Weekly 2018-03-26

Hey patrons! 

Krita 4.0 release

This week big news was the release of Krita 4.0. It was also the final stone for my mission on the new preset pack : publishing the documentation here with a visual example for each 120 brushes. It took me a big part of the week :-) 

Research and development...

In parallel of that, I kept working on the future episode 25. Since start of 2018, I'm not really lucky: I can't count the number of time I get disrupted on this quest. Also, I have this time a very precise type of rendering in mind and I really want to spend all the research and development necessary to match it. Don't worry;  I'm not looking at a crazy new rendering: it's even a rendering you are already very familiar and I consider as probably my best panels and illustration on Pepper&Carrot. Here is a sample: 

Getting this level of rendering was always very difficult for me, but I always felt very happy when I was able to reach it. It has enough "comic" feeling for my taste, enough "painterly" and "illustrative" feeling too. The characters have a painted outline (but not really regular or dark as a line-art) and the background are fully painted like in animes. These renderings keep the facial expression of characters graphical and iconic while also allowing me a complex shading to express myself in the ambients...

(picture: workflow in two steps: ugly speedpainting then long long long paint-over)

Unfortunately, the common things with these artworks is they never came with a clean method with reproducible steps. They were all more or less just speedpaintings with on top a ton of hours of paint-over, like a heavy pass of make-up with a thin brush. The paint-over pass cover almost 90% of the artwork, until I match the vision I have in mind. This pass in my workflow is by far the biggest bottleneck for my production pipeline. It might works for a single panel and for a cover ; but rarely well for a full episode (eg. really hard to keep consistency over a scene with dialogs ). Every time I tested, I got trapped into sleepless night of work to add make-up to every panels (with often more or less success). That's why on Pepper&Carrot episodes; you can find roughly two family of episodes: the one painted with a big pass of make-up ; and the one where I tried to make steps like drawing + inking + coloring were I rarely was happy with the result. 

( random portrait: testing colorize mask on "digital painted inking" )

So my research is to 'reverse-engineering' this type of artworks to find how to reproduce a similar rendering with logical and cumulative steps. I counted five (rather classical in the end) steps:  sketching, inking, flat color,  shading, post-corrections. I already perfected greatly all the last part of the workflow ; the coloring and shading technique (improved thanks also to the colorize-mask new feature in Krita 4.0). All my first batch of tests were done on top of my Inktober artworks and that's why you saw many of them with color test. I told in the livestreaming of wednesday (archived here for replay on Youtube ) all the results of my new shading tips. The tricky part is still mainly the "inking". 

( inking test on a page, with ballpen and blue pencil )

For inking, my first test were influenced by my result of coloring and shading over the inktober artworks. I decided to try to do real traditional inking on a full page of episode 25. I'm proud of the result in the physical world; but the method took so many time  ( especially scan, cleaning, spliting the blue and ink on background layer and foreground ). This black&white result already explode my time budget; so I don't want to imagine same for a full page colored. Also, the result of the lines themselves was a bit blury after scan :

media: quick mp4 video, cleaned result in digital after scan

So, I am searching now for a "digital painted inking" style and I found yesterday evening an experimental method. Next week, I'll apply what I learned from this specific inking to a comic page and see if it works. 

I'll tell you next week. Thank you again for the support!