building a toolkit
Fucking around with some brushes. The two sets of strokes on the right are the exact same bristle brush, except with some Appearance panel trickery applied to the right-hand copy.
Most of the solid shapes are just pencil-tool drawn shapes with a fill and no stroke, and with Roughen applied in the Appearance panel. I think I probably need to put some kind of art brush on these things for the look I really want for ‘Drowning City’.
And if you want to try this yourself, here are the settings for the bristle brush and appearance stack I’m using. The top ‘roughen’ is 12pt absolute, 10/in, smooth points; the bottom one is 2 pt absolute, 46/in, smooth points.
Also I feel like this Alecto is really off-model; her design has varied over the years so it’s hard to know which one is exactly Right offhand without digging in my favorite sketches of her.
Ultimately, my goal is for Drowning City to be done with a ton of brushes and effects that take a lot of the work out of it for me; I’d like to be able to knock out a panel without spending much more time than I do on Rita, but have it look all painterly. I will have to work out some processes that make this easy. Obviously I’ll have to put SOME more effort in, as I want everything to tend to have some shading; Rita has strong shading sometimes, but a lot of panels are completely lacking in any sense of light or shade. But I think I can come up with some rules for how to shade everything that will make it fast.
(This drawing uses various tints of one color, and simply shades things by using a dark color at 20%; some experimentation suggests that a couple of messy thick brush strokes of that dark color at 20% works pretty well for a ‘painterly’ shading look! But also reveals that reverting from 18.1.1 to 18.0 leaves it super unstable when dealing with any kind of interesting appearance tricks, sigh.)
(Also of course doing the ‘noisy paper’ technique I did in Absinthe will add a lot to that “painterly” look.)
Originally published at Egypt Urnash. You can comment here or there.