Anyway, this style of graphics has been around for a few years, and the animators that worked on A Scanner Darkly, called it Interpolated Rotoscoping. Don't bother asking Webster what the hell that means cause my damn spell check is already freaking out at that terminology. Put simply, the style sort of mimics a graphic novel style of coloring. Or comic book style, for those of you who rode the short bus with the tinted windows.
I'm only kidding.
I decided to try this style of coloring a few weeks ago on a photograph of some friends of mine. You start with your basic photograph and you add layer after layer of color. First, you ink your dark areas and lines just like you would bringing a pencil drawing to life. Then you just keep adding layers of color under the blacks to 'flush out' the new color by eye-dropping the actual colors from the photo into the new layers. I used Illustrator CS3 for doing all of this. It sounds harder than it is. I probably have 18-20 hours into this image. Took me for-freakin' ever. Though, it was my first time, this was done using a mouse, not a digital drawing tablet. (I'm still working from the stone-age.) The newly colored image is on top and the original photo is perched at the bottom.
