Another experiment in not coloring. I decided this time that I didn’t want to color (again), but that I might like to do some shading. Actually, I tried the shading 3 or for times (yay for saving a scan of the lineart) and this is the best I did, though the first attempt had some areas that I preferred. It’s the first time I’ve tried to shade with ink and hopefully I’ll get better and more consistent with practive. For now I’m going to consider this a success since there was a minimum (at least for me) of digital cleanup involved. My next few projects will probably be like this; I’d like to see what I can do with just ink.

Nothing particularly special about the pose, though I think it came out pretty well. For once drawing the hands didn’t murder me, though that right (her right) arm gave me some trouble getting a pose with the right perspective.

Note: I really do wish it were summer, just not for any reason that people might think from this picture. I’m just tired of it being cold.

Yes, it is a trio of cheerleaders dressed in gothic lolita. Sure the clothing is not at all practical to the leading of cheers, but that’s not the point. The idea amused me, so here it is.

I thought it might also be interesting to do something a little different with this piece and instead of coloring I wanted to just a monotone piece. No shading, just black and white. I think it worked out pretty well, though I did end up spending more time touching things up on the computer because of all the black touching black. If I had been more careful I might have avoided adding all the white outlines.

The pom-poms didn’t come out all that well in my opinion, but it’s really the first time I’ve tried anything quite like them.

Since I interrupted this project midway through the development of some of the techniques gets a little convoluted, but here it goes. First, the lining. I had originally planned to use the scanned linart straight up with only minimal corrections in a effort to speed up the process. I had already laid down the base colors and the first layer of shading when I decided that this just wasn’t going to work and went back to redo the line art. I didn’t want to go back and just draw in vector lines so I went ahead and tried to draw over the lines with my tablet. It was the first time my Wacom and I really saw eye to eye and (with a little copy and paste where I really needed symmetry) it worked out well. I would do the same with the drawing for the 4th. In case you doubt the improvements, here’s the new outline over layed over the cleaned up scan (black = new, red = scan):

A large improvement I’m sure you’ll agree.

Shortly after finishing the reline work I went of to work on the aforementioned other project. I worked on this a little bit in July; got most of the shading worked out. Alas I had a busy month in August and didn’t get anything else done, but I finally got around to finishing it this weekend. I used more or less the same coloring techniques as I had for the 4th of July project, so the shading is a little softer than most of the stuff I’ve worked on. I also went a little easier on the shading than I normally tend to; I think I usually overdue the darkest level of shading and glare so I tried something different.

Since I put my previous project on hold to try and finish this on in time, the drawing is my first (completed) image to be completely digitally inked by hand. I finally feel like I’ve justified the purchase of my Graphire. w00t! All the coloring work and the lineart on the character was done with the GIMP.

The background was thrown together in Inkscape (and then blurred in the GIMP). I’m not sure it integrates all that well with the character, but it doesn’t look too bad and I was late as it was.

Gallery of Screenshots

Right, so this is the best picture of my GM; in this picture it looks better than it really is. If you could see it up close you’d see all the things I did wrong. About all you can probably get from this picture is that the main body is darker than it should. Unfortunately my choices for that color were either too shiny or too dark; I went with the too dark optino hoping the white primer would lighten it up. That didn’t happen.

Anyhow, here are the lessons I learned with this project:

1. I should be more agressive when sanding off the little nubs. Even after painting over them, they were still visible.
2. I need to be more careful about how much paint I put on the parts.
3. Painting parts while on the runners may not be the best idea for all but the really small parts.
4. 1/144 scale is really quite small.
5. I need to be mroe careful when hand painting those sections that I can’t spray (gray on the blue parts). I thought it was too small for masking tape, but it’s worth a try next time.
6. Some paints takes longer to dry than others; read the instructions
7. “Flat” toothpicks are just big splinters.
8. A cutting board will protect you table from harm.

The Guncannon I have lined up next should come out better as a result of the lessons learned here, but I will probably want some more practice before I try my hand at the HiNu Gundam.

Below are some more pictures I took throughout the project:

Gallery of Screenshots

It is also notable that this is also my first submission to deviantArt ,since a friend at work suggested I get an account.

Right, so having never put together Gundam kit before, I kind of butchered my Gundam GP01 Master Grade (got it cheap at Big Lots, so I don’t feel too bad…it’s not really that cool of a Gundam unit anyway). Anyhow, since it was snap together and precolored I figured I was golden, but I didn’t invest in proper tools and the parts weren’t separated from the runners all that cleanly . Also, no one I’ve talked to seems to think it’s a good idea leave the colors as is. In any case, here’s the result:

It sat like this on my bookshelf for nearly a year, but now that I’m getting ready to do some different Gundam models it was time for that to change. It’s too late to paint it or correct extraction errors, but I never really did any finishing work on it and that should be good practice. So I took out my Staedtler 0.1 pigment liner and inked the panel lines. Then I also took the time to apply the stickers and decals I had left off. The result was a much more respectable Gundam (at least from a distance):

So, since this was all practice here’s what I learned:

1) I’m definitely inking the panel lines on future projects, the difference is amazing, but I need to take panel inking slower. It’s very easy to become sloppy, and while I wasn’t too worried on this one (it was already sucking up the place) I really want to be more careful on future projects.

2) Next time I’m going to try a 0.005 Micron pigment liner, it will give me better detail. This will probably be even more useful for the 1/144 scales.

3) Decals are a pain and I need to be careful when applying them. I was glad that the decals were dry transfer, but it was difficult to tell when I had gone over them enough to get a full transfer and some of the decals got messed up. Also, some of said decals were painfully small and in hard to reach places.

4) Not sure I like the effect of applying all the stickers. That is to say, I’m not sure adding the unreadable “caution” messages, etc really add anything to the model. The large readable text is nice, but the stickers get ridiculously small and I doubt they were even animated often if at all in the OVA. Also, these stickers do have a clear bit around them that does remain visible. I’ll cross that road when I come to it (my practice kits don’t have any of these), but I’m seriously considering NOT adding these next time I come across them.