Milky Way Railroad: Chapter 1, Making of

I learn so much from reading other people’s techniques and get inspiration from knowing that even the pros have to work at their drawings for hours, even days, tweaking them to get them just right. Here’s my process from start to finish. I hope someone will find it helpful!

I used some techniques I learned from reading Sam Bosma’s blog. Go check him out, his work is crazy good!

I did about 15 or 20 thumbnails for this drawing before deciding on the one you see here. I’d post ‘em up but the sketchbook they are in is lying in a box on some boat in the pacific on its way to california from japan.

Rather than try to draw characters into a composition, I like to draw them seperately in pieces. This gives me the freedom to move them around in photoshop until I feel like I’ve got a good balanced composition based on my thumbnail. Also if you’re anything like me, drawing on a big clean sheet is nerve wracking, so this helps cause I don’t feel like I have to get someones face perfect or I’ve messed up an entire drawing.

I then printed the comp out really big using four sheets of 8.5 by 11 paper. Tape em together, and use tracing vellum to do my pencils. I would usually just draw the whole thing in photoshop, but my big wacom is also in the depths of a boat somewhere.

After scanning in the pencil drawing, I decided I wanted something more clean, so I went over the pencil lines with my little graphire that could. I also completely changed Zanelli’s face to fit more with the style of the rest of the drawing.

It helped a lot to get the values down before putting in color. There probably comes a point where you don’t need to do this anymore…but I’m not there yet. Coloring is the hardest part for me. To do this, I just trace the shapes using the line drawing, throwing in random values, until I’ve got every shape cut out and on it’s own layer (its very important to stay organized here, maybe create a separate folder for each character). Then I get rid of the lines, and use only the shapes to find my values. If it reads well without the lines, it’ll read all the better with them.

I would usually spend more time on shadows, but didn’t feel like dealing with it, so I created this quick layer of blue shadows and set it to multiply.

The red noses and ears…I dunno why I do it. I guess it makes them feel a little more alive. Maybe I’m modelling them after myself?

The bounced colors and shadows in the third picture… I don’t really know all the rules, and there are plenty of webpages out there devoted to this subject. I just kinda go with, if theres a red wall, anything next to it is gonna get a bit of a red tint. Sometimes I don’t care about the rules and just add whatever color I want. Sometimes that works, but usually it looks terrible.

Adding the lines back never gets old. Its like opening a present on Christmas morning.

I wish I could say that I hand make all my textures but the you could call me a big liar. I got the ones I used on this image from a great blog called Lost and Taken. Its full of all sorts of textures.

Using these help get rid of that cold digital feeling. Its a quick cheat though. I’m sure there are better ways. I usually put set these layers to soft light, but just experiment and find what works best for you.

Adjust the levels and color balance and you’ve got a finished image!

I gave myself two days to finish this (although I’ve been doing thumbnails here and there for at least a month now), so while I could keep tweaking and tweaking to my hearts content, my self made deadline is up and this is the final.

Thank you for reading :)

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