Rendered Cartoon Illustration Technique Part 2
Once I have all the basic layers created, I start shading them in. Understanding shading and form are also things one must practice. This is my favorite part of image making. I usually imagine a light source, but I never get too obsessed with this – I have learned that the most important thing is to make a picture FEEL correct, especially a fantasy-oriented one like this. Edges need to stand out in the foreground and on important shapes, and can recede to create distance.
Here the obvious strong light source depicted by the fire has to be respected to a large degree, but you can still take liberties to make the overall mood and color harmony work for the good of the design and composition. It’s seldom a good idea to “zone isolate” colors to one part of a picture – they need to move throughout to create balance and unity, and to move the eye.
For instance, I use a lavender-blue color on the buildings in the distance, partly for design effect (I just like bright cartoony color!) and partly because city buildings are often cool colors, and cool colors tend to recede. Yet I also want to make sure they contrast well with the very warm flames behind them. I make sure to carry an accent of that blue into the pictorial foreground in the water squirting from the fire hydrant.
As I start to add details to layers such as the buildings, I make “sub-selections” again using the pen tool as detailed in Part 1. Many of these I DO save to channels so I can turn them on and off. I could continue to make layers, but the more layers you make, the more memory it requires, and the program can start to slow down. You can load selections and invert them for “positive and negative” masks, and combine them with other ones for various new masks.
As to the brushes I’ve used, I tend to keep things simple – I don’t use a large number of different brush categories in a single illustration – again, I think this can lead to disharmony and call too much attention to the method itself, rather than the subject at hand. I love texture, and as I’ve stated earlier, I think the way Painter uses the pressure sensitive paper textures is one of its very best features.
Much of this picture was painted with the basic Digital Airbrush, but I make one important modification – I make it paper texture-sensitive by changing its Method Subcategory from Soft Cover to Grainy Hard Cover in the Brush Controls>General palette. Now I can bring out the grain of the basic paper texture, which I’ve used here at 150% scale. I also used the Variable Splatter Airbrush variant for some larger “speckles” in the flames.
I continue working back to front, occasionally changing things as the picture develops (notice how I rethought the most distant buildings, simplifying them to make the hand stand out better). Next, I’ll show a couple of simple “tricks” I used to make the smoke coming out of the monster’s nostrils.