Here's my art I did of Bubbles using the sketch provided in the PPG style guide. I did it first in Adobe as that's where I'm most familiar, and its what they required you to do it in. Back in the early 2000s, there were no other programs available outside of Adobe, except for maybe Corel Draw.
Instead of following the How-To exactly I deviated from it in spots as it was geared to doing a final color version. Doing the kind of work I've done I knew I would need to have a separate line art version as well. So I focused on doing that as a colored version is fairly quick and easy to create.
First thing I noted as I was doing this is that this instructional How-To was made for designers who may not be artists who can actually draw. They originally gave you a CD with the pre-made files for the ellipses for the head, arms, mouths, and Bubble's ponytail (as you can see on one of the sheets below). It felt a bit like Colorforms and how you could mix and match parts to make a quick Powerpuff Girl. I'm assuming all the vector art in the style guide was all layered anyway so if you had to switch out an arm or mouth expression, you could do it fairly easy.
I followed the steps and started working under the template (as they suggested) and not above it. That was a change for me as I always work over my roughs. But I tried it their way. I played with the opacity of the rough sketch to get it where I wanted it (around 30%).
I made the two ellipses as they suggested for the head, though I wondered why they worked this way.
The next thing that was weird was that they told you to keep the two ellipses exactly at their specs and to adjust and resize the pencil rough sketch to fit the ellipses. I then realized why they wanted it done that way because when you did the rest of the body, the thicknesses of the stroke lines would all match up to what they should be as per the guide. Basically, once you had that done you could enlarge the figure up and use some math to keep the stroke line thicknesses consistent when you did future stuff.
I laughed to myself as I was doing this as my first Powerpuff Girls work, in fact, my audition pieces were all done by hand with my green templates and French curves! Even artist Phil Moy, who did the Powerpuff Girls comic book for DC Comics at the time, did the original art all by hand as well. Mostly so he had the original art to sell later on. Great minds think alike! Mostly, I'd like to think there was a higher level of skill we applied to it.
I inked Bubbles in Adobe Illustrator with the pen tool and saved it as both an .ai file and as a .eps file, and the I opened it in Adobe Photoshop to color it. Yes, I could have colored it in Illustrator if I had to (as it's simple flat colors) but I prefer using Photoshop to drop some quick color in as this exercise was more to see if you could do a line art version and have it be on spec. It's from my working cross-platform on many projects. I love a simple color palette and the PPG characters certainly had that!
Once I was finished, I wondered if you could do it in the newer software that wasn't around originally. I decided to take the same rough sketch of Bubbles and do it all over again in Clip Paint Studio Pro as a lot of artists use that now. Clip Studio has come a long way from its Manga Studio origins and more artists have shifted to it over the years. I wondered if the quality and technical ease would be the same and so I loaded the sketch template into Clip Paint to give it a shot.
I created a new Bubbles using the figure rulers and figure tools (mostly the Continuous Curve with Cubic Bezier). Yes, I could have probably done it using the Bezier tool as well. Once it was finished, I then colored it in Clip Paint as well to keep it all together. One layer for the line art and one for the color.
Overall, I think they are really close. The only slight difference you can see is on her ponytail. It's a bit sharper in Illustrator and was easier to do (possibly because I know the program so well), so I would toss the edge to Adobe Illustrator in that respect.
I had toyed with the idea of trying it a third time using Krita. I started to play with the ellipses and stopped as there is a lot of Krita that I don't know how to use yet. How many of these programs can you know and keep in your head??? Seriously!
Hope you like my effort on these! I posted my scanned How-To pages here for you to try if you want!
