There’s a reason he’s wearing a rooster hat.

So I got back to that work-in-progress during lunch today.

And of course by “during” I mean “instead of.” I really wanted to save the linework, but I’ve grown accustomed to getting rid of the lines during the coloring process, since they’re usually a guide and not part of the composition. Still, I liked how the work-in-progress from last month came out. I set Lock Transparency on the lines and painted them with whatever color was best for the regions they enclosed. Problem solved – in Photoshop.

That said, Painter can bite me. It was great for the first half hour of work or so, then it just started getting slower … and slower … and slower until I had to close and reopen the program. Not only that, I’ve been having a hell of a time getting both Painter and Photoshop to behave well in OS X with my tablet. This image here was ultimately done in Photoshop, though a lot of the groundwork was Painter and the lineart was Paint Tool Sai. I was too lazy to reboot and too engrossed to stop what I was doing and start up Windows in a virtual machine, so I made do with Photoshop’s weird tendency to add tails to every stroke of the brush.

Honestly, Sai outdid them both. One might ask, “William, so why not just work in Sai exclusively in Windows or somethingorother?”

Good question. I’m trying to avoid Windows 7 right now because Flicks won’t deactivate even if I’ve done so from the Control Panel – still gives visual feedback on taps, still wreaks havoc with stylus input on anything that isn’t the handwriting recognition window thingy, swears quietly in the background. That sort of thing.

Either way, I like how this turned out and don’t want to mess with it any further. I originally wanted to get a more detailed, painterly look, but after putting down the base fields and fighting for an hour (or more, even) with my computer, I’ll just let it stay as is. The next picture, I’ll try skipping lineart entirely and see how that turns out.

Did any of that make sense? Christ, I’m hungry.

[AND SO, A DAY LATER]

I take back my hatred of Painter and reduce its rolling boil to a low simmer. It’s another case of having to learn to work as the program wants you to work, and not trying to bend it to your will – and in this particular case, the program will resist by way of crashing or refusing to function properly. I tried another approach: work entirely in Painter, start to finish, using appropriate virtual media instead of trying to make my own brushes.

Which does work, I would think, because 11 includes that extensive brush creator. I couldn’t get it to work properly. That might be my fault, but it’s more fun to blame Corel.

Point is, Painter behaved throughout the admittedly short session and its media emulation is still one up over Photoshop. I haven’t yet bought the program, instead making use of its Fully Functional Free Trial (woooo), but have to wonder if it’s really worth $400+ on retail.

I’ll mumble about that in a bit.

A header illustration for a friend who remains semi-anonymous. Seminonymous.

This is actually the first all-color picture I’ve done in years. I made a few significant changes to how I did color in the past, or at least how I remembered doing it:

One, don’t rush. That seems obvious, but I’m a sketch artist by nature and I feel weird if I don’t draw quickly. Going slowly meant cleaner lines and more detail where it counted. Of course, moving too slowly with a light hand resulted in wobbly edges, and that’s why we draw with the arm, not the wrist.

Two, don’t put down what you don’t want to show up. I started out doing dark line work, but thought better of it and did the lines in whatever color they were going to contain.

Three, contrast. Go nuts with it. Do not go so nuts with gradients. Contrast makes things interesting, keeps edges sharp and looks fantastic if it’s what you’re going for. Gradients add that extra bit of depth to break up flat fields of color but will look like an amateur airbrush horror if overused. So: we are nothing without shade, and flat without gradients.

Now, I could have done this image in Adobe Illustrator and saved myself the problem of fuzzy edges. Unfortunately, after installing Snow Leopard and flattening the system beforehand, I didn’t have Illustrator installed and didn’t feel like waiting for it to download (LEGITIMATELY, THANK YOU, LAWYERS READING THIS). I ended up actually running Paint Tool Sai inside a Windows virtual machine with my tablet attached. Considering how badly I suck at gouache, it’s nice to know I’m not that terrible with its digital version.

I haven’t forgotten about my work in progress from a few days ago, so I’ll be going back to that with what I’ve re-learned by doing this picture.