Vector Carrion

I've been experimenting with vector colouring. Normally I export the lines into Photoshop and then colour them there. Flood fills under a multiply layer make life fairly easy. I've been getting more and more comfortable with Inkscape though and the colouring jobs I'm doing are getting fiddlier and fiddlier. So I tried a thing.

I think I like it. It means I have to do some things differently - I have to delete line sections that I want to be invisible (I used to just hide them behind white shapes). So it's a good idea to keep a source copy of the linework so i don't have to reconstruct it if I decide to make changes. Not an enormous bother.

It suddenly occurs to me that they look like a Pokémon evolutionary line in this picture. Oh dear.

The long pointy arcs of colour are much easier as vectors, which is handy because I found myself doing those a lot. Other shapes are harder - I wanted to tear my hair out putting the highlights on those intestines. The hulk and the titan have more detail than just about anything else I've done though. I wanted to test it with something meaty (no pun intended).

I've also scaled them differently. I used to use a fixed square as my scale guide, fitting everything inside it. This had the odd effect of making people holding their arms above their heads shorter than people standing upright. I'm now going to allow them to have different sizes as appropriate, and scale human figures to each other. Line thickness will stay absolute, so larger creatures will look like they have thinner lines, and all human-size figures will have the same relative line thickness.

Toyed with making another leap to variable line thickness and maybe even abandoning the flat ground-line, but decided against it for now.  For now. Also pondered giving proper hands to people. Again, not yet...


Oh yeah - the leftmost guy is new. He's a carrion zombie. Zombies are pretty boring, but I felt that this theme needed a human-scale something. I may have felt wrong. He was a valuable prototype though. Working out how to do a human-scale ribcage was a big problem and I'm not sure I've got the right answer yet. I used so much colour detail that the lines are obscured anyway.

I'm not sure I'm going to do more Carrion. They're meant to be ancient skeletons slowly re-clothing themselves in flesh. With strange masks. Not sure where else I could go. Differently proportioned figures? Not enthusiastic yet - these are cool on their own.