City of Heroes - Little David Poses

I've been trying to work up the nerve to do art stuff since February. This is part of my practice-but-drawing-in-earnest attempt to get back into it, featuring my flagship hero (and first ever character) from the now-dead superhero MMORPG City of Heroes. (The death of which I'm still sore about). David "The Daring Little David" Puskás was/is a Technology-origin Assault Rifle/Devices Blaster. As far as his personal origin story goes, he used to work as a garbage collection supervisor in Paragon City before he stumbled upon an opportunity to become a superhero, in the form of scavenged armor from dead Crey Crisis Unit agents left to rot in a dumpster. He's a sort of "rags to riches" kind of hero.

When it comes to digital art, outside of sprite art and Ragnarok Wisdom, I've come to prefer making vector-based art rather than raster-based (as all those hitgifts I've made can attest). Ever since I made those Shadows in the Light concept artwork pictures back in 2005, in fact.

The reason for that is because, when it comes to printing and DPI quality, standards keep increasing over time, or at least, that's what it seems like. Because vector artwork is based entirely on, well, vectors, artwork made with it can be exported to a raster image of just about any size, so vector artwork can keep up with DPI standards. Raster artwork is fixed to a certain DPI when printing, and as standards increase raster art of a certain size will be smaller, and they can't be scaled gracefully.

My issue with making vector artt, though, is that I have only one option available to me for that: the really old version of Flash I have. I don't have Adobe Illustrator or any other vector-based artwork programs, but even then I don't know if the newer stuff gives the artist similar functionality that raster image editing programs (like say GIMP or Photoshop) have. It's certainly harder to texture a vector image.

Over the past week I've been experimenting with a method for efficiently and effectively coloring comic books devised by a dude named Neil Fontaine. His method was meant for Photoshop, but I wanted to see if I could apply the technique to Flash.

These drawings are the result of a week's worth of free time spent trying. My tactic was to turn similarly colored parts into a Symbol in Flash, which then had a masking layer with the base color at the bottom of the stack, and then a ton of layers for addressing certain steps of Fontaine's coloring method.

What do you guys think? How does this look?