I've been meaning for the last, oh, 3 years or so to make an avatar for myself/Flubward. Something that had the tinkering, the mezzing, the charming.. and of course EQ. In a relatively simple picture.
After using several very... productive ... nights at work (yay for the yearly tape backup wait-a-thon!), I've managed to make something with which I'm happy. Naturally, I want to show it off a bit. Sadly, it has a bit more detail than comes out in a 120x90 pixel avatar.
I sketched it out with ye old trusty #2 pencil (kept for such occasions... I never use them for actually writing), inked it, scanned it in...
then shaded the sketch with a 4b (very soft) pencil, then used that as a guide to shade and colorize from the inking in photoshop.
I tend to go heavy on the layers in Photoshop. Slows things down a bit, but it lets me tweak elements independently. The textures are all brush textures, mostly on the shading layers, with the colors being mostly straight fills.
Hope that answered your question without going into excessive detail.
My main thought after finishing? "I'm never going to do that again without a graphics tablet." Drawing lines with a mouse is a skill I don't think I'll ever master. At least I gave up on using the trackpad after about 30 minutes and nabbed a mouse from the server
Nice work Flub. I think it's great that you were able to mix in pencil with pixilated colors, tints and shades; you can't beat the uniqueness of hand-drawn lines.
As far as using a graphics tablet, I'd save the $$ and invest in Illustrator. You can scan your sketch, import it to Photoshop, apply an overlay filter, move it to Illustrator to do the line work and then back to Photoshop where you can add the bells and whistles.
PM me if you want to know more on how to buff out your designs like a true comic book professional.
