Here are two color projects I done for my friend vilot11 on DA who done the line art, hope you like it
I know you color them and you're not drawing the line art, but something is just a little "off" with Prime's face/shield area, seems a little out of skew to me...Your colors are wonderful tho.
You're right, as Prime's faceplate's proportions are off, as the plate is skewed up right too far. The coloring on Prime is nice. Sideswipe is a bit flat, though. I'd recommend varying the colors and tonality of your shadows a bit more. Thanks for sharing and keep up the good work
I have noticed the face plate as well on Optimus and I tried to keep things right but it was hard with him. and as for sideswipe I may go back and deepen some of the shadows and add some more highlights to make him stand out better, but thanks
here is a few more fan colors I done for DA member XenoPrime (the two mini bots I done in flat colors on purpose to keep them in a g1 feel) Mini Megatron Mini Optimus Here is another OP coloring I done the line art came from Dan Khanna
I think Sideswipe suffers from being all silver, it might be an idea to break it up by doing his internal robot parts a bluey-silver instead of the same shade as his chassis. Probably not movie accurate, but kinder on the eye.
I like where you're going with this, but the colors aren't vivid enough and you need to have more variance in shade with the greys. As it is it looks like the colors are laid over them, not on them.
The above nails it. Personally I think it's a really excellent job, curvy metal like that is not an easy thing to get right. The shading is in all in the right places, which is the hard part, just lacking some contrast. Grab a piece of shiny silver metal and have a look at it, the reflections in it range all the way from black to white, if you just have them as shades of grey then that will make it look grey rather than silver. Just need to a bit bolder with the shading that's all, you don't need any more highlights or shadows adding, the lights just need to be lighter and darks darker, in order to look like this: Example (this was literally just increasing the contrast of the image in photoshop) One other thing on the above example, the lights. As he's a pretty monotone character his eyes and headlights have a great chance to really lift him. It's dead easy to do nice realistic loking glows, the key thing to remember is that lights aren't actually a colour, try looking at a lightbulb. Actually don't, that wouoldn't be very healthy, look at this instead: so even though if you glanced at that you would say that the light was blue, if you look at it closer you can see clearly that the light itself is pure white (it's true, try eyedroppering it in photoshop), it just has a blue glow on it. So colour your lights white or slightly off-white at most, then on the layer beldning options set an outer glow of the appropriate colour, and then set the transparency mode of the outer glow to 'linear dodge'. here's another perfect example, at a glance you would say that one lightsaber is a red light adn the other blue, however you can see where they cross over that they're both in face pure white with coloured glows: so between the contrast and the lights that's only a couple of very minor tweaks, but after that to my mind it's at least it's really good and i far prefer it to the official renders in which he just looks battered and worn, yours actually looks like it matches the alt mode. hope that helps!
another tip for you, background. if you can design your background so that light areas of it are against dark edges of the character and vice versa it can make a huge difference: it's an old trick, here's rembrant doing exactly the same thing:
thanks guys for the tips and doing bots that were originally 3D models is very hard in photoshop. I am learning coloring techniques with every coloring I do and those are no different. I also didn't focus on the backgrounds to some because I was focused on the bots but i will keep it in mind for some backgrounds.
