Gradient example

Look at that glorious purple background. Darkish on top, lightish on bottom. How can I do this without spending $500- $600 for new software? My Corel Painter Essentials 4 does not permit such colorization. Here's the extent of what it can do. Don't look directly at it; you may go blind.

First Half Page "Flat" Color

First attempt at full color (half) page. (I plan on combining half pages so the book is taller than it is wide).  The number of decisions required to produce this page was enormous. Trial and error, scouring manuals and chat rooms, watching Youtube videos, and more trial and error and here's what we get.

I've abandoned shading for the time being. Adjusting pixels, brush width, scanning resolutions, gradient fills, remembering colors so skin and clothes don't waver, and a zillion other tasks were technical  challenge enough. Once I'm relatively facile with drawing with a stylus, managing files, and so forth, and then I might return to Art School 101 and study shading, light, highlights, reflected shadows, again. However, I'm not going to live forever and this project already is ten months in the making. Even doing flat colors is arduous and time consuming. I estimate about 450 half pages are to be drawn, scanned, colored, and posted. It just doesn't seem right to me that, should this take ten years, a seventy year old man is still drawing comic books.

Second First Color Job

Every journey begins with a first step. Here are my first steps applying color. I begin with faces traced (from a model book) with black fine tip pen, scanned at 600 dpi, and uploaded to COREL Essentials. 

 I use the paint bucket to apply solid colors on the guy's face and shirt. So far, so good.

Then I leap into the unknown and fling paint everywhere applying shadows. You should see my living room; there are spattered pixels all over my rug, walls, and shirt. (My first digital joke). These shadows are haphazard, helter-skelter, and savage. But I gotta start somewhere.

My quandary: do I postpone drawing pen/ink finished pages until I gain competence as a colorist? This means coloring all 22 characters before drawing any pages. That will require weeks of coloring before drawing any pages.

Or do I start drawing finished pages (I've got 50 pages scripted, blocked, and ready for images) and  learn to color as I go? The problem with that plan is that as my technique improves the finished book will be of uneven quality. The earlier pages will be amateurish while later pages become less amateurish.

I think I'll keep improving my coloring technique. Certainly I can exceed the level of skill on display above. This'll put my schedule off once again...but since I'm really under no deadline I can putter at a leisurely pace.

I do have this fear somebody, somewhere on the planet is working on a comic book based on Ecclesiastes and every day I delay publishing they get closer to beating me to the punch. This was Art Speigelman's challenge when Steven Spielberg was coming out with An American Tale. Art was halfway through MAUS when he got wind of Spielberg's plan to use immigrant mice with nasty cats in 1890's NY city. So he published half of his work (Jewish mice; Nazi cats) before completion. Hey Spielberg, you got any plans to do a film about Ecclesiastes? Please don't. 

First Color Job

Arturo Alfredo Giovanni, 21 year old exchange student from Tuscany who is studying culinary arts. His
heroes include Bobby Flay, Gordon Ramsey, Rachel Ray, Julia Child, Wolfgang Puck,and Epicurus. 

The things about the project that give me an overload of delirium and joy: 

1.Tapping into the part of my brain that controls eye/hand coordination. Moving your hand on a tablet while the drawing appears on a screen is a weird disconnect. 

2. Learning about layers, blending, eye droppers, and a zillion other tools is an unending swim in bliss. 

3. Marveling at the creative genius of the persons who invented digital art--every move I make causes me to gasp in disbelief. 

4.  The stylus that I draw with has no batteries, no wires, and get this--when you turn it upside down you can erase with it. This must be what it's like when aborigines see aircraft for the first time.

5.  The range of possibilities is infinite which again causes me great joy because I get to be a decision maker. Do I color this thing in plain colors like Tin Tin?

Or do I mush and blend like master craftsmen who paint with pixels? Look at this digital painting and gasp with me.

The amount of work that went into the shading of fabric and facial shadows certainly paid off. This is brilliant. My optimistic brain tells me, "If this person learned how to do this I can, too." But then another part of my brain says, "Dude, you're 60 years old and you don't have time to invest learning how to do this."


Then there's MAD artist, Tom Richmond. Look at this exquisite spread.

I feel like the desert crawler who stumbled upon a drive through coffee stand offering free Italian sodas in favorite flavors. Choices, choices, choices!