{"id":523,"date":"2008-12-20T18:25:50","date_gmt":"2008-12-21T02:25:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/?p=523"},"modified":"2008-12-20T20:15:36","modified_gmt":"2008-12-21T04:15:36","slug":"a-gloomy-bears-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/archives\/523","title":{"rendered":"A Gloomy Bear’s Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday was Shirley<\/a>‘s birthday. We went out for dinner with a bunch of people and drank. It was fun. I also decided to play with my tablet, yesterday. So a birthday ecard was a natural gift!! I sent this to her a day late. <\/p>\n

\"shirley_bday_ecard_small\"<\/p>\n

Similar to my A Bug’s Life<\/a> post, I’ll give a little overview of the process that went into this picture… I do this because I tend to enjoy reading these types of posts, myself… and… I can’t be the only one! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

First, the idea: I know Shirley likes Gloomy Bear<\/a>… but I know almost nothing about it! After a little searching to get the idea of Gloomy Bear’s looks. I gave it a first attempt:<\/p>\n

\"gloomy1\"<\/p>\n

I watched an informative and entertaining 3-minute video<\/a>.Usually with Gloomy is the boy, Pity<\/em>. Pity loves Gloomy, even though Gloomy’s a bear and attacks Pity, sometimes. I wanted the boy giving Gloomy a cake… then Gloomy reacting. Let’s try for more action….<\/p>\n

\"gloomy2\"<\/p>\n

Well, I was content with the idea… but that still didn’t look like Gloomy, at all<\/em>! Did a couple sketches of Gloomy and Pity for a little practice:<\/p>\n

\"pity_sketches_small\"<\/p>\n

\"gloomy_sketches_small\"<\/p>\n

Alright, these were looking a bit better. The perspective I wanted was a little awkward, but I’d give it a shot. The following resulted from drawing a lot and erasing a lot on the same sketch. That’s why it looks “smudgy.”<\/p>\n

\"gloomy3\"<\/p>\n

Awesome. It was starting to look acceptable. Now I had to make a nice outline. Using the Pen tool in Gimp<\/a>, I added a new layer above the blue sketches. On this layer, I created paths and then applied strokes to the paths. (This kind of art should really be done with a vector program, like Inkscape<\/a>, but I was tinkering in Gimp.) When I was done, I had a clean outline sitting on a layer above the blue sketch:<\/p>\n

\"gloomy4\"<\/p>\n

Next step was adding colour. This was really easy because the style for Gloomy Bear doesn’t have any shading – a single solid colour is applied to everything. Alright, then! Just had to hide the messy blue layer and add colours to a couple layers beneath the outline layer (we want the outline to be on top).<\/p>\n

\"gloomy5\"<\/p>\n

Add some text, a few touch-ups here and there, and that’s basically it! \ud83d\ude42 Yay!<\/p>\n

Originally, I did have a more elaborate idea of doing a stylish multi-panel comic:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Pity gives Gloomy a cupcake.<\/li>\n
  2. Close-up of cupcake.<\/li>\n
  3. Close-up of Gloomy’s face, colours inverted.<\/li>\n
  4. Gloomy reacts violently.<\/li>\n
  5. Back to original scene, with after-effects.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This was my sketch for the reacting violently<\/em> panel: \ud83d\ude09
    \n\"gloomy_unfinished_idea\"<\/p>\n

    Would have been fun. But I decided to keep things simple. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

    All images are under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License<\/a>. And I would appreciate being told if you use anything. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Yesterday was Shirley‘s birthday. We went out for dinner with a bunch of people and drank. It was fun. I also decided to play with my tablet, yesterday. So a birthday ecard was a natural gift!! I sent this to her a day late. Similar to my A Bug’s Life post, I’ll give a little… Continue reading A Gloomy Bear’s Life<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,11],"tags":[205,206,249,154,204,86],"class_list":["post-523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-projects","tag-ecard","tag-fan-art","tag-friends","tag-gimp","tag-gloomy-bear","tag-graphics","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4jEMb-8r","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":540,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523\/revisions\/540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}