Tutorials

This is a round up of the Demon Trio project, where I look back, review and make a note of things I have learned. Regular readers might know, I did a similar post on the Monster A Day challenge.

Before I get to things I learned, here is a round up of all the posts on this project:

1. Slug - Part 1
2. Slug - Part 2
3. Slice - Part 1
4. Slice - Part 2
5. Slice - Part 3
6. Screech - Part 1
7. Screech - Part 2
8. Screech - Part 3

Things that I learned during this project:

• Concept Study - Doing lots of study sketches helps a lot. This actually helped me a lot while I was workingn on Slice. References help in getting the artwork to be more believable, even when the scope is fantasy/fiction.
• Complimentary Colors - Use them extensively in the composition of your artwork. That too, painting over the complementary color of the target color of an area, makes it more interesting due to the color variation achieved.
• Details at Focus - Give extra effort in fleshing out the details of the area of focus. I did not do it too well, and was pretty late on the realization when I did this project. But I learned that you should not be detailing each and every inch of the artwork, it just tends to distract the eye.

That is all for now. Stay updated using KalaaLog.com feeds for more tutorials/projects/news.

• Software: GIMP or Adobe Photoshop
• Level: Advanced
• Subject: Demon Trio - Screech

In the last part, I had done some preliminary painting that established the color.

Refine Underpainting

I just continue work on it and clean up the different areas.
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• Software: GIMP or Adobe Photoshop
• Level: Advanced
• Subject: Demon Trio - Screech

In the last part, the concept was created as a line art and some amount of shading. In this part, I explore a bit of the color value. Separating color and value before adding the details helps a lot in terms of composition. This is a technique I have rather used repeatedly after my earlier study - Separate Light and Color.

Flats

I still am working on this in GIMP. I scale up the image before adding any more detail to A4 size at 300 dpi.

Using the path tool, I create the flats.

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• Software: Inkscape (or Adobe Illustrator)
• Level: Intermediate
• Subject: Chain Links

Illustrating vector art of chain and chain links is quite fun once you get the hang of it. The most important thing is to get the basic shape right.

Basic Shape

Getting the basic shape right is very important. Draw as many grid lines to assist you as required. There are basically two shapes you need to draw. One that is parallel to the canvas and one that is perpedicular. The parallel one is composed by subtracting shape 1B from 1A. (In Inkscape use Path > Difference from the menu). See to it that both the shapes are of same height and also that the perpedicular one fits into the hole of the parallel link.

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