Learning Goals and Gradient Maps (Patreon)

So it's been about a year since everyone's plans were completely upended and disrupted. I've written before about how this really shuffled a lot of my priorities, goals and plans. Since then I've been trying to think about where I want to invest my time. 

I decided on two main objectives: I want to take a step back and work on levelling up all of my "component skills". What on Earth does That Mean...? Well! Comics are a very complex art, and combine a lot of different skills - writing, drawing accurately, portraying emotion in art using line and colour... when you make comics you're using a lot of skills and thankfully all of them improve with this practice. However, sometimes it can be faster to focus on one skill at a time. 

The other objective is I want to become a Clip Studio power-user. Clip Studio is the software that I'm using to make my comics these days. It's great! I consider myself pretty proficient in it... but I know this software has a lot more power than I know how to use. So while I'm taking a step back, I'm going to try to figure out these less-obvious features and use them in my levelling-up process. 

While I was working on Shenzhen Fast I was able to practice with a number of new tools - namely Clip Studio's Page Manager tools and Perspective tools. Very handy for drawing all those buildings and machines...!

Another one I wanted to figure out was Gradient Maps. Basically, it's a tool that takes a greyscale image and applies colours that you define - so each tone of grey corresponds to a different colour. The drawing at the top is one you've seen before - it was the header image for last month. I started by laying down these grey "flats".

Next I made some quick light and shadow layers...

Now here's where the fun starts... I can now apply a gradient across the whole image and have it map to these areas of light and shadow. 

Immediately a lot more interesting than just grey! Using this method I can also very quickly mock up a bunch of different colour styles/moods...

So that looks... cool, but it doesn't necessarily look like a real forest, right? So next I made another "flat" layer with some basic colours for bark, foliage and rocks.... This is how it looks with just a plain "overlay" mode applied to the greyscale. 

More realistic... but a bit "flat". The lighting isn't very interesting and it doesn't have a lot of mood. What I can do now, though, is use those "flat" colours to make a set of gradients - each one with its own gradient map. 

Interesting...! But maybe not the best for this image. As you can see I have some masking problems here... the ferns are not.......... the best shapes for doing clean flats, regrettably. But this might help if I was trying to plan out a more detailed painting that I might do later on. And with this level of control I can do a lot of interesting stuff. 

The last thing I tried was leaving the flats as overlay, and then making gradient maps just for the light and shadow layers. This way I can more easily control the "mood" or time of day of the panel...

Not too bad! This one is a lot more realistic, and definitely has more realistic light, but again my, uh... rough treatment of the light layer needs a lot of work. 

So that's what gradient maps are! Now I know :) Which one is your favourite?