Illustrating an alien character in Flash and Photoshop
In this final video on page 147, we bring the painted characters into the actual comic page and composite the whole thing together, as well as painting in the backgrounds, and any final touches and effects.
In this video we open the .eps file with all the characters into Photoshop and paint the shadows and highlights. The beauty of an .eps file, with antialiased off, is that you can open it at any size or resolution (unlike .png which is broken in Flash CS3) and select the various colors perfectly for masks while you paint.
In this video we bring the vectorized lineart into Flash CS3 and do the flat colors. We then convert the characters into symbols that can be reused when needed. We then export the characters as a vector .eps graphic.
In this video, we show the process of vectorizing the comic line art in the open source (and free) vector program Inkscape. It's a little clunky to use, but does a great job converting your line art to vector.
This video shows the completion of page 147, compositing all the characters into the comic, painting simple expressionistic backgrounds, and final touches.
This is part 2 of making page 147 for the webcomic The Far Reaches. This part deals with digital inking using Manga Studio. Commentary will soon be available at www.legendsfromthevoid.com.
This isn't really a "how to use Flash" tutorial. Rather it is a tutorial that shows how you can convert your comic lineart to vector art and bring it into Flash using the freely available Inkscape. It also shows how to color in the line art in Flash, work with gradients, and using a modular approach to characters. Basically, it's just some ways Flash could be used for comics.
