Colouring the Arm

Despite having finished the complete robot print a while back and having displayed it in the Collide exhibition, I still wasn't quite happy with the finished picture. Something wasn't quite right. It took me a long time to come to terms with it.

I think I was expecting the picture to be a big joining of lots of different shapes, colours, and styles, like a pile of dirty laundry. But it wasn't quite looking like that. It took me a while to realise it, but instead of being a mash-up of different parts, it's instead become interesting for a totally different way. Apart from one limb, he's an incredibly cohesive bot. It took me so long to realise what needed to be done to make it work. It just needed the detail fineliner arm to fit in more.

I'm no stranger to colouring my robot artwork. Initially all of my drawings were coloured, mostly in pencil crayon. But starting with A Certain Romance, this stopped being the norm, and I  stuck with black and white art and focused on the detail. I've since had a few attempts at colouring my art, using the the gradiented technique I used on the first batch of New Captain Cool art. I had a little success with that but I never felt like it fitted my style. When I did the batch of Citybots that accompanied Bigger Chris, I had to find a technique that would do them justice. I decided to dial things back a bit. I set up a really limited colour palette of shades of brown with some greys and reds. There were about seven colours in all. I then used these as block colours, observing lighting and shading but also adding details and embelishing in the other colours. This worked well.

I had no doubts about using that technique for this arm. The usual robot colour scheme had partially inspired the colours of this bot, and I already had the vector arm to give me a colour guide. This made things fairly simple. I gave the robot a quick coverage of the basic colours of the other arm, adjusting for the new shading layout. Afterwards I used the more minor colours to add detail to the arm, simply by adding colour to individual sections across the robot. I then repeated this with the other detail colours. I took note of the area colours as well with this. The brown area mostly uses the beige detail colours whilst the dark green sections make far more use of the blues. It helps to keep the sections distinct. To finish I used the magic wand tool to clean up the edges, then re-added it to the C4D model. I also had the chance to make a few stylistic tweaks, making the arm slightly bigger as well as the head so it fitted onto the pipes on the torso. I then rendered it out at 800 dpi to account for the broken camera of the C4D file. For the finished robot I had to flip the image (as C4D flips it back) and I also increased the brightness as it looks too dark when the colours are combined with the high-density detailing. I prefer the dark one for the limb on it's own though. I feel it's a little more characterful.

Now the arm's been coloured the picture works so much better. It's got a symetrical colour layout and the only B&W parts are the waist and thighs. I'm proud of this one.