Saturday, January 08, 2011

Ladies Of The Legion: The Villains

Yes, after all these months, it's a new Ladies of the Legion picture:



Meet Glorith of Baaldur.
...
I don't have much more to say about her, as when I read Legion in my youth, I was completely unaware of her existence. I only recently learned of her existence in reading the Showcase Presents volumes, which collect the earliest adventurs of the LoSH.
In those stories she was the non-powered henchwoman of the Time Trapper, one of the Legion's deadliest enemies, but honestly, she didn't do much.
In later stories - after I'd stopped reading the Legion's series - she became much more prominent, apparently.
Lacking any particularly interesting insights into the character, in approaching the picture I though about her connection to time and also about the notion of an "hourglass figure," and decided to try to add a bit of a visual punch to the image with the dress made up of flowing sand, and the cartoonishly "womanly" figure. As is so often the case, the concept was better than the execution...
There are some things that are significant about this image though. For one, I drew the basic image - without any sort of reference - completely by hand in Manga Studio before bringing it into Photoshop to do the coloring, touch-ups, and effects.
I'm still trying to get the hang of Manga Studio, but I find it so much easier to default back to the more familiar Photoshop.
I've run into various stumbling blocks in trying to get past the Manga Studio learning curve. I'm beginning to suspect that the biggest stumbling block is that I'm really not that good, which is something that, to a certain extent, I'm able to adjust for in Photoshop.
I don't know. Anyway, it's a picture.

4 comments:

Mario said...

I have to disagree as I think you ARE good.
Lately I'm experimenting with doing the coloring in Photoshop as well. Until now I did all the work from sketching, penciling, inking and coloring in Manga Studio.
There are just certain things that the coloring features of Manga Studio don't have. Things as playing with Hue saturation and the brushes are very limited in comparison with Photoshop. Especially when it comes to the smoothness of the brushes.

I immediately thought 'Hey, this artist has switched to Photoshop to do the coloring' when your artwork popped up on my screen.

Very well done!

Have fun drawing and a very nice day,

Mario

Merlin T Wizard said...

I zoomed in on the picture before I read about the hourglass figure thing and thought about how similar it looked to Red Hood in that classic Warner Bros take on the story. I know that what appears on the page doesn't always mirror what's in your head, that's the main reason I don't draw anymore, but I think you succeeded in getting the concept across rather well.

Jon Maki said...

Thanks (to both of you).
From what I've seen, I can't imagine using Manga Studio for much beyond very basic coloring.
My biggest problem with it so far is that the line work looks extremely bitmpped and aliased at anything beyond about a 25% zoom level. From what I've read online, that should go away when the image is exported, but that hasn't been my experience.
Where the "I'm really not that good" part comes into play is terms of doing things completely freehand, as I've gotten so used to working with paths in Photoshop. So my lines are pretty shaky and jagged, and I don't seem to be able to get them to join very well. There's always some extra bit of line that has to be erased.

Mario said...

You can use the correction levels for the drawing tools in Manga Studio to get the shaking out of your line work.
The line work will be absolutely smooth if you use a vector layer for it, what is only available in the EX version.