coloringJade's Escape

I’m getting used to making digital art nowadays, and this next project proves it. In my past art projects, especially the last Ryukyu Star cover and my personal avatar picture, I had trouble with the coloring. There was a thin layer of white surrounding all the lines I filled in even when I made the pictures into vectors in Illustrator. I finally looked up how to color hand-drawn images from a free class on Skillshare.

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The hardest part about this project? The actual concept. I hate re-using other motifs, and if I have to, I’d rather just not do it or tackle it in a different way. I pulled out the most famous part of Alice in Wonderland–falling down the rabbit hole–and replaced Alice with a man working on something because this is the busiest time for English teachers.

I ended up changing the original concept and added a fall-to-winter doorway.
After changing the original design, I started to paint the image in Photoshop. I learned that if I put the image’s layer in Multiply mode (it’s usually set in Normal mode), all whites in the picture would become transparent. This solved my white line problem and made my life a lot easier.

I did almost lose the colored picture. I was happy to play with lots of colors and gradients to get the final image below.

For the Ryukyu Star, a publication created by and for JET Programme participants in Okinawa, Japan, I made a cover using this issue’s theme, the rainy season.

1. The penciling and inking: It took me longer to come up with the concept actually drawing it! I had to look at different pictures and paintings with rain and spring. Finally, I decided using an Arriety-style character with a larger-than-life flower instead of a typical umbrella. The inking was done within 20 minutes.

2. Tracing and Base Colors: After I scanned the image into Illustrator, I did an image trace (Illustrator traces the image and makes it into a vector) and painted in the base colors.

3. Photoshop: I took the image to Photoshop in two different layers. One layer was the transparent black-and-white image on top of the base-colored image. The rest of the coloring were sandwiched as layers between the top black-and-white image and the colored one so that I wouldn’t end up coloring over the lines.

4. Coloring: If I were drawing or painting this image, I’d start with the lighter colors and work into the darker colors. I took the opposite approach and started with the dark colors and build up to the light colors.
5. Final version: With the coloring done, I transferred this image to InDesign (since I always get the sizing wrong when I do it independently). I added a blue background, the magazine title, and lines.