Remember this guy?
I decided to give him a little color in GIMP.
Big mistake.
Important note: this is not a finished drawing!
Concentrate on his skin for a minute. It looks okay, right? A little choppy, but generally all right.
Now look at his hair. If you just look at it, it seems okay.
Now look at the whole drawing. The skin and hair just don't work together!
At first I thought that his hair just wasn't detailed enough to match with his somewhat-realistic skin, but looking at him again, I think it's my line weight.
I'm not saying that the non-detailed hair isn't part of it, but the heavy line weight, while fine in the original drawing, which had very little shading or detail:
Just doesn't work in a drawing with lots of realistic detail:
Also, all the lines for interior detail (excluding his nose, which I did in a lighter line weight) looked a bit heavy, awkward, from his eyebrows to his mouth to his collarbone, though the hair is by far the worst. I think this is because regular, human, hair is very light compared to the sharp contrast displayed by, say, jawbone to neck:
See how light the 'outline' of my hair is in contrast to that of the shadow cast by my jawline against my neck? My angel boy has lines just as heavy for his hairline as for his jawline, and the result is that he just looks awkward. His lines are even a bit thick around his shoulders and the jawline itself.
Uh, I think I need to reduce my line weight?
However, I don't think line weight is the only culprit, as I briefly mentioned before, I was thinking that his hair wasn't detailed enough for his skin, and that might be adding to my problem.
Notice how choppy and non-strandy his hair is:
Then compare it to this picture of Renton from Eureka Seven:
Well, Renton's hair is just as choppy as my angel boy's, but it looks fine on Renton.
What's up?
Okay, notice how Renton and Eureka are shaded: cell shading, while my angel boy is all soft shading. I'm thinking that the choppy, undetailed hair can't go with soft shading; it has to go with hard cell shading if you want it to go at all. So if I had cell shaded my angel boy instead of soft shading him, he wouldn't have looked so strange.
I still would have had to reduce my line weight, as shown by Renton and Eureka: even though they're cell shaded, their lines are not that heavy, like my angel boy's are.
Which brings me to YET ANOTHER POINT:
I use GIMP to color in my artwork. (I say the word 'use' lightly, as I'm just beginning to dabble in digitally coloring my artwork, as opposed to watercolor. This probably comes from the fact that I've switched to manga as my art style.)
Anyway, the point is that I don't know how to get smooth, even lines in any program, which is why I'm making them so thick, because they will be more even that way.
In Paint.net and GIMP, which are the two programs I've used so far, the fine lines are pixtel-y and generally choppy and ugly looking:
Ew, grainy! Especially note HL's jawline---it's totally choppy, and I have no idea how to fix it short of majorly blurring it, which results in my line art being, well, blurry and wide, which doesn't really solve the problem.
So what do I need to do? Get Photoshop? Does that do fine, non-pixtel-y lines? Or do I need to do something like make huge, huge files which will be so enormous that you can't see the grainy lines when the file is being viewed at a size lower than full size?
I don't even know if that's possible without killing my computer/sanity, whichever comes first.
Should I just grit my teeth and get a good version of Photoshop?
Any input appreciated!
No comments:
Post a Comment