Black & White Colouring - Miscellaneous Artwork

Back when comic books were just starting to hit the motion picture movement, I saw a few and was really impressed with the skill and color the designers used to perfect their artwork. So one weekend I started searching for some B&W drawings that I could use to do some colouring. I did a lot of google searching and MSN searches, but just couldn't find the comic artwork I was looking for. Then I headed over to DeviantArt and started doing some searches and soon after, I found this drawing which I thought would work well with my first digital colouring.

I emailed the owner and asked permission to copy his image and do some colouring work to it. After a few days he responded and said it was ok. I was stoked and started on it right away.

I first started by outlining the whole drawing in sections to create the base pattern and outlines. After I was finished doing that, I started creating shapes for the highlights and shadows of the animals and surface areas. I had to create quite a few shapes in order to get the desired pattern effect. Once I finished the base shapes, I then started to work on the colour choices. I started with the dinosaur first, then moved to the squirrel and finally the wolph. After I finished the animals, I worked on the surface areas which were pretty easy to do. The final piece left was to do the background explosion. Explosions have numerous colours and the heat causes the colours to change. I wanted to be as realistic as I could with it, so I looked up some explosion images and studied the colours from the inner most heated area, to the outset of the explosion area. It took a few tries to get the colours right, but after a bit of playing around, I was able to produce the desired effect.