My Digital Drawing of a Twitter Bird

I’ve been participating in MacHeist 3 this year (more about MacHeist). On completion of the latest mission you gained access to a copy of Scribbles by software developer, atebits. Atebits is also responsible for bringing the best Twitter app to the iPhone/iPod Touch, Tweetie, which I use and you should too.

I’ve made a promise recently to myself to start drawing more by doing a drawing a day. Now I haven’t kept myself to that but I do the best I can with the time I have. So I decided to test run Scribbles by creating my very own Twitter bird to enhance my little Twitter update in the sidebar of my Web site.

Scribbles is, in a word, AWESOME! It couldn’t be simpler to use. It very responsive and gets out of your way to allow you to focus on your art. It has an infinite canvas so you need not worry about page size. It has very well crafted brushes and the color picker is awesome.

Scribbles reminds me a lot of Brushes for the iPhone/iPod Touch which I’m also a user of that too. I highly recommend Scribbles. If you check it out please let me know what you think of it in the comments.

My First Digital Inking and Coloring

Honestly, I think this is not that great in terms of showing my skills but I think it’s a damn fine first go at digital inking. Especially, considering that I’ve always hated traditional inking.

I have a long way to go before I think I’ll ever be happy with my style but I think that’s true with any artist. If we were ever truly happy then what would push us to get better? Chocolate? Probably.

Thanks Brian for all your words of encouragement whether you meant them to be that or not.

Flatting Plugin for Photoshop

I was reading one of Dean Trippe’s Livejournal entries about how he and Jason Horn are working on the colors a new comic mini-series, currently titled The Division for Arcana written by Ed Brisson and penciled and inked by Damian Couceiro.

Sometimes a colorist will do what’s called flatting. This is where you quickly lay in flat color over the inked art. Then you go back and start adding the shading and details. Flatting is a great technique to help you work out color combinations and lighting. You can think of it as being somewhat equal to sketching or penciling prior to the finished inked art.

Dean mentioned that they were using a Photoshop plug-in to help them do the flatting. Of course, you are relying on a computer to pick colors so this is just a tool in your toolbox to help speed up the grunt work of flatting.

Leave a comment about how you may be using other tools and techniques to help you with flatting.

Spider-man: Colored

I forgot to post my finished coloring of Spider-man I drew.

Backpack for Fundraiser - Poster

This is the final poster design of the backpack I drew for the fundraiser. I blurred the text because I don’t like publishing who I’m employed with. Nothing serious, just a thing I have.

If you look closely at the soap dispenser you’ll notice that I added some liquid soap which was not present in the previous sample. You may want to click on the image to see a larger view.