changes to the original lineart as  suggested.  I gave Cole a grimmace instead of the weaker smug appearance.  I also placed the line-art onto a blue background in the preparation for adding flat colors.  I used the blue background because that blue would be the main color I wouldn’t be using for anything else and incase I leave holes in the image, the blue allows any of them to been seen ensuring that I fill all if not most of the line-art with color.  I’ve been doing it for years, and it keeps things tidy.

After I laid the lines down, it was time to lay down the flat colors.  Since most of the colors Cole was wearing were either CG images or heavily post-processed imagery, I found it a tad bit difficult to get the colors of Cole’s outfit.  I figure I did a well enough job.

Once I laid the flat colors down, I had to take a break from it for a while.  A decent amount of work goes into popping the colors into place, and believe me the Paint Bucket DOES NOT work as well as one would imagine.  Upon my return I began to insert highlights and shadows via the Photoshop pen-tool.  The pen-tool within Photoshop work pretty much the same way as the Illustrator pen does.  Except its in Photoshop!  Whodathunkit!

The images above show the different statuses of the project when I was simply adding cel-shaded highlights and shadows to it via the aforementioned pen-tool.  Some of the shadows I simply drew in by stylus and airbrush.  My main concern was placing the right amount of lighting without drowing the image colors out or making things look outlandish.

Once I finished the highlights and shadows.  The fun part arrived.  That really wasn’t all that fun.  Wait, I take that back it wasn’t all that bad at all.  I decided to add some modest lightning effects around Cole’s arms and waist in the post process.  Since I don’t really have the process images for that part since it was on the fly, I was actually very afraid to try it at first, I’ve got the final images down below for what I churned out.

One image I added a blue filter in front of everything, and I sort of enjoyed how it turned out.  The image below is the image unfiltered.  I would upload larger images so you could attempt to appreciate the detail that went into what I did, however WordPress hates freedom, and promotes terrorism and doesn’t accept files of a specific size at the moment, I’ll probably end up offlinking the files to my site after a while in case anyone was interested.

Sorry to keep this so short kids, but Daddy General’s got business to attend to.  I’ll catch you kids next week!

Out.

Ever had one of those days when you’re at work delivering packages on your bike, and some guy calls your mobile to tell you to open up his package for him, and you accidentally end up annihilating part of a city?

No?  I haven’t either.

This poor guy did.  Only he woke up with awesome electrical superpowers and placing the city in which he lives in a state of national quarantine.

I'm Cole, I blew up half a city a few weeks ago. How do you like me so far?

Cole is the Protagonist in Sucker Punch’s new video game released titled, “inFamous,” on the Playstation 3.  I ended up buying this game because of a handful of videos I’d seen a a week or two  prior to its release.  I’m normally not as impulsive to purchase games like this.  Usually it takes a good deal of deliberation beforehand.

Or not.

The game is pretty much in a sandbox-like environment where you travel around the city completing various missions in order to clear your name for ultimately destroying part of Empire City.  The game uses a karma system that allows you to make good or evil decisions throughout the game altering the way some of your main offensive abilities work and ultimately affecting the ending of the game.  It’s not an innovative game mechanic by any means, but it at least guarantees a second playthrough.  Which I figure I’ll be doing in a week or two since I’ve completed it as the obligatory nice guy.

Since this isn’t a game review, I was a bit inspired to try and sketch up some fan art for the game.  Cole as a character was made to feel like an every-man, given either the responsibility of saving Empire City or ultimately controlling it.

Jazz hands, baby!

So I tinkered around with some ideas and I came out with this.  It feels a bit uninspired, I know, but I created it while I was imbibed, so I was pretty proud of myself.  I realized that I’m horrible at creating detail when I’m already drawing small.  This image was actually 2.5-3 inches in height on paper.  I didn’t start big at all since I’d be working on an infinitely larger scale in Illustrator.

So far, I’ve gotten the piece laid down with some lines in Illustrator.  I’m going to tinker around with more line-weights and get things the way I like em.

The real challenge of this project is going to be coloring it.  I’m not sure which style I want to take, and if I want to do anything experimental with the lines themselves, or even do away with them altogether.  I was planning on adding the obligatory lightning effects around his hands and lower-legs later on in post process in Photoshop.  I’m probably not going to keep the lighting-like lines around his forerams at all, since I placed those lines on a separate layer altogether.  I’m actually looking forward to completing this, unlike most of the stuff I create.

Next week, I should have this bad boy cleaned up and colored in some form or fashion.

Catch you on the flipside…. Console General, out.