Friday, April 04, 2008

Flashing Ape



So this is a drawing that I did with Flash... I've been using Flash at work lately and I've been dieing to try it at home... this is my first effort on my own.

9 comments:

Tom Moon said...

Are all those little brush strokes auto-vectorized lines?

When I saw this drawing, all those beautiful, bright, primary colors gave me a little charge. It felt like when I was young and just the sight of Superman's costume on the page gets you excited.

Tom Carroll said...

Very cool! Are there any good tutorials out there to show this process?

Rickart said...

Yes! Those are brush strokes that are vecotorized when you lift your stylus! I'm doing this on my Tablet PC, but any Wacom tablet will do.

It's not hard at all... I learned most of what I needed to know in about 5 minutes. Flash has layers like Photoshop, so you can put a sketch in a bottom layer, your line work in another layer and your color fills in-between. If you have a copy of Flash I could talk you through it over the phone in no time. Which isn't to say that I know how to use Flash, just a few of the drawing tools.

I just love what Flash does with brush stokes... you get a lot of happy accidents and polish with very little effort.

For this drawing I picked colors on the fly, but for the stuff I've been doing at the office I've had sketches that have been colored in PS so I have a general idea of where the highlights and shadows are going to go and some mixed colors to use. Yes, Flash has an eyedropper to pick out the colors you are using, even from a bitmap you bring in as a guide.

I know what you mean about the color... there's something very lush and pure about the quality of the brush stokes in Flash.

Mr Goodson said...

turn it into a symbol now and you can do alpha tricks, scale it, animate it etc.

Very nice and inspiring. That's my big thing to do this weekend is to use the new cintiq for some flash. Maybe a little UPA style animation

Jeff said...

Verrrry cool! Yeah the colors have a....freshly printed poster look to them! Animate that sucka!

Davis Chino said...

Very cool--lots of personality, and definitely very fresh color.

Looks like the program has encouraged some new ways of making marks--the Rick Schmitz "caligraphy" is there, but with a twist. I don't know about everyone else, but I have to search a little bit to find the gun--not a big deal, but I like to see tools of violence highlighted.

A very funny--and fresh--monkey.

Rickart said...

You are correct about the buccaneer pistol... the original sketch I was working from had an ugly version of the gun that I created from memory... the one you see here was done on the fly based on some internet reference, hence it's weak appearance. It's no excuse, but it is a reason it's kinda weak.

Davis Chino said...

I like the cartooniness of the gun--I think it's more of a color/value issue--the hands/arms read really strongly, both on their own and related to the rest of the drawing (their dark contrasting the value of the rest of the drawing nicely). Maybe more contrast on the gun would pop it a little more and make it blend less into the body?

You know I only talk about this because I want suggestions from anyone for my own stuff...and because I care.

Rickart said...

And I appreciate the feedback... and I totally agree with you.