Character Design: Goliath - Part 2

Welcome to part 2 of the Goliath tutorial series! If you don’t already know, Goliath is a character I designed for Rob Arnold’s Replicator Comic Book.

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Be sure to check out the latest Replicator campaign at: https://igg.me/at/Replicator1/x/20658139#/

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Now to the video – At this point in the demonstration I’ve outlined the major contours of Goliath’s main concept, and dropped in the shadows. So we have a good idea as to how he’ll be lit, and there’s enough information there to guide us through the next step…

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Rendering!

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Throughout this comic art tutorial the main topic we’ll be covering is rendering and the various crosshatching techniques I like to use to shade my comic book art.

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Hatches have three main characteristics that can be tweaked and modified to get a desired tone or gradient. Those are – the thickness of the hatch, its length and how far away it sits from its neighbor. With those three variables alone we’re able to control how the forms, materials and textures are shaded throughout our character.

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As a general rule of thumb the hatches will start out heavier, and more tightly packed together the closer they are to the core shadows. The idea here is to gradually spread them out and make them thinner as they’re gradually pulled out toward the lighter points of the form.

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This creates a seamless blend between the pure black and pure white values, of the shadows and highlights. On top of that it also helps to describe the dimensions of the form. As each hatch is drawn in, they curve around its surface.

 

Because the rendering conforms to the shape we’re shading, we’re able to visually indicate it’s three dimensional qualities – pushing its depth even further.

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When it comes to controlling the tone our crosshatches are coming together to create here’s what you need to keep in mind –

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To create darker tones, you’ll want to give the hatches a heavier weight, and sit them closer together. This should increase their density, and allow you to keep the tone in those lower value ranges.

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If we want to make our tones lighter, we’ll want to essentially do the opposite of that, making the hatches finer and creating more distance between them.

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You can tweak these aspects of the hatches to scale the lightness and darkness of the tones you’re creating, and there’s a very good chance you’ll need to since many things come into play when it comes to ensuring your shading reads accurately.

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That includes the brightness of your light source and the direction it’s projecting down onto the character from. It also concerns the forms you’re shading – whether they’re curved like a sphere or hard-edged like a cube. Not to mention the materials those forms are made of and the textures which coat their surface.

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I hope you get a ton of value out of today’s lesson and that you’re able to put some of the rendering and crosshatching techniques demonstrated throughout this video to good use.

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PLEASE NOTE: The Goliath video series may not always be available for free. There’s a good chance it’ll be taken down, re-edited and packaged up as a premium product later on. So if you find this lesson valuable, please make the most of it while it’s available for free, by taking notes and putting as much of it as you can into practice. Thanks! And enjoy.

-Clayton

 

Software Used: Clip Studio Paint/Manga Studio

 

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