Feb 5, 2007

Watch Me Draw Frankenstein in 20 Seconds

6 comments:

Mike said...

Very cool.
I'm curious...Do you scan the pencil drawing in, then use a tablet for the black lines, or do you use ink?
I'm asuming that you use photoshop or something to keep the layers separate.

abnormalbrain said...

step 1, quick rough pencil sketch.
step 2, scan and place into illustrator, reduce the opacity to 30-50%, and lock that layer
step c, i make a new layer and start "inking" the foreground figure with my 4x6" tablet and a brushstroke i've developed (all the native illustrator brushstrokes do strange quirky things when you apply them to oddly-angled vector lines. the ones i've made stay smooth 99% of the time, took me a while to figure out how to trick it).
step 4, a new layer under that one for the colors
step 5, a new layer under that where i start hashing out the background with the black brushstrokes again
step 6, repeat step 4
you can see most of these steps happen in the animation.

abnormalbrain said...

no photoshop.

Mike said...

Thanks! I'll have to try using Illustrator more. I've always used photoshop, but I dont get the super-clean lines that is in your work.
I love the animation. Very cool idea.

Do you have any idea what charles burns technique is?
http://www.fantagraphics.com/artist/burns/burns.html
I always wonder if he uses ink and brushes, or if he might use adobe illustrator.

abnormalbrain said...

looks like traditional in on paper, with traditional comic coloring. though i've seen straight acrylic paintings that look similar. like coop's for instance, http://artofcoop.com/index.html

he used to have photos of his process, step-by-step on his blog (http://positiveapeindex.blogspot.com/), but you'll have to dig on there, it looks like he's mostly taking photos at car shows lately.

abnormalbrain said...

ink on paper