The Iconoclast
I am extremely impressed with this. Could you tell me more about your digital inking technique?
Another question I want to ask is in regards to the slightly blurred, dream-light, almost "glow" effect of this lineart. I see it in a lot of digital work, but do not understand how it is achieved. How did you do that?
thanks for the comments everyone, it's great to be able to work on my own again instead of doing concept work for some big corporation.
kheleksul is right in using gaussian blur for the dream-like appearance (i use photoshop cs2). what i did was flatten the piece so the girl was on one layer, then i duplicated it and kept the copy on top. i went to filter -> blur -> gaussian blur and messed with the settings on how blurry i wanted it to be. another extra thing i do is that i play with the layer settings and change it to overlay, or which ever one you prefer. i like overlay because it makes my darks darker and my lights lighter. and to have a little more control on how much i want it to be blurry, i right click on the gaussian layer and pick 'blending options.' then i mess around with the bars on the bottom, especially the first bar. the little arrows on the bottom shows on where it'll start blending, and if you move it up and down the bar you can change how much you want. if you hold alt while you're doing that you'll split the little arrow into two if you want to able to pick precisely how much blurriness you want.
my inking is a little bit different in terms that i don't use the pen tool to do my lines. i'm pretty picky in how i want my lines to look so i normally go for the hard round brush (100% opacity) and have the settings on it be on shape dynamics with the control on pen pressure. so then depending on how hard or light i press my pen on the tablet, the wider my lines will be. another thing i also do is zoom in if necessary to the pixel level if i want my lines to be especially clean (with the eraser on 100% opacity also a hard round brush).
i'll normally work in only black and white when i ink, and then mess with it after i'm done. the gradients i used for her was really simple; i locked the transparency on the girl layer (the checkered box looking icon in the layer window) so then i can play with the colors without having it go outside her outlines.
it's a little bit different than with most people who use vectored lines...but i like doing it this way because it gives me almost complete control on how i want my lines to look with minimal computer assistance. deep down i'm still a trad. artist at heart and i enjoy doing this and having it look the way i envision it.
