From Sketch to Final Design
Sketch
The concept of a character usually exists before any drawing occurs. Ideally, the character’s purpose and personality should be communicated by the design. Multiple sketches are made to try and capture these attributes. Once a direction is found, the character is drawn in a pose to later be recreated digitally.
Line Art
The photo of the sketch is then traced over with a digital pen in Clip Studio Paint. Some sketches are much rougher than others, and give less of a guide for building out the line work. In this example, the lines of the sketch were fairly defined and allowed for easy replication of the lines digitally. During this stage, alterations to the design are often made. The more clean line work for a digital image demands different design choices than the more loose sketching of a pencil. The roughness of a pencil sketch is good at hiding mistakes in the design, whereas faults in the digital line work will be more noticeable. By zooming in closely on the lines, smaller blemishes are smoothed out with the eraser tool.
Color
Once the line work is finished, the layer is duplicated. This duplicate layer is kept behind the original line art layer. The paint bucket tool is used to give color to the back duplicate layer, without permanently altering the line art of the top layer. The colors of the characters are not solidified during the sketching process and it can take a while to find a color scheme that fits the design. If the image calls for a background, then it is usually created at the end, so that the colors of the background accommodate for the character’s design.
The final image usually has multiple changes from the initial sketch. Sometimes this looks like an added window, while other times more drastic alterations are made to the composition. The digital nature of the work allows for easy reconfiguration of the subjects in the drawing. The image’s objects can be resized or distances between characters can be changed with just a few clicks.