Super Heroes Inc.

Ok, so this is my last post before I call it a night and head to bed. So, I was thinking after I made “Goldenman” that I wonder what would happen if I took a West Parker comic and did Live Trace on the cartoon, so I did and it worked really well, it did however convert the image to black and white which wasn’t so great, but then I was like, I’m going to have fun with color. I did my best to match up the image to what I wanted it to look like in Photoshop, but then I pulled up “Live Color” which allowed me to really have some fun moving around the color wheel while watching the effect it had on the comic that I had just colored.

Thus, here you go; and goodnight!

While I have only been playing around with what the computer can do, I can say that I don’t know if this illustration will end up playing into any character development in the story’s plot, however I felt like it should be showed off.

I included the original sketch that I showed on an earlier post, now this has only been done with a few hours or studying Illustrator… I best be hitting the books so I can get real good at this.

With my other cartoons I have always wanted to go with a super deformed look, simple, and easy to draw for a quick turn around of a good comic. With Super Heroes Inc, I’m wanting to go in a more ideal image style, much like the comics of today, I’ve been practicing thanks to a few helpful books. 

The Images you see here were some of the images that I practiced with. I took the steps that Andy Smith showed me in his book: “Drawing Dynamic Comics” I then went and inked the images with some drawing pencils that my girlfriend gave me for my birthday. 

The next step was I scanned them into the computer.

In photoshop I really only scanned the images, but part of my goal is while I want to hand draw the comics, I want to ink them and color them using Illustrator. I haven’t used that program much, but what I’m finding is both exciting and confusing. I’ve picked up a book that’s going to teach me the basics, but I also like playing around with the images themselves. I imported these images you see here into Illustrator and went to down. In fact, I’m trying to export the image now, but it’s taking it’s sweet time. Hopefully it will finish and you will get to see what I have done. 

Following some advice that I got from Max Riffner’s website I found out that you can import a file as a template and then set the opacity to 50% which makes life so much easier when inking the images you drew. I’m thinking that once I get better in Illustrator I might try it for my other comic, West Parker, but right now there is no telling.

After quitting Illustrator and starting again, I figured out what I did wrong to make it take so long to render the image. So I give you a mix of the image, as well as some color that I applied to it.

The lines are cleaner thanks to Illustrator, and while I’m just playing around with the color, I can see a whole lot of options opening up. This should prove itself interesting.