The Making of Ancestral

My design for the Homestuck t-shirt contest, which you can see in the last post, (or at the end of this one) used a technique I hadn't before and turned out really well, so I thought I'd show the process.

It started with a sketch:

Or rather, a scribble, really just to get down the positions of the characters. (As you can see the Sufferer is the only one I put any care into at this point.) Then I made a finished sketch on Canson bristol:

I inked that all in black with a Sakura micron pen.

That took care of the lines. For color, I took another sheet of bristol. I lightly traced some pencil lines to let me know approximately where everybody was, then went at it wet-on-wet with Winsor and Newton, Daler-Rowney, and Higgins inks.

I made sure to use this ink for the Dolorosa: (Homestuck fans will get why.)

This was the result:

So I scanned in both the lines and the colours, making sure to scan the lines as black and white, not grayscale. In Arcsoft Photostudio, I put the colours on a layer below the lines, then selected the black lines with the magic wand tool and just deleted them. As it turned out, I had painted Redglare's glasses out of position, so I used the Hue editor to change the color of the ink that did end up there.

And there you have it! Wish me luck in the contest!

I thought about it and I wanted to add, for many of my readers who probably know nothing of Homestuck but might have been curious, even confused, at names like the Sufferer and the Dolorosa: yes, these characters are figures of Christ and the Blessed Mother. The comic would not be favored by many Catholic readers, (lots of foul language indeed) but that's there, and it's one of the best parts.