From draft to final art. PART THREE: Editing and Colouring

Are you still with me? Remember the fishies? Good.

Righteo. 

Step 3 A. Edit dogdy bits of your drawing by directly moving the little blue dots mentioned in the last post OR.....use a drawing tablet to re-draw over the image.

I use one of the tablets pictured above. It plugs into my MAC, and has a special electronic pen. 

I create a new layer in Illustrator, above the original art, and just draw over any dodgy bits. I'm still learning to use it, and find Illustrator's lists of brushes really limiting, but it does an ok job for little corrections.

Step 3 B. Once I've got my black and white artwork ok, I then save this file. (I'll often spend lots of time colouring my work and then find I prefer the B & W version, so it's really important to keep the single colour version).

For an image like this, I mostly colour using Illustrator's bucket tool. Choose "Live Paint" under the "Object" menu. Then use the little bucket tool.

As a general overview, I'm not completely happy with how this little project is going.

The colouring is taking a long time. Lots of teeeny liiittle scales to fill in. And I'm not sure if I like the blocky, one shade tone of using an auto-paint. I suspect printing the image out as B & W, and then hand-coloring it with water paints would produce a better final result.

So Step 4 may well be titled Go Back to Step 2. Which is why the hourly rate as an artist is so crap, I suppose. Lots of Go back. Lots of Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

It's loads of fun, but.* Which is why Step 4 isn't Give up this phiffy phaffy fartsing around and get a real job. Not yet, anyway.

*Putting "but" at the end of a sentence is an Aussie thing. 

Crass? yes. 

Strangely appropriate at times? Yes.