In the Works

Back in high school I used to visit this site called www.rocktoons.com (which apparently stopped updating in 2007). Anyways, loving music and drawing as I did, I was really inspired by the site to make my own "rocktoons." I even had a mini ripoff version of the website of my own. I think everything from back then has been lost or deleted, which is good because my stuff was not very good, hahahaha. Anyways the basic process was drawing a band/musician, inking it, then using photoshop to color it.

This past week I got back into that process when I obtained photoshop and illustrator again. A lot of what I know in photoshop I learned during this time in high school from tutorials, experiments and just solid work. I know a little more now and had some experience with illustrator in college so I wanted to see how much better things would turn out.

Anyone who knows me knows I love football and before the NFL season started I had the idea to make a piece every week for who I thought was the player of the week in the NFL. So I have a couple drawings of a few players through week 3 right now (week 4 just ended minutes ago). I didn't want to use markers for these and decided to try the old photoshop method. The results so far are iffy, but I'm going to post them for feedback and ideas.

There's an amazing tool in illustrator (Live Trace) that cleans everything up from the initial scan, so that makes my drawing look 50 times better than it is. I think it may even work better as a black and white line drawing. But I wanted to try color anyways and here are the results so far.


As I said earlier, the line drawings look really good after cleaning them up in illustrator. The color versions on the other hand I feel need a lot of work. I've never been good with realism as you can probably tell and I didn't spend too much time on the color versions. It was basically a refresher. I was trying a different method and I don't have a tablet and blah blah blah. Just excuses. Before the end of this week though I'm going to hammer at least one out as best I can and see how that plays.

I can already tell from these that the line drawings may need more detail, almost like a comic book. Varying the thickness of my lines will also produce better final images. And I tried in the Polamalu (black background) one to use a color line. Although that was out of necessity, coloring the lines will undoubtedly help as well.

I'll have another post tomorrow with more sketches, especially my subway ones, because I've wanted to post about subway sketching for awhile. And look for one or two more posts as well. Thanks for reading everyone and spread it as much you can. One of our goals is to eventually have guest posters, there's already a submission link on the side. So send us whatever you feel like.