So here’s something neat. I’m just about done colouring chapter one of DDATOL, and I discovered a neat time-saving trick.

I’ve been using the gradient tool to quickly throw down colours in abstract backgrounds. That’s what you see above. It works well – it’s easy to experiment with and is fast. But I don’t like how smooth it looks. I’ve been fighting this in the past by using a textured brush to go in, sample a colour, paint, sample again, paint, sample, paint, etc. you get the idea. It takes longer than I’d like, and it sometimes muddies the colours. On top of that, I prefer a sort of mottled texture in the BGs – something that looks more like natural media.

Fly past the break to see the results and the method.

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Whoops – I’m late in posting this. But there it is – the clean line art that will appear in the finished book. A few small changes were made between the rough sketch and here. (That link’s included in case you’re somehow not viewing this on my site, where in order to compare the two you need only exercise that scroll wheel a bit). It looks a bit cluttered right now, and Selim (right in the middle there) gets lost, but the colour will put the focus back on him.

Some of the line weights are a bit inappropriate, so I might fudge those in Photoshop later.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to help me out with my multiple-choice difficulties! It started out with Option 4 taking a pretty strong lead. Option 1 was sort of like a tag-along – it seems like people who liked 1 also liked 4, and 4 gained the most weight. But then Option 3 started to pick up steam late in the day!

Unfortunately for 3, if you put it in context, it doesn’t work as well as 1 or 4. So I’ve tightened up 4 a bit (you can see that above) and printed it off (you can see that below). This page comes between 19 and 20 in Chapter 4, so I’ll be pencilling it in about two weeks. I’ll share the line art when it’s done!

(FWIW, I shove a “Gradient Map” adjustment layer at the top of the layer stack, with one end representing 15% Cyan. Print it out, and when you scan it in again, and you can just pull out the blue, leaving the lovely line art.)

For a page in “The Oriental Lieutenant”. Without me providing anything so trivial as “context”, which of the four images above do you prefer?

I’m aware that, as an author, I’m not traditionally allowed to do this sort of thing. But this is the Internet! The twenty-first century’s Wild West! Anything goes!

EDIT: Durr, comments are disabled. Sorry. Hit me up on my Livejournal or on Twitter!

Progress continues on Delilah Dirk and the Full Length Graphic Novel. I am well-ensconced in the line-art process, where I’m making some dark, clean lines on top of the squiggly blue ones. You can sort of see the the process in action above, as I’ve plucked out the strands of meaning in dark lines while the chaos of the blue roughs swirl underneath. It’s been a preeetty slow process so far, and I’m getting about 2-3 pages done per day. Usually two. Thirteen pages were completed last week, and I’ve got a lot of pages to get through, so as you can imagine, this is probably going to take a while.

Working on paper means I don’t have to turn the computer on each morning, though, which is nice. It also means I’ll update the blog less. In fact, I will post so infrequently that older posts will probably start disappearing. It’s negative posting. ZOOP.