S&F Extra - October (Patreon)

It's S&F Extra time! Here's a behind-the-scenes look at what I worked on last month. 

In the gallery above, you'll find the final version of each piece, as well as some animated GIFs of how some of them came together.  And down here, I'll provide some info about each piece!

October Inks
I thought you all might get a kick out of the process GIF in the gallery, which shows how I go about photographing and coloring my "inktober" style pieces. Over the years, a few people have asked me how I get my photos of the line-art so crisp and high contrast. So, it's time for TECHNICAL TALK! (Feel free to skip ahead to the next piece if you're not interested in this nitty gritty stuff.)

First, I take a photo in very, very neutral ambient lighting... usually a brightly lit room with a ton of natural light coming in the window. This results in an image like the first step of the GIF... something low contrast, but with no shadows or lighting highlights/reflections on the page. From top to bottom, the paper is all (relatively) the same shade of grey pixels. 

Then, I heavily narrow the levels sliders in Photoshop, until the inked lines look pure black and the paper looks pure white! That results in an image like step 2.

If I want to then colour these photos, I duplicate the lineart onto a separate layer and hit it with the Threshold effect. This makes the line-art look very pixely, but also very easy to colour. Once I'm done adding the colours, I set that layer to "multiply" and run it on top of the original non-thresholded, non-pixely lineart. And that's that!

Texts from Bunsen
I've finished the cover art for the new Bunsen book that I mentioned last month. In the gallery above, you'll find a full process GIF. It's a complicated one... lots of layers!

Libearbee
Here's a little sketch I drew during a recent D&D session. The Libearbee is, obviously, a bear/bee chimera who works at a library. OBVIOUSLY.

Vampire Jess
For the spooky season, I thought you all might get a kick out of this PG-ified version of a recent Saucy Hippo drawing. I am actually really curious about what would happen to pop culture vampires -- and all their related tropes -- in a world where vampires have been revealed to actually exist. Would the massive array of vampire books and movies suddenly become offensive relics? What about "sexy vampire" halloween costumes?

Spooky Sketches Past
Since it's Halloween month, I thought it would be fun to look back on some of my favourite S&F dress-up pieces I drew in previous years. These ones are all from 2016 and 2017! You can see the full-sized versions of all ten in the gallery. From left to right we have:

-Sam and Fuzzy as Rick and Morty
-Jess as Amethyst from Steven Universe
-Brain and Fuzzy as Bill Cipher and Dipper from Gravity Falls
-Dev and Conscience Cat as Hazel and Brain
-Gert as a roller derby player
-Mr. Sin and Fridge as Handsome Jack and Claptrap from Borderlands
-Sam and Dev as ghostbusters
-Fuzzy as a Care Bear
-Hazel and Brain as Samus and a Metroid
-Fuzzy as Monokuma from Danganronpa

I love drawing dress-up pieces! I will definitely be doing some more new ones before the month is over.