Project Three: characters colored in

Ahhh... it's so nice to have Sunday off so I can do what I've loved doing since I was a kid: draw and color.

Here we have the characters fitted to the background and colored in:

As yet there's no shading, no integration of these elements with the background.  That will happen this week.

Notice that El Kabong isn't purely white but an off-white.  The off-white will accept shading much better than a glaring white.  Also notice the dust trail EK raises with his reluctant feet.  A bit bright, perhaps, but I don't dislike it.  I used the SketchBook Pro soft airbrush for the dust effect.

With each of these characters I ink with the SBP marker brush which gives you nice thick-n-thin variation of line.  I preserve that inking layer, fill in the colors underneath, then I go back and duplicate the inking layer.  I "hide" the original layer, hit preserve transparency on the duplicate layer, and readjust the colors of the outline so they're closer to the fill colors and don't stand out quite so much.

By the way, I ordered Wacom's art brush for my Intuos4.  It showed up Friday and the damn thing is broken... what a disappointment.  The tablet will recognize the eraser end but the pen end doesn't register. Fortunately Amazon has a pretty good return policy and a replacement has already been ordered.  I was so upset ... especially after looking forward to using that art pen in this project for real variations of line... that I went ahead and ordered the airbrush pen as well.  Hell, I don't have any other vices but I do love digital drawing and painting so it's worth the additional moola.

Back to the project.  Now here's my typical problem: there's very little room left for lettering.  And I have a great idea about the lettering.  The title "El Kabong Strikes Again" will be "shaded" in the Mexican national colors red, white and green.  The El Kabong adventures do happen down in old Mexico, after all.  So the colors will be highly appropriate.

But now I've painted myself into a corner.  I can make the letters rather small and fit them across the top, very small and across the bottom... or do the inexcusable and keep the letters large and readable but cut off my characters.  Or I can extend either the top or bottom and place normal sized letters.

This is what happens when you don't plan.  I generally find myself in a jam and wondering what I'm going to do about it.  Remember the Wally Gator Little Golden Book cover?  I did the same damn thing!!

Ah well, stay tuned....