I used to draw quite a bit when I was younger, as I got older my designs became more refined and my pictures started to look more professional. I started to use computers and art specific programs to color and add lighting effects. The difference was profound.
I had drawn some characters I was proud of and gave them back stories but I didn't want to have to redraw them on the art programs I was using so I decided to scan them. The scanner got the pics but because the paper was old and faded it captured the color of the paper as well.
Here is a pic that I drew and scanned years later and started to clean.
The amount of time this took was ridiculous, if I tried to flood fill it deleted the picture, so I had to painstakingly zoom in close and erase all the grey manually.
Here is that finally finished.
While still zoomed in I retraced all the lines so that they were solid black, there couldn't be any openings in the lined because once again if you flood fill and it found an opening the whole screen would be colored. It took many attempts to find every nook cranny with a hole but I finally got it colored.
I had never shaded anything before so played around with special effects and ambient lighting but I didn't like the results so I decided to keep it simple and played with just light and dark colors and I think I did quite well.
This was one of my first tries with the computer assisted art program, I think it was jasc paint shop pro 5? I was never truly satisfied with the end product it always seemed like it was missing something, I tried numerous backgrounds but I never found something that worked, I finally gave up and settled on this:
Still not happy with this either so I started a different project.
This picture was so much worse than the last one because I had colored it first, removing the greys made me cross eyed after a while but I finally finished.
I got a little too excited and started to color it before I saved.
Here is the finished product.
I really dislike the the rendered background but I'm pretty happy with the overall look of this.
I did try to go out in the world and work for a comic company and I went to an animation school to learn how to animate, but in the end there was no one that appreciated my work as much as I did and I didn't get a job, it turns out that this will be a hobby, one that I think I may get back into.
Hope you guys enjoyed a little slice of my private collection.
Scott Goerz
