Ninjai
08-09-2005, 12:10 AM
Ok,
So i've been doing some research and learning some new things.
A lot of you have seen the cut style where you have really high saturated high tones. Mexican colorists in general use this style. Lately, I have been seeing some pages from Wildsiderz preview colored by Eldegado (Studio F) where he's abandoned this style to go for a more smoother, and professionally restrained style where he's using more smooth and gradual gradients that lead up to a high tone but doesn't show the cuts as much. You barely see the cuts outline and those that you do see are very close in color contrast so they blend well together. Only in some very small spots like in certain detail areas will he hit them up with a high tone pass...typically only on areas like hair, or a squiggle here and there. That's really effective because it really gives your pages a smooth realistic look while still being able to manage the FX effectively to show your light sources. The key in these gradients is accurate light source and a smooth gradient.
http://www.opticstudios.com/gallery/ninjai/archive/circle.gif
In this circle i've shown you basically what to do. I start with a lighter flat tone. Most people are taught or told that you need to have a dark dim flat tone because you need to create enough contrast between the flat and the high tones. This WAS the way to go but now things have changed somewhat. You can have the flats be a higher tone color to start out with, you just need to tone down the saturation so that you end up with a dim (but high tone) flat color. This allows you to blend more easily because you're not jumping huge rungs in the color spectrum. What I did was do a lasso of the entire circle and draw a radial gradient with the flat color as my background color, and my high tone as my foreground. This is different from what some people do with setting your primary color and leaving your background transparent.
So basically what you're doing is not hitting everything up with a super high saturated tone making everything look "squeaky rubbery". Hit up certain key areas of your piece with a high tone but keep it minor or else you negate the whole point of building up your pieces with smooth grads. Hope this helped some of you.
So i've been doing some research and learning some new things.
A lot of you have seen the cut style where you have really high saturated high tones. Mexican colorists in general use this style. Lately, I have been seeing some pages from Wildsiderz preview colored by Eldegado (Studio F) where he's abandoned this style to go for a more smoother, and professionally restrained style where he's using more smooth and gradual gradients that lead up to a high tone but doesn't show the cuts as much. You barely see the cuts outline and those that you do see are very close in color contrast so they blend well together. Only in some very small spots like in certain detail areas will he hit them up with a high tone pass...typically only on areas like hair, or a squiggle here and there. That's really effective because it really gives your pages a smooth realistic look while still being able to manage the FX effectively to show your light sources. The key in these gradients is accurate light source and a smooth gradient.
http://www.opticstudios.com/gallery/ninjai/archive/circle.gif
In this circle i've shown you basically what to do. I start with a lighter flat tone. Most people are taught or told that you need to have a dark dim flat tone because you need to create enough contrast between the flat and the high tones. This WAS the way to go but now things have changed somewhat. You can have the flats be a higher tone color to start out with, you just need to tone down the saturation so that you end up with a dim (but high tone) flat color. This allows you to blend more easily because you're not jumping huge rungs in the color spectrum. What I did was do a lasso of the entire circle and draw a radial gradient with the flat color as my background color, and my high tone as my foreground. This is different from what some people do with setting your primary color and leaving your background transparent.
So basically what you're doing is not hitting everything up with a super high saturated tone making everything look "squeaky rubbery". Hit up certain key areas of your piece with a high tone but keep it minor or else you negate the whole point of building up your pieces with smooth grads. Hope this helped some of you.