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A big bunch of requests came in after my first asking how
I went about shading my stuff. In this guide, Ill go
through shading with simple 3 tone shading, using solid
colour. Ill assume that you have already read
my first tutorial about the basics of flash vectoring.
If not, give it a read!
Again, the methods used can be carried over to any other
vector package. I prefer to use a combination of Flash and
Illustrator, but do the bulk of the vectoring using Flashs
organic tools. Alright. Now that that is out of the way,
lets have some fun!
Setting it Up
The first thing youll want to do, is to make sure that you
use a strong contrasting line colour, to easily distinguish
it from your already coloured piece:
I usually go for something ridiculously bold like orange when Im working with dark colour, and dark purple or red, when working with naturally bright colours (read up on Brightness vs. Whiteness if you have no idea what Im on about). Simply put, if you use colours which match too closely with the existing base colour, its going to suck to pick out.
Light it Up!
Before you start shading, determine where your light source
will come from, and how intense you want it to be:
As a general rule, the more intense the source, the more contrast you will have in your light tones. Just dont overdo it! Highlights will sit on the edges closest toward the light source, whereas shadows do the opposite and try to hide from it. Dont forget cast shadows as well! When something blocks the light, behind it will be a shadow.
Get in Nice and Close
Its vector, so take advantage of it! Using either the line,
pen or pencil tool, draw the line of the shadow/highlight
around the form on the same layer. Remember to
think in 3 dimensions. Shadow lines are almost never
straight, unless the objects contour is:
Imagine you are running a Spiderman style web around whatever you are shading, and as you will see, your shadow will turn out more volumetric.
Tinting
Here comes the fun bit. Using the eyedropper tool, grab the
colour of the base:
Now that you have the colour selected, you can open the colour mixer (Shift + F9). Drag the slider according to how much you think the form needs to be lit/shadowed (remember, more on each extreme or harsher light sources) Now fill in the area you divided off in the previous step with the new colour.
Clean It!
Alright! Now that you have highlighted and shadowed your
stuff, its time to delete the heck out of your lines (if
you vector like me, youll delete them all), and see what it
looks like:
If you find that it looks too beveled, you can either reduce the amount of contrast between the two, or split the shadows and highlights into two toned shadows (similar to stepping with pixel art). To do this, simply resample the shadow or highlight colour, and pick a value that sits between it and the base colour. Draw a flowing line that divides the shadow in half, and then fill in the secondary shadow.
Oh great! Gradients!
Well sweet! You have something coloured up and dandy, but
you want to give it even more volume? Lets get crafty with
some gradients! Create a gradient in the fill panel, and
sample each slider to be that of the base colour. Now
slightly increase the brightness of one, and decrease the
brightness of the other.
Now just click into the area you want to apply the fill to
and see how it looks. Obviously, it is not going to line up
to your light source right away, so you now grab our fun
little friend- the fill transform tool. Use the stretch,
scale and rotate handles to align the gradient according to
your light source:
After you have done the base, go through and work on all of the highlights and shadows, and you will immediately see the difference!
Well gosh! I think Ive given you enough information to start experimenting! Try messing with shadow overlaps, and even layering shadows to see what you get. Ill sometimes export my vectors into a raster program and smudge tones into each other and layer textures to get some groovy effects. Its all about experimentation. Go nuts and have fun with it.
Now go out there and make some art! If you have questions
about anything (including future guides) , feel free to
contact me, or post on the
forums.
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Pasquale D'Silva aka darkmotion |
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