Digital Painting Color Maps - Game Character Creation with Blender and Unity - page 149

Sketching is also a viable method of creating digital paintings, especially if you are
familiar with contour drawing. Sketching simple outlines in a light blue, transparent
brush can simulate real-world, no-scan pencils. By creating these light, noncommittal
lines, you can find the lines you like and then add darker black lines for more finalized
shapes (Figure 6.18).

Figure 6.18
Sketching for the
zombie model
sheet. This tech-
nique was used to
give a more comic-
book feel to the
model sheet.

Another useful method for digital sketching that deserves attention is the digital
sketching program Alchemy (Figure 6.19). In recent years, Alchemy has become a popu-
lar choice in the Blender community for concept sketching. It was used in the production
of Sintel and was featured in David Revoy's Chaos and Evolutions instructional DVD on
digital painting.
Alchemy is perhaps the epitome of improvisational digital art. It is an art program that
allows users to create wild shapes according to the motion of their mouse. It has no Undo
command, a decision that was designed into the product to foster brainstorming. Artists
can utilize varied effects for mirroring their images and other useful twists. The program
even has a mode that changes the artist's stroke style based on the sounds coming into the
computer's microphone. Forget playing records backward to hear hidden messages—now
you can see what kinds of art they produce.