I’ve been feeling a bit down lately, so I decided break out Photoshop and do some digital colouring to cheer me up. I wanted to choose something simple, so I decided to do a piece by Fred Gallagher (of Megatokyo fame):

Original black and white lineart by Fred Gallagher.
Click for larger version.

And here are my coloured versions:

Work-in-Progress snapshot. Here I have the base colours layed down under the line art.

This is the final shaded version.

I’d really like to hear what you all think of this. It isn’t my best colour ever, but then again it only took me about an hour from start to finish, so I think it turned out pretty well.

Tooling around with illustrator, it took me about an hour to make this:

Click for larger version.

Not the worst thing ever, but it took me an *hour* to do it. Coming from Photoshop’s paths, Illustrator is really messed up. Take for instance the yellow bits of hair: In photoshop, I would simply make the head shape and the hair lines, then make a subtractive selection from them. I’m sure I’m doing this wrong, but in Illustrator I had to copy the head and hair twice, and then make a clipping path for each side (in the process making about 4 useless layers). Ugh.

I’m sure I’ll crack the Illustrator learning curve soon, I’ve only had it for 2 days, it’s just frustrating when you’re migrating from a inefficient but usuable art-production method to something much more unfamiliar and convoluted.

On a side note, I’ve started working on a new version of LJI. It’s mostly a user-interface update so far, but if you have any feature requests, you can leave them here.

I got a copy of Adobe Illustrator CS2 earlier, and started messing around with it. I remade the arcolz logo:

Click for larger version.

A meager learning experiment. I think it turned out pretty meh, but I like the text. Illustrator baffles me, but I’m starting to figure it out.

I’m starting to rethink this whole branding thing. Not only does “arco” sound like a 50’s carburator manufacturer, it doesn’t even sound like a cool carburator manufacturer. Is it necessary for me to obfuscate myself through the use of meaningless screen names and website titles?

“nillahood” sucks too.

Hmm.