Gold Iron-Man helmet

Working with lighting - absorption, refraction, reflection - on metals.
Gold is... interesting. It absorbs light, but reflects more than enough to be able to have a mirror-esque finish. Soft and malleable, easily dulled and dented, but capable of a fine shine.

These may look "okay" at a casual glance, and maybe I'm my own worst critique
[no internet, that is not a challenge], but there's something about these that doesn't feel right to me, and I'm not sure what. Going to try and get one more attempt done before class tomorrow, maybe finally nail it down.

This is shading with colours, instead of lightening or darkening an already coloured section.

And this is using the lighten / shadow brush in MS5.  The shadow brush takes a really light touch to us it without 'burning' the colour.

Update:

A 3rd attempt - about 50% done, ran out of time before class [and dinner].  I like this one much better, but it's still not where I want it to be [but I think I may have found some brushes that'll get me closer to it]

]EDIT[

Here's the 3rd attempt - finished.

Skullkickers colours

Via the wonder of twitter, I saw a link from Jim Zub to some line art for his fun-to-read comic SkullKickers.

So I snagged the made-available [here] line art and spent some [very distracted] time doing this to it:

And in case you're wondering, oh yeah, I borked the booboojeebies out of this.
My light sources are wrong, my shading went off the rails.
This is not quality work. This makes me mad at myself. I need to do this again and do it right.

Here's my flats - no major issues with them, but I completely demolished the highlights, shadows, lighting, contours and depth.

Fantastic Four page - coloured

Aaand here's the flats all coloured up.

Initially saved as a 17meg+ jpg, I resized it down to about 130kb. Gotta love Irfanview.

So the costumes are different from the norm, or any of the redesigns I'm aware of [all-white with some black, and red & black].  I think it works okay - not great or amazing, but it works okay.

The Thing is often orange-y/brown..supposed to be all rock-like. So I spatter-flecked him out with some lighter & darker shades ...pondered trying some marble-style vein/slash designs but it just didn't look good.

Johnny's almost always on fire.. so that's half the team being red[ish] / hot coloured.... and they also tend to be the hot-heads. [moreso Johnny than Ben].

Sue and Reed are the scientists of the team.. so I kept their costumes similar to help balance against the reds/oranges.  Sue's a biologist if I remember right, and would know the value of letting your skin breathe. Yeah, Reed designed the costumes out of ...unstable molecules?... so I'm sure it breathes better than cotton, but nothing breathes as easy as no impediments at all.

Anyhow.. team balance, brains & brawn.. blues and reds.

Fantastic Four page

I don't know about you, but FF means Final Fantasy to me.. probably because I've never been a fan of the Fantastic Four.

There's no script with this bunch of assorted Marvel pages, so I'm just winging it here, feeling a bit adventurous. Also playing with a lot of blue here.

Work in progress - flats.

Colouring the Lartist

The always-a-great-guy Lar de Souza was kind enough to send me his line art & inks for a piece he's doing for a convention or some such thing - you can check out his own colours and such HERE.

I had no idea what colour scheme he would be using for anything, an didn't want to see his finished piece before I made solid commitments to my own colour schemes.  Thankfully, I only saw his after I'd already laid out my flats.

My only complaint is the line art & inks he sent weren't signed by him. I believe in giving credit where it is due, and this wouldn't have happened at all if not for his art.

So here's my colours on his awesome art:

First the flats:

And now the finished piece:

Character Design Version 2

Trying a different shading/colouring technique that, in my own opinion, I need more practice on.
I don't know the proper name for it, I've always referred to it as two-tone shading, or "Simpson's Shading".

Character design, Version One

Version One of a character design for a set of short stories that are brewing. 

There's a few other styles to try out before I settle on one.