Saturday, June 12, 2010

Vector Art

A couple months ago I got back into vector art after seeing the vector request thread on /w/, and I'm so glad I did because it's so fun.

My old style looked ok for an amateur or people who didn't see much vector work, but in the grand scheme of things it was BAD, BAD, BAD. I was obsessed with the stroke tool having never got the memo that it was the absolutely worst possible tool to use when doing line art of work. My old method also took me almost twice as long as my new one.

It went a little like this:
  • Rough lineart
  • Tweak rough lineart so it looks neater
  • Add new layer with base color underneath
  • Move it around so it doesn't peek out from under the lineart
  • Add shadows and highlights
  • Move the shadows and highlights so they don't overlap in odd places or poke under the lineart
I don't know if that looks like it took that long, but it did.

So I stopped vectoring for a while because of lack of inspiration and the fact that it took so long made me hesitant to start anything because I would be forced to finish it no matter what.

 Luckily a couple months ago I was stumbling around /w/ and found the vector art request thread. It was there I found the absolutely amazing vector tutorial for Illustrator. That was when my spark for vectoring came back. For one thing I'm most motivated to create something if it's a gift for someone else and if the source image is good. It's easy this way since I get to choose which image I want to do for someone and just post it when I'm finished for them. I'll be the first to say that I'd rather receive than give, but that doesn't mean I don't like that sweet feeling of doing something nice for someone.

Anyways here are comparisons of my old work to my new work:

The Old
  

The New



One of my most recent vectors was just done yesterday and it is my favorite one out of all that I have done, it was also the one that caused me the most grief while creating it.(The runner-up for that is the Hina vector up there.) Anyways my latest one was a Mari from Neon Genesis Evangelion and I fell in love with the style and colors of the original, so I was thrilled when mine came out almost as good.

The biggest trouble came from deciding how to go about doing the lineless parts and if I would give them lineart or not, and where it would be, etc. The second biggest trouble was the gradient of the hair. There's two ways the I do my gradients. The first way is just creating a new shape under my live paint layer and giving it a gradient. It's the easiest to control for me however it's a pain to do if the shape is complicated like Mari's hair for example. The second way, and I'm still getting used to it, is just filling in the shapes in the live paint layer with the gradient. The person who requested it helped a bit with some advice on the hair so it came out just as good as the original.

More of my vectors and other miscellaneous art can be found on my Deviantart.

1 comments:

Sean Clark said...

Really good, the one of Mari reminds me of Samurai Jack, where they don't use outlines to draw the characters.

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