Category — Three-Eyed Larry

The last frames have been inked, scanned, and laid out in Painter. I made another test reel, and the inked lines look pretty darn good. Please pardon me while I collapse in relief…

WooHOO!!

Now… since inking is finally behind us, we can turn our attention to coloring. At one point I was planning on doing the inking and coloring at the same time, with Sharpies for the line art and Prismacolor markers for the color, then scanning the results. Figured it might save a step or two. Unfortunately, I did some test images and found I couldn’t get a consistent color tone with the markers. I’m sure there’s something I could do when scanning that would let me even the tones out, but my knowledge of Photoshop and GIMP leaves a lot to be desired. Fixing it after the fact would be just another tedious, manual process, which I’m not interested in doing. So, we’re using the Wacom and Painter. I’ve modified my coloring methodology from the last time I painted Larry, made it a lot simpler, so I’m thinking this should go smoothly…

We’re on the downhill slope. After coloring, we do audio, editing, and mastering — easy fun stuff! Still looking good for a February 4th release. Won’t be long now!

Just began the second week of inking, and things are moving along at a more leisurely pace. I decided to ease up on the throttle, not rocket through the frames as quickly as I did with the pencil roughs. For one thing, with the sketches I could afford to keep it loose, slop it up as I go, knowing full well any stray lines will meet Mr. Eraser. With the ink… well, the nature of ink demands a tad more caution and a much slower hand. On top of that, I’m inking the drawings at a larger scale than I originally sketched, so that takes a little more time. As a result, I’m getting about twenty frames inked per night…

As with the pencil roughs, I’m running into the get-the-images-into-Painter bottleneck. I have to do things a bit differently with the inked drawings, so part of the slowdown is trying to find a workflow process that actually works. It’s getting better, and I still prefer to do it this way than have to try and do everything with the Wacom again. So, there you have it…

Today’s your lucky day. I was going to go into a long-winded, coma-inducing blurb-fest about how the pencil roughs for Larry were complete and ready for inking and blah blah blah, but then I got the stomach flu, so my plans went right down the crapper. Literally. Instead, I’ll just give you the ten-second version: I’ve got 150* master frames to ink and color. I’m dealing the Wacom out of the mix for inking — instead, I’m printing all the cleaned-up pencil roughs and I’m gonna use Sharpies and tracing paper. Then, the traces get scanned and dumped into Painter for coloring…

There! That was simple. Why can’t all my log updates be this short and to the point? Whatever…

*There’s a moving starfield I have yet to render, but it should be relatively simple to create and loop.

All the primary pencil work has been completed, and by “completed” I mean images have been drawn, scanned, & cleaned up in Painter, rotated, and scaled to the right size. So far, so good. We’re almost ready to move on to inking. Wow!

A few steps to go before we get there. First of all, I haven’t seen these pencil roughs in motion yet, so I’ll need to convert all the drawings from Painter’s native format (.RIFF) to PNG, which POV-Ray expects, with an intermediate stopover as a Photoshop file (.PSD). So, RIFF to PSD to PNG for POV. Got all that? Yeah, me, neither… It would be nice if Painter could export directly to a PNG, but the version I have is old and decrepit, and such niceties are sadly lacking. Anyways, after the files have been converted, I’ll need to render another animatics reel and go through it with a fine-tooth comb — I may end up having to redraw certain frames…

So, I have some work to do. Still, the experience has been positive so far, which means my blood pressure is close to normal and I don’t feel the need to lay down in the middle of a freeway. Not yet, anyway — inking is right around the corner…

Just a couple of post-Turkey-Day notes to pass along…

Penciling for Three-eyed Larry continues smoothly. I’m about 90% finished with drawing and digitizing all my image layers. There are a couple of changes to the layering I have yet to plug into the POV script, so I hesitate to say I’m officially ahead of schedule… but I have no problem with unofficially (wink-wink, nudge-nudge and all that)..

I installed a local copy of WordPress on my iMac and I’m turning it into a Goofy Graffix dashboard*. I used to have a notebook that did the same sort of dashboard-y things, but one day I left it out of the portfolio, and the next thing I knew it was six months later and the notebook was horribly out of sync. Annoying. Anyway, the whole thing is electronic now, and I’m scratching my head in puzzlement wondering why the hell I didn’t think of this earlier…

That’s all. I’m going to go back and wait for the Fedex guy to bring me my new drawing table light so I can finally see what I’ve actually been drawing — I’m sure the truth will be disturbing…

* I’ve heard of people using wikis and CMS software to accomplish the same thing. I chose WordPress because a) it’s free, and b) it’s the devil I know.