I like to take a break from all the coding/drawing and come here to write on the stuff I have done so far. I've drawn a ton of stuff, though not as much as I wanted to since I had to code a couple of stuff to integrate the different comic scenes. I slept and woke up really early today.
I'm also beginning to "explore" other art styles that I stumbled upon while drawing my stuff. One of the scenes I was really looking forward to draw was a scene of the Countryside comic.
One of the styles I felt like going with was a very simple style where the picture is mostly just either black, or white. No Grey or any shades of colour. It looked really nice when I was just started, as seen from the picture above.
It looks similar to "Take A Walk", a game which had really good and detailed graphics even with the absence of colour.
Below, I tried a couple of blending modes. It did not quite achieve the effect or beauty of anything better than the original so I just used the original. There was one effect (I didn't put here) that was pretty good, so I made an animation for this scene. I added a setting sun and as the sun sets, the lighting of the scene changes. I did that with Flash's blend mode. The following are not done in Flash, but I thought it would be cool to try other effects like morning, night, rainy, super bright lighting, etc... The images below shows some of the simple effects I tried applying:
I was also drawing another scene. It's a very dense forest scene and I suddenly came to realise that the trees looked quite good even without strokes. I previously drew them with strokes because they lacked the detail and shading to make them look good on their own. But as I draw, the outlines do become a nuisance at times, taking up unnecessary space at where I need them most, especially with small objects in the distance.
With strokes
Without Strokes
It's been a fun week. I was doing programming for the Comic mostly as well as implementing the Hats for the turtle properly. I drew new hats too! I did more programming than drawing, but I did take short breaks to draw stuff whenever I get inspired.
Each scene in the comic is classified under one of 3 types:
- Normal: The scene appears normally. No special effects other than animations.
- Scrolling: The scene can scroll left to right or right to left. I draw my scene wider when I intend to do scrolling. It apparently looks better when I exaggerate the effect of parallax scrolling.
- Zoom: One of the hardest effects to create when combined with the above scenes. The scene requires its own camera and multiple layers of depth in the picture. I then manipulate the scaling of each "layer" individually, to give the impression that the player is moving toward or away from the scene. I imagined it to look really cool, but each scene in the comic is about a quarter the size of the entire game screen, so the effect didn't turn out as awesome as I expected. It still has the effect I intended though.
Lastly, I am going to animate some objects or people in the comic to make stuff more exciting. This comic is looking good so far. The enemy frames above were made like this to create a special "revealing" effect which I don't want to say too much about haha. The animation will do the talking.
Above is a parody of Limbo I drew. It isn't very high quality because it was drawn in a very short amount of time before I wanted to sleep (took me like 30mins to speed-draw this), thus the "blobby" outlines and simple shapes. Limbo is another game with really good art direction.
TreeMoon.jpg
And here is a scene which will be used in the comic. I drew this because I saw two of my images - a tree and a moon - overlapping each other. And coincidentally, their positions actually looked really good together. I got a good feeling out of it and I drew something more complex. I wanted it to be simple, so there wasn't much detail in this as the other comic scenes. That might change though, since it looks like an idea for a frame in a comic scene. The text in TreeMoon.jpg will be changed in the final version.
Above is the inspiration for TreeMoon.jpg. I somehow feel I could have done a better job for the TreeMoon though.
Also, I found a quick and easy way to automatically convert all pictures to have pure black outlines and white for everything else. Here is a forest scene that I just completed:
Unfortunately, it doesn't automatically draw outlines for shapes that aren't black, so there are a lot of missing details in the furthest layer of the background. Notice that the numerous silhouettes of those trees just disappeared in the black and white version? Still, it was a quick way to see how my pictures look like without colour and just the outlines themselves!
After playing with the setting subsequently, I was able to find another easy way to get the same effect above. But it isn't as clean since there are patches of grey in the picture. However this method is more flexible in that I am able to control how much detail I want in the picture. I can set it to hold more detail, and thus more patches of grey, or have lesser patches of grey at the cost of detail. It's quite cool to play around with the settings and experimenting with the results haha!
And alas, this weekend is already coming to an end. As usual, weekends are being themselves - short and ephemeral.
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