For a future game I really want to use a hand drawn technique. So today I’ve been experimenting with colouring in an old drawing. Here are the results:

The drawing is (heavily) based on an exoskeleton armour guy from the first series of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. To be honest I’m not too bothered about the quality of the pencil drawing itself, this experiment was to test the process of colouring and finishing the image in GIMP. The original version (including layers) can be downloaded here.

First I drew the image on paper (many years ago) before scanning and importing it into GIMP.

The idea is that the drawing handles the outlines, details and some shading; so it was applied as a hard light. I also went around the drawing deleting the outside JPEG artefacts.

Next was to add colour, so underneath I filled new layers with block colours. A dark sandy tone is used for the armour and a very dark grey for the gun. This layer was the only one which was set to normal.

The shading in the original drawing is very sketchy; lots of white and grey lines side by side. This makes the highlights look dirty so to thicken then up I copied the drawing layer, applied a large Gaussian blur and then upped the contrast to give a bigger difference between light and dark. It was set to replace the ‘value’ of the image, which is essentially the lightness of the image.

You’ll notice the shading is still far from even; the large shadows on the legs still look sketchy. But that helps to work as a mix between the pure sketchyness of the original drawing and the large blocks of colour. Plus if it’s too uniform then it won’t look like a drawing anymore.

Finally I added a gradient overlay with the centre placed approximately around the head. This is to accentuate that area of the armour as the centre of the picture. The lines around that area of the body appear more black then those further away.

Putting those layers together gives the final image. I had also thought of texturing the colours but it looked cheap. I’m really happy with the results and plan to use this technique in the future. But I really like is how I’d managed to plan all that out.

First thinking of the effects I wanted to achieve and then picking the GIMP features needed to achieve them. In many ways just like how people approach real software development. I’ve still got a very long way to go, but I’ve definitely learnt more drawing this. Here it is again!