"Red Monika - Private Dancer" is a finished work, but I thought some people like to see some snapshot of how the colouring progressed. Note that the pencils were provided by King Cheetah.


This first snapshots shows I'm not very systematic with my colouring. Using King Cheetah's pencils as a guide, I've drawn all of the flats, some of the lines, started adding shadow and lighting.


You can see how much better the shadow looks on her face in this one. Once I was happy with that I used a similiar shadow all over her. I've added the yellow lighting over the right of her body where I imagined a light source from a fire would reflect on her. I've also added some blue to her body to match her hair which is lit by stars. Her skin tone has also been changed.

I've also changed the blue in hair. One of the great things about Inkscape is being able easily reuse gradients and when you decide to change colours you only have to change it in one spot. I do this constantly.


Here I've changed the colour of the light on her skin and added more yellow light to her hair. I applied a simple radial gradient to the skull to give it initial depth then added lighting to it to define it's shape. I've also started playing with a night sky background.


Tweaked the yellow light on her skin even more. All lines are finished now. Notice the high contrast gradients on her metal gear to give it a real shine. Again I've used the imaginary star and fire light sources as a reference. I also changed the shapes of lighting on the skull to use gradients rather than flat colour that way it doesn't look chiselled.

That was the last snapshot I took before the final image.

very cool thanks! Just wondering.. are you using more than one layer? How are you getting multiple gradients on the body for example?

Darth_Gimp wrote:very cool thanks! Just wondering.. are you using more than one layer? How are you getting multiple gradients on the body for example?

I use multiple objects, each with it's own shape and gradient. You don't need to use different layers, but it can help keep things organised. Take a look at http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/56207425/ and you'll see how I overlay multiple objects. This is easier to see on her face where I use elipses to create the shading on her cheeks and nose. I can provide snapshots on this image also if you like.

This leads to another question. Looking at the last link you shared (thanks by the way love your gallery) I see varied line widths. The black outline on her left arm (our right) for example and along the torso.

Darth_Gimp wrote:This leads to another question. Looking at the last link you shared (thanks by the way love your gallery) I see varied line widths. The black outline on her left arm (our right) for example and along the torso.

ill have a guess that they are not "stroke" but just a seperate path. AFAIK, variable width paths are not possible with SVG... (dont quote me on that...)

Darth_Gimp wrote:This leads to another question. Looking at the last link you shared (thanks by the way love your gallery) I see varied line widths. The black outline on her left arm (our right) for example and along the torso.

Ah, well I'd like to take credit for that, but I simple took the original pencils, darkened them in Photoshop then use the 'Trace bitmap' feature in Inkscape to convert them to vector.

But if you doing them yourself, I recommend simply creating a path with no fill but have the stroke roughly the thickness you want. Then go to Path > Stroke to Path to convert the stroke to a shape you can edit. Then you simply manipulate the nodes to make the line variable thickness and tapper off.