Experimenting with colour and painting the final Robo Samurai design...

Now that I had finished both the final design and a value study of the Robo Samurai, I was about to start work on colouring the design. I opened a new file in Procreate and added a saved version of the black and white design, then duplicated the layer twice and arranged each layer as shown above. 

I wanted to play around with the colour balance of each layer as this is a really quick method to do, you can change the overall colour by doing this and get a sense of how it might look if this particular colour was used. So, starting with the top left I used the lasso tool to draw around all of the body except the wheel and the swords. This area was then selected, I then went to the Colour Balance option (below Hue, Saturation & Brightness) and chose the layer option and adjusted the colours till I'd achieved the green you see in the image above.

Now, this should have been a simple case of rinse and repeat, however when I then tried to use the same process to change the colour of the bottom middle design, for some reason it wouldn't work. I didn't have time to research why so I quickly opened a new file and made the changes in there, then saved the image to my library and went back to the first file and added the Red version to a new layer. I repeated this to create the Blue version as well. 

Now at this point I'd already researched a lot of Samurai imagery, both photos and other people's artwork and found there was a large number of Red Samurai designs out there. I'd also seen the image below when researching sports bikes for the creation of the lower-half of my design and absolutely loved this zingy green. Decision made...

Next I opened a new file and added the line design of the Robo Samurai, then started working in layers above this. Below is a 30 second time-lapse video of this process...

While painting I used the value study shown below to help when making decisions about adding shades and tints and recreating the light and dark areas for contrast.

Below is a close-up of the upper-half of the finished coloured design. Ever since I came up with the idea to place an energy source/light on the chest/stomach area I thought it would be really intriguing to use the same techniques I'd played around with when adding a glow to my sword design. This was done by duplicating the layer, selecting Gaussian Blur and changing the layer type to Add before duplicating once more. 

It worked nicely so I used the same technique on the red cyclops eye...

Throughout the completion of this coloured image it was important to me to try and recreate the different surface textures to add contrast and make for a more interesting finish. The steel blades were coloured using both the Willow Charcoal and Airbrush. The body was mainly done using the Script brush with Willow Charcoal here and there and small highlights using the Airbrush. The tyre was a combination of the Script brush, Charcoal and Spraypaint.

 Overall I'm very satisfied with the finished three-quarter design and look forward to both finishing the other views of this character and creating a proper model to import into After Effects and animate next semester.