"Imaginative Creator of Spring" and some behind the scenes

It's already April and I'm posting this Well it's okay, there are always some countries experiencing Spring, eh?

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Note: All images you can see here are heavily resized, if you are looking to download it, look for the download links at the bottom of this post!

I completed this thing quite a long time ago, trying out some new stuff. It's the second time I'm trying to use both traditional pencil traces and digital drawing methods. Since I don't have a drawing tablet and that thing is expensive as heck, I tend to use only one of these at a time (for example, "Sometimes We Fall" is a complete pencil drawing, "Her World" and "The Dreammaker" are full digital drawings, while my profile picture is a combination of both). It is still somewhat special this time, as it is the first time I'm colouring a pencil drawn thing as if it is drawn directly with a computer.

This is how it looks like on paper, it's how the thing initially looked like. It looks more complex, eh? Yea, the original design has more lines and stuff. Since I actually have the urge to fill up all the space I have on a canvas, this is what happened...not too bad, I hope?

Someone might prefer this over the final version? Idk lul.

Pencil drawn stuff feels more natural, smooth and flexible in my opinion, since, I don't have a drawing tablet T.T Drawing on a paper also gives some other little details that cannot be produced by a tablet. See the shades on the girl's hair? It is caused by continuous erasing and redrawing with different angles, and hence it is a little messy and random. It is produced unconsciously, and I love it. That's what human errors bring to creations that computers cannot reproduce.

The main aim of the method I'm trying here is to create the usual line drawings I'm used to make in the past drawings, while still using a pencil. Thanks to the high quality scanner in my school's library, I managed to get a clean and clear image of my drawing on paper as seen above. What's next? Of course, put it into Krita to mess with it.

Colour to alpha -> Let it turn #ffffff to transparent. It makes everything go transparent except for where I have traced. Then, cancel all active selections (by selecting a 1x1 pixel randomly), and tell Krita to select opaque parts. That's how it magically selected all parts I have traced, and I can just pick up a huge 100x100 pixel brush tool to start splatting colour at parts I want - the safety net is already set, I won't colour parts that are not selected, which means I will only grant colour to what I have drawn!

Did I mention about the shade at the girl's hair? Do you think it's so perfectly fit into her hair? You are too naive if you did. It splats everywhere, because I erase everywhere - and it is indeed messy. It took some effort to clean it up....

Oops, coloured it white instead of erasing it...fixing it again after adding background colour.

It's how the the shade only appeared within her hair - I cleaned it up :D this is one of the biggest advantages I can see when using a computer, things can go super precise. The computer knows how to set the safety net and prevents errors, plus it gives the sharpest weapon you need to kill details that are out of your pencil's reach.

Regarding the lines outside that served decoration purposes (?), they are only selectively coloured - I decided that too many of them actually make the whole thing a little too tiring to look at, and it lacks some order (well idk, it just seems a little wrong in my eyes, but now looking it back it seems to be well...?). The gradient is painted brush by brush - it is very fun doing so when Krita gave me the safety net to do so. It's literally impossible to achieve the same thing on a watercolour painting or using colour pencils. Best part - the whole thing looks exactly like using colour pencils, while I don't even need to use a "pencil brush" or something like that and try to replicate it with my mouse.

So after adding the background colour and making sure that everything looks correct - hide the pencil drawing layer - tada~

You can see a thin border out there - idk why, the paper is a legit A4 paper while the scanner is also correctly configured to scan A4 papers...well, maybe magnification issues. Not a big deal, we can crop it away - and it is the end product you see on top of this post :)

Alright end of post, here's the links I promised :D

Direct link to full size image (6910x4862 pixels)
Direct link to full size pencil trace ver. (7016x4961 pixels)

(Pencil traced ver is slightly larger because it is not cropped - there is a small white border around it)

Hope you liked this post, see you soon~

--Lilacse

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