I decided to play off of something that was mentioned in class… change our mascot from Donald Duck.. but I decided to go with DarkWing Duck.
Haha
I tried to stylize it to meet my own style and to try and copy Skottie Young’s technique.

So this is my first attempt to draw and color in his style, but with a subject matter that’s my own.

This is Donkey (yes, a donkey named Donkey).
I guess the hardest part was trying to figure out how to shade it.
There’s a lot of confusing light sources…
I’ll have to mess with that more later.

Another attempt at coloring in Skottie’s style.
This time this was my process:

• I drew it in my sketchbook with the PrismaColor Brush Pen
• Then I scanned it into the computer
• Colored it on PSCS5 w/ Bamboo Fun tablet
• I also used a color overlay on the lines to try and match how Skottie’s looked, since the lines are not completely black.

So overall my method wasn’t too different than last time, except I didn’t use Live Trace and I drew with the brush pen first.

It’s going to be interesting trying to copy his color choice when I try something of my own…

Here’s the original:

So, according to Skottie Young, he sketches things out in Sketchbook Pro first, and then prints it out blue so that he can start inking with a pen.
I tried to copy him with the sketch that I did in Sketchbook Pro.
I used the PrismaColor Brush pen.

Here is the first attempt at getting rid of the blue:

• I changed the levels of the scanned photo.
• Then I used Threshold to make it change completely to black and white
• It appears that the blue does not show up too well in Threshold.

Here is the 2nd method/try:

For this one I:

• Changed the settings to Black and White and then lowered the blue channels to get rid of it
• Then I darkened the lines by adjusting the levels.

I feel that both methods would still need to go through some live tracing to keep them a lot more clean, but to stay truer to the original brush strokes I would stick with the 2nd method before going to Illustrator to Live Trace.

*Here is where I found out Skottie’s method

• Pentel Pocket Brush Pen [made in Japan]
• Kuretake Brush Pen [made in Japan]

After I found this out I wanted to try and use a brush pen to test out how to use it to ink.
So off to the Duck store I went. At first I didn’t manage to find the ones that Skottie uses, so I just picked out the brush pens from:

• Copic
• Sakura
• PrismaColor
• FaberCastell

Funny thing though, after picking them out, I glanced over at some other random pens and there it was! The Pentel Pocket Brush! It looked like someone returned it, but I thought it was really funny because it was the only one there. How fortunate! Lol
But, instead of putting back the other pens (and potentially saving $10) I decided to buy them too so that I could experiment with all of them.
So here they are:

Anyways, so I messed around with them in my sketchbook, and these were my impressions of the tools (click to enlarge and read):

So I found that the Pentel Pocket Brush might now work out soo soo well for me, but since I spent the money on it, I’m going to keep it of course. I kinda like the PrismaColor Pen the best.
However, using these pens to work on details made me wonder what scale he works on to ink these, and what kind of surface..? Is the table tilted for the ink to flow differently?
Just some other things that I would need to keep in mind.

Here’s the reference pic that I used to test the pens with:

So I have been researching what kinds of programs and materials that he uses.
One of them is a drawing program called Sketchbook Pro.
I downloaded the 15 day trial for now to check it out.
I did a couple of sketches using my Bamboo Fun tablet to mess around.

He usually uses this program to do his preliminary sketches.
It’s interesting because for me I definitely use a regular pencil and paper to do this.
The program is a little like Photoshop, but a much MUCH more stripped down interface.
It’s very simple, and it would be cool to mess around with it more… but darn that trial

My Method for this round:

• First drawn in my sketchbook with a Copic 0.2 Multiliner pen
• Scanned it in and then vectorized the lines
• Colored on Photoshop CS5 using a Bamboo Tablet

His method/process to do his art has much more steps than I just did, so here’s the first round to copy his style. Later I will attempt to do the same process that he does in order to understand the tools better.

It was fun to do this. However, to improve in his style, I’ll have to do more with with the line art first before coloring. I also think I need to exaggerate some of the features more. I tried to get it sort of the same, but the mouth on mine is a little smaller and not as warped.
Skottie exaggerates the features in his characters, so I’ll have to keep that in mind.

Here’s the original:

So I made some general observations of Skottie’s work. Here are the 3 main characteristics that I managed to observe.

What I did:

• I used a Copic liner pen to write and draw everything in my sketch book.
• Then I scanned it and put it into Photoshop to use threshold to change it to black and white.
• Then I transferred it into Illustrator to live trace it to make the lines look darker and cleaner.
• I plan on coloring the venom/deathpool sketch to see if I can match his coloring style.

Here are the references for some of these sketches: