Boom. New character and something 99.99% of you won't understand without some backstory.

Daemon X is one of my buddies, but he's such a smart aleck that he usually succeeds very well in ticking off some of my angrier characters. Trent, the man you see here, is one such angry character.

Trent is a jerk and a Linux zealot. He also rarely leaves the huge beanbag he enjoys relaxing in so much, and tends to have his laptop with him at all times. So basically, he's a 35-year-old Geek with a short fuse (although he probably doesn't -look- 35, I'm working on trying to make him look a little older than he does look. it's hard when he has the mind, clothing and demeanor of a 25-year-old programmer though).

The command rm -rf in Linux is, basically, to delete without confirmation. So Trent has taken a nap and is having pleasant dreams of deleting Daemon X. Poor DX.

Now that the backstory is complete, on to the technical aspects. Obviously I was going for something different here. I finally learned how to flawlessly transfer a pencil drawing over to a digital format suitable for coloring (that is, without a bunch of white grainy spots in it, etc). The style is indeed somewhat 'messy,' and I actually kinda like that. It's something I would have been doing for the past few years if I hadn't been looking at anime and trying to be perfect. The coloring is intentionally a little messy too. I'm going for a sort of... natural-cartoony look. With that in mind, what do you guys think?

The lineart was done with an ordinary mechanical pencil on ordinary blank paper. Once I scanned it in, I used GIMP 2.2's 'color to alpha' function to get a layer where there was absolutely no white, only pencil marks. From there, I could darken the pencil as I wanted to, and I then did the coloring underneath it with the 'pencil' tool (not the brush tool because it's fuzzy) to make it absolutely flat color. After that, I shaded on top of the flat color layer using just a black brush and then made the shading layer partially trasparent. The yellow highlights were done in a manner similar to the shading.

It's kind of interesting to have to actually -color- the picture with pencil and brush tools rather than slapping bucket fills all over the place like I did in Flash. I'm hoping that I'll get faster at it with practice, heh.

I definitely want to move away from depending on Flash for my style of drawing. I've -always- wanted to do colored pencil-to-digital, and this is my first ever truly successful attempt.