Han Revisited.

So I felt I was on to something with that digital pass at the Princess Leia. Obviously for work, it's pretty much all digital, and I'm no stranger to coloring pencil art, but this time I thought I would try a different process, combining what I've learned with all these paint tests, and how I work in photoshop.


As we all know, I wasn' t too happy with how the Han and Leia Portrait came out, so I thought I'd revisit Han one more time. And since I viewed this as a coloring test, I just used my trusty black Col-Erase pencil. But. If this was for work, or even portfolio, I'd recommend using a couple of different pencils with light and dark lead weights instead.


So I scanned in the drawing, filled in the blacks, and used the smudge, blur, and erase tools to smooth out the pencils. I probably could have spent a bit more time on it to get a little bit better likeness, and smooth out the 'digital mush', but I wanted to get to the coloring!


Here is the first pass, using techniques of color layers that I normally use for things like Transformers, but against the varying levels of gray, this coloring made most of the skin look 'blown out.' So I copied that color into a new Multiply layer, and blended it...


...making it a lot more subtle, and natural. This is a technique definitely worth developing...!