Monday, January 30, 2006

Fun With Scissors - part 7



Today: Snidely Whiplash.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello John,
This is great stuff...I'd love to see an "in progress" series...from greasy kid's lunch bag to Gleek or whatever. Your rendering is so exact that it's hard not to believe it wasn't all Adobe Illustrator. I'd also love to see your original illustrations. Or should I say: I've seen your originals before and wish the rest of the world could see them. The homage to H&B are great - near perfect but what the world needs now is sum Rozum. I'll keep my eyes out.

10:06 AM
John Rozum said...

Hi Julian,

Thanks, as always, for the compliments. I've considered doing a step by step run through of the process, but it's a bit of an inexact science.

Part of it involves feeling my way around a piece of paper while looking at the image I'm working from, somewhat like typing while watching the screen and not the keyboard, only with scissors. Some of it is roughing out a shape--larger than I need it, and whittling it down, bit by bit until it works (sometimes requiring a second, or even third attempt. Many of the Hanna-Barbera characters were done with me holding two sheets of paper taped together in a place that would be trimmed later, and going through the first step mentioned above. I would end up with a black silhouette, which would be the base character, as well as a color overlay, such as Snagglepus'pink fur. I would then trim the perifery of the pink so that it was a bit smaller than the black giving it that animation cell black line.

Unlike my more involved stuff, the mistakes show more on these simpler characters. If you look closely, you can see on some of them, where the overlay doesn't line up precisely with the black base sheet.

I have gone the other way, working from the top layer down, smaller to bigger, trimming down each successive layer as I go, with the black outline coming last, but find this way more difficult, as I like to work with the character's basic shape first. It make's it easier to estimate everything else by eye without ending up with any feature's being disproportionate to the whole.

Mostly, though, it's a lot of guess work, and just feeling my way through the process.

I could do a step by step run through anyway, but the point of these is to get them done quickly. Scanning each step will veto that.

I'll keep it in mind for the future though.

Check back in.

9:55 PM

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