As I continue to familiarize myself with this new WACOM digital tablet I realize how little I understand light and shadows. To teach myself the ins and outs of painting with pixels I feed my eyes with the art of experts. Here's a clip from a Tom Richmond spread from MAD magazine. Study this and I'm sure you'll be astonished like me at the profound technical proficiency of his skill. Ignoring for the moment the spectacular amount of detail in this cartoon, I'm blown away by the 3D effect his shading's had on this guy's face (and clothes and hands). Copying this is very difficult.
Tom Richmond once told me his inspiration was Mort Drucker. He didn't paint digitally and look at how well he colors.
Here's today's attempt at coloring with the "airbrush" tool. The number of decisions one makes to color as Tom does above is incredible. What palette color, what brush, what blender, what layer, what highlights does one use? For me it's trial and error. At this point, mostly error.
Never one to let a challenge like this daunt me, I pulled out my notes from the digital painting class I attended with Jason Seilor last February. I attended that lecture to learn about caricature and paid little detail to the intricacies of digital details. Pity. He did however recommend a book which I just purchased on Amazon. The reviews for James Gurney's work are spectacular. I want to learn from the best. Let's hope it works!
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