I figure that in the mean time as I’m trying to write and figure out the story for TFR, it’d be fun to start doing artwork to experiment with different art techniques. Then of course I’d post them here for your perusal. Well, here is the first experiment. As you may or may not remember, I’m totally a sucker for 3d art, and have wanted to do a 3d comic for a long, long time. But one of the challenges of doing a 3d comic is doing the clothing. You’re pretty much limited to clothing you can buy, though there’s not shortage of that. But then you have to custom texture it and such to get it just right. It seemed to me that David Simon of Crimson Dark, who was cool enough to share his techniques on YouTube, had an interesting way of doing the clothing of the characters in 2d and making them look 3d.
This was the first of my experiments, in using a 3d character and then creating 2d clothes. In the end, I decided to ink the clothes over the top in Painter and then use Simon’s technique for painting the lighting on the clothes so it looks semi-3d. But I think one of my big mistakes as you can see in the second pic, it that the line work is so “comicish” and to bold. So it didn’t quite fit with the 3d character. My temporary solution was to apply filters: Paint Daubs and Poster Edges, to make it look more artistic. Together they made the suit and character look more like they belonged together. Not perfect, but kind of interesting. It looks more artistic at any rate. Here’s the original image before the filters.
Again, you can click on the thumbnails to see a bigger image. As with all my stuff it’s a work in progress, and this is my first effort at combining 3d characters with 2d clothing. The benefit of the 2d clothes is that they can be any design and take less initial setup work since I don’t have to model or texture anything. That’s always the trick with these things. By the way, to set your mind at ease this is all experimental for another comic, not TFR. So let me know what you think of the style and where you think it’s good or bad, and I’ll try to keep posting stuff, even if it’s just art or articles about the TFR universe.
