Majin Badge Walkthrough

Just a little walkthrough showing how I shaded a badge. I tested out a style of shading I haven't practiced in a year or two, but I thought the style would suit the badge rather well.

The character depicted is Majin copyrighted to BlueWolfCheetah on Deviantart. Art is mine though.



Just the base colors. Nothing really drastic or interesting as of yet. Typically I put the base colors of all the markings and such on the same layer, but this time I separated them out in order to do the sort of shading I wanted to.



Lighting is my weakness so I blocked out the direction the lighting is going to be coming from.



Working on the shading. I'm doing it gradient style. Used to be really popular and now that I can actually figure out the style, it's sort of fallen out of popularity a little bit. Shame...it is a beautiful style.



And shading all done. Basically the shading is done on layers of the colors/markings done. Not nearly as much room for mistakes as opposed to if I put the shading on a separate layer from the colors. However to get the right colors to blend together, putting them on the same layer works rather well. If you want to see how it's done, Kuitsuku's tutorial shows it really well: .



Add the background, backlighting, and shine. Had to change the background color so I could clearly see the glowing off the moon and stars so I could go back and tweek them later. Background's just a simple sky. Take two shades of blue. Use the gradient tool and add small stars (put the stars on a separate layer though). The stylized moon and stars...I put a lighter color inside and on a separate layer the glow is the same color as the "inner glow". Use an airbrush on low opacity to get the glow effect.



Eyes are always the last thing I color. Usually I go more detailed than this, but this is a bit more simplified version. The glass in her glasses was the very last detail one. It's a pale blue with a layer of white gradient shine over it. Bother layers are lowered in opacity to give the illusion of glass.

This is more of a walkthrough than a tutorial. However if you have any questions about the process, don't hesitate to ask. Most of this can possibly be covered in Kuitsuku's tutorial however.

Storyboards

For my storyboard concept and development class's final project, we have to create a Leica reel for something we hope to turn into a full animation. I chose to create a storyboard for the song "Hero's Come Back" by +nobodyknows from Naruto Shippuuden.

These are the first two. Something to just start me off before I really get started with my final storyboards. These'll probably change a lot for the finished product. My main idea for this was to not create a full story nor animation based on the words of the song. The song's in Japanese anyways. But I wanted to create something based on the mood of it. Hero's Come Back has a pretty upbeat tempo and I always think of a battle when I hear it. That might be some of the influence from Naruto, but I think a fight sequence would go great with this. So basically there's going to be somewhat of an epic battle between my evil characters and a bunch of good characters (some that belong to me and others that do not). This is also gonna double as a gift for some people I consider friends and inspirations. Unfortunately because I think this is going to be difficult enough as it is, I don't think that I could put in everyone and everything that I would want to, but that's okay because I have some more ideas in mind that I could use.

My teacher warned that if I did make an animation out of this that I wouldn't be able to show it off (except maybe as a portfolio piece). I was aware of this, and I'm just using this as an exercise in timing and movement. I do want to make something to go along with the song CaramellDansen as an exercise in lip sync...but perhaps later.