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 Art tips and techniques, reviews and interviews from my studio. Archived here and at World Famous Comics. Comics 101 for 12/12/2002 Star Wars Gamer #7 - Anx Week Two: Digital Painting over Pencils - Rendering With Watercolors in Painter Part One Perhaps if this were an inked line drawing, I'd be going the Photoshop route more heavily with this piece. I would probably mask the line art and fill the white areas of the canvas on another layer with flat tones to then add rendering onto later. But for this particular piece, where I'm wanting to paint directly over my pencils (which aren't solid black line making the normal Photoshop masking process tougher) and allow the energy of my original line art to show through, I'm putting my faith in Painter with it's ability to do washes of translucent colors with the Watercolor brush on my digital canvas. With these washes I can create multiple layers of color and value like my more traditional painting process (whether it's watercolors or acrylics). As seen in the first example, I'm starting off in my initial layers using more subdued tones like the brown and green earth tones. For the 'blue' and 'yellow' Anx characters I'm blocking them in with more primary colors now even though I'll tone and layer these colors with more value later. This way, from this intial stage, they will definitely feel unique and will still separate from the other characters in the composition even much later in the painting process. I'm also blocking in the majority of the background including it's lighting now, working up from background towards the foreground of the composition. This process allows me more oppurtunity and freedom to tighten up the foreground edges of the characters later by painting over any adjacent background elements if need be. Also in this stage, on the blue and yellow Anx, I'm going in with a second, medium gray value of each color to start simple blocking of my shading and filling in any skin patterns like stripes or spots on the aliens. 
I'm primarily using the Watercolor brush here which is found in the Brushes palette. I'm able to adjust the opacity of the paint in my Controls palette and choose colors rapidly (alot more fluidly here than in Photoshop) allowing for large areas of basic color to be blocked in quickly. Also with Painter, you have alot more options to mimic traditional painting effects than you can in Photoshop. The fact that you have a variety of brush 'tips', not just 'sizes', to choose from and the ability to control the wetness and thickness of the paint, the paper grain of the canvas and work from alot more choices in the color palette gives you more freedom. In the next stages, I'm blocking in more rendering on the foreground Anx characters. With the left one, I'm using layers of blues and purple washes in the shadow areas which I plan to layer even further later, allowing for some translucent cool tones to 'bleed' through the shadows of the character. I like having light spots in my shadows since no true shadow can be devoid of light. Even the blackest shadows and tones have some semblance of light filtering through if you look close enough. In fact, I usually only paint with pure black tones if I'm going for a more graphic feel to my paintings, whereas here I'm striving for more pastel and natural lighting. The secondary, yellow Anx is being shaded with some translucent green and grey values in the shadow areas as well.   Next week we'll continue to look at the painting process layering more watercolor washes on this art in Painter. See ya next time, Joe Recent Columns:
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