THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Monday we managed to finish revising show 11 and I was asked to board show 10’s Couch Gag.  Once again, I’ve got a another crazy epic Couch Gag to do. It might as well be it’s own short film, it’s so long. This season is full of very long Couch Gags. Not sure why.

Tuesday I brought Dante to work with me. Our daycare was closed that day. Alesha took Elizabeth to work with her and baby Ambrose was taken care of by my brother-in-law.

Dante was a good boy overall. I had originally planed on dropping Dante off with my wife at noon, mostly because I thought he might be a handful. He behaved so well that I kept him and actually got work done too. I was very proud of him.

ART

(For those of you coming in late to these posts, if you want to read what my project is about, CLICK HERE to learn about the general world the story takes place in, and CLICK HERE if you want to know the story itself.)

Now that I have the drawing up on the computer, vectorized and inked, I started trying out style tests.

My first test was an attempt at a thick outline around the art.  I only got as far as the Sorcerers before I made up my mind that it was too much work and it didn’t look the way I wanted it too:

My next test was to add a black shadow to the drawing.  To be honest, I think I did a lousy job inking the drawing.  I put all the blacks in all the wrong spots. I should have blacked out the background instead of the characters.  Still. As lousy as it turned out, I found it very difficult to get the same effects I usually get with an actual brush.  I didn’t like the process much, so I decided I didn’t want to go in that direction anyway:

The test after that, was just to keep the lines I had and color the drawing.

At first, I was thinking I would use a self ink line, but then I didn’t want to re-ink the drawing all over again. I also realized that it would have been far more work than I really wanted to do.

I have very little experience with color and I had no idea where to begin.  I started coloring the drawing like I would have normally done it, namely, color everything the color it is.  The more I though about that though, the more I thought I needed to really think more holistic about it.  I thought, instead of using all the colors I could, I should limit my pallet and think about how the drawing should feel rather than the what color the sky is normally and what color apes are normally.

I decided to make the dominant color green.  Green was going to be the color of the Sorcerers. Why? Well it worked on Disney’s SLEEPING BEAUTY.

I thought green would work for a “strange magick” feel.

I’m planning to make red  Rob’s “I’m angry. It’s time for payback” color and blues and yellow where going to be the calm normal colors.  Since this particular drawing was dominated by the Sorcerers, I thought it should be green.

I started laying down the colors but I’m not done yet.  This is what I have so far:

What do you think?

By the way, all this work was done  using Storyboard Pro.

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THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Didn’t really get off too easy with the work load these last two weeks.  The episode I got put on a had a huge rewrite.  The entire 4th act was completely rewritten. My friend Eric was put in charge of revising that act but it meant that I had to revise acts 1 through 3. The revisions weren’t easy and now I have to work overtime in order to get the work done on time.

That’s two shows in a row.  I hope I don’t burn myself out.

ART

(For those of you coming in late to these posts, if you want to read what my project is about, CLICK HERE to learn about the general world the story takes place in, and CLICK HERE if you want to know the story itself.)

Alright, I finished adding tones to my drawing.  I didn’t follow the thumbnail sketch I was originally going to use. Originally I was going to make the background the darkest part of the drawing and have everything else be lighter.

When I did that, in the finished drawing, it had the exact opposite effect that I wanted, namely, it obscured everything in the drawing rather that let my characters pop out.  I decided to go a different way:

I decided the lightest light of the drawing was going to be the background.  The mid tone was going to be the mid ground and the darkest part was going to be the foreground.  The only exception to this rule was that I colored Rob’s hair and pants darker than anything else in the picture, that way, he stood out the most.

This had an unfortunate effect. Because I didn’t want to upstage Rob’s hair and pants, I couldn’t darken the foreground elements as much as I would have liked. This meant that the darkest part of the mid ground almost matched the dark tones of the foreground elements. In the end, I ended up having to live with it.

I added the tone directly over the line art I had drawn on the tracing paper.  I found adding tone to a drawing incredibly easy on the tracing paper.  It also erased like magic. No matter how dark I drew, I could erase it completely.  The one thing I found annoying was that it picked up pencil a little too well.  It was difficult not to make something look dark even using an H pencil.  I found it could match the darkness I got from using a 4B pencil.  The tracing paper made it difficult to control the darkness of a pencil stroke. It also smudged like crazy.

I was glad that the line work was done with Prisma Color pencils since, when I needed to erase any of my tones, it wouldn’t erase the lines as well. I’m generally happy with the way it turned out. There are some things I could do better and I’ll fix them in the next step. The next step being, digitally inking and coloring it using STORYBOARD PRO. In general, I think I’ve succeeded in making a decent tonal study that I can use as a guide when I go to add color to this drawing.

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A word about using tone.

I wasn’t taught how to use tone properly until much later in my career.  I went to a lot of figure drawing classes where we were taught many things.  Yet, for some strange reason, when it came to using tone, it was never really broken down. I think it was assumed that you just kinda knew what  to do, that you would figure it out on your own or that it just wasn’t important. My one teacher that was masterful at using it (Master artist, Steve Huston), never bothered to tell us how.  Meanwhile all the other teachers I had, didn’t know how to do it very well.    This usually caused everyone’s drawing to be well drafted but poorly shaded.  The student’s tonal studies always looked amateurish and  the edges  just looked like a bunch of smudges on the page.

Then I went to another school of figure drawing that had a very painterly style of drawing.  It used what was called the Reilly Method. THERE I learned how to use edges correctly. They went out of their way to break it down so that it could be done well.

Ever since then, I get annoyed when I see the smudge style tonal studies without the slightest idea that different edges exist.  Especially when I see it used by animators who think they know and yet have never been taught.

So here’s what I learned in a nutshell. You might already know this but if you don’t, it will be very helpful:

As lines can be broken down into three types (straights, “C” curves, and “S” curves), tones can be broken down and simplified into four values and four edges.

I’m going to emphasize edges but I’ll quickly sum up the four simplified values:

• White, light grey.
• Dark grey, Black.

Light areas in a tonal study consist of White and Light grey.  The darkest dark of a light area shouldn’t be darker than light grey.  Shadow in a tonal study consist of Dark grey and Black. The lightest a light area should get in shadow is dark grey.  As in all art, it’s not an absolute but it’s  a really good rule of thumb if you want your drawings not to get muddy or poorly unified.

Okay, now about the four edges:

In same way as drawing straight lines and curve lines together creates good shape contrast, having contrasting edges creates a much more pleasing tonal design.  The different edges are:

• Hard,
• Firm,
• Soft and
• Lost.

I asked my friend, teacher and coworker Paul Wee, if I could post a handout he once gave out in one of his figure drawing classes.  It sums up just about everything I wanted to say in one easy to read page:

The offending edge that tend to pop up in many artist’s work who haven’t been exposed to these edges, is the soft edge.  Soft edges tend to be used for EVERYTHING. I see it a lot in Photoshop drawings where only the airbrush tool is used to shade with.  It makes for a very muddy looking drawing.  Not everything you’re adding tone to is soft and round. Sometimes it’s a little firmer and sometimes shapes meet and come to abrupt ends which cause the edges to become very hard.

In my drawing above, I was trying really hard to make sure I was changing up my edges where appropriate. The figure drawing classes that I’ve taken and applied these edges in, helped me a lot in making those decisions.

Keep an eye out for the different edges and where they fall when drawing from life. It will give your tonal drawings a more designed look.

WEBSITE

If you want to see great tonal drawings, Paul Felix is one of the best examples.  He was one of my teachers and I didn’t realize that someone had put an unofficial website with his work.

CLICK HERE to see his amazing work.

For more comic and stories written by me, CLICK HERE.

If you like what you read, please consider signing up to my rss feed.

Comments are appreciated as well.

I also have a store. Click Here and check it out.

If you would like to have a text ad on my site, click on the red BUY LINKS button under the Archives list.

And while you’re at it, please Digg me too.

Writing this blog is almost a part time job for me. Tips are most welcome.