canoftoast:

maid-en-china:

jerkdouglas:

maid-en-china:

Work progress gif for Leave it Broken :D 

I forgot to mention in the gif, but the character, layer overlay, and paint over was done in Paint tool SAI and then edited in Photoshop. 

I made a tutorial a while back on how to integrate 3D backgrounds to help speed up the drawing process for comic artists. Check it out if you’re interested. :D

 On one hand, this is worse than tracing. This is cheating of the highest order, anybody who uses sketchup should be hanged.

 On the other hand I’ve never been worth half a shit at backgrounds, and how much can I honestly expect of myself?

 On the third hand, nothing I say will ever get me to use this before I’ve learned to do it in my head.

Ok, I am getting tired of people calling using 3D as “cheating”. 

Cheating? Cheating at what? If I entered a draw-background-from-imagination contest, then yeah, this is cheating. But the goal here is to illustrate a graphic novel in a reasonable time. I don’t hear people calling Pixar movies cheating. Why don’t they draw everything by hand? Oh wait, it’ll take a million years before a movie comes out.

I’m not trying to gain false praise so people can say “Oh wow, look how well she can draw backgrounds!” If that were the case, why the hell would I show the work progress and even make a tutorial? People need to keep in mind that different artists have different goals. Yours may be to perfect drawing everything from imagination, mine happens to be to illustrate a story before I’m 70, because unlike Pixar, I am a one woman team doing research, paying rent, and working on 2 graphic novels at the same time. (though this story won’t be released until 2013).

So if you think I should be hanged for that, then you need to seriously open up your mind. Artists aren’t clones programmed to have one goal in mind. That’s not saying we shouldn’t try to improve ours skills without 3D, because it will come in handy for many other situations. I honestly wouldn’t be able to integrate 3D and 2D if I didn’t learn how to draw everything in 2D the old fashioned way. Sketchup just speeds up the process.

So before you closed mindedly shut off the potentials of 3D, ask yourself, what are your goals as an artist, and what’s the best way to get there? Is it to practice until you can show off and say “look at all the backgrounds I can draw without Sketchup!” or is to create something greater than an image about skills? Pixar did, and they seem pretty damn successful to me. 

End rant. 
 

3D is art too, putting hand drawn and 3D is perfectly fine. Not many people know this, but the author of the manga Naruto, Masashi Kishimoto, totally uses 3D for most of his backgrounds in the manga itself. How else would he be able to produce quality work in under a week.

Lots of people do this. It’s not called cheating. It’s called being efficient in a digital age. People want to go home to their friends and family and we have the technology to make work load easier, so why not use it?