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I like Darkwing Duck, even though it's by a huge corporate
giant that would have me drawn & quartered if they ever found out I drew
one of their copyrighted-out-the-wazoo characters. NegaDuck is an evil
anti-hero to the extreme -- I like him!
This is actually a still from my storyboard of a scene
from my idea of a Darkwing Duck movie. (Which would make the aforementioned
corporate giant have an apoplectic fit -- there's enough violence and bad
language to get it an R-rating! Heh heh!)
Demented imagination; pencil, paper, pen; Photoshop 2.5, CorelDraw 4
I traced the storyboard panel with black ink (a magic
marker, actually) and scanned it in. The lines were thick enough that
they didn't need any cleaning up as usual (see "'Watch
Your Step, Cat!'").
I just used the magic wand (in 'Shop) to select each white
area and slap a gradient fill in it. They say that too many gradients
ruin a picture, but I don't buy it. Every shape in this image, except
the gun stock and cape, has some kind of gradient fill.
On the rim of the gun-barrel, I created the black-to-white-to-black
fill by filling half of the shape with a straight black-to-white fill.
Then I selected the leftover white space and filled in the other direction.
(Of course, nowadays, you'd just use Kai's Power Tools.)
The text balloon wasn't in the original drawing. I
tried to do this in 'Shop. I theoretically could have
done it in 'Shop, but the paths just wouldn't behave. I didn't even
try the text.
I exported the image to Draw and tried out some pre-made text
balloons. I hated all of 'em. So, I made my own! I just
took a rectangle, rounded the corners, drew a sweeping pointy thing over
it and welded. To make it tuck behind the gun barrel, I added 2 nodes
where the shape and barrel intersected, then deleted the original nodes in
between. Miraculously, the curve clipped perfectly to the shape I wanted.
(Normally, I'd have to fiddle with the node handles to get the curve
to match the picture!) Then I gave it a thick outline.
The text was easily positioned, adjusted, sized, given a font
and partial italicization. Then the whole thing was exported as a bitmap
image.
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