Our Flag Means Death fan art – Izzy in drag, and digital color practice

For the most part, I’ve just been posting my fan art creations on social media (Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter specifically), but this one I wanted to show here as a before/after thing, comparing my first ever effort at digital coloring with my most recent. So here’s the just-completed Izzy in Drag piece, line art done in natural media, coloring done in Photoshop:

And now, for comparison, my very first attempt at a digitally-colored comic (for this one, the line art was also digital, drawn with a tablet that is functionally little more than a glorified track pad, and is the same tablet I used in coloring the Izzy piece):

I would say that’s a bit of an improvement, no? To be fair, I did install a bunch of digital brushes in the intervening 13 years, so I had more texture options for coloring Izzy. Even so, I have learned a lot about flatting and clipping masks and transparency and so forth.

This is all self-taught, by the way. I would love to take a class in digital coloring someday, but it ain’t happened yet.

Cheers,

Dylan