The Speed of another Year Gone By

Last month I made only one post, and I fear the same will be true this month.  Next week my Family arrives for Christmas, and that's more or less me out of the picture until the new year.  At least this time I'm letting you know in advance that there's no more coming for a while.  I have a lot to catch up on next year of course, as this last year I have let things slide to a revolting extent.

I've been trying to think of ways to get the sketching I missed up faster, but I don't want to resort to just posting the pages uncut.  Actually, I might, that's even more honest than the usual way I do them - you'll see all of the crap along with the relatively good stuff, although it's harder to clean up the scans because my scanner hates me.

Another thing I need to do is get back in the grove with Speedpaints.  The last Speedpaint post I made was three months ago, and that's just not good.  This latest one contains six new ones, so that's about two a month.  Disappointing.

Time Taken: 45 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

I guess this one isn't dreadful for the time I spent on it, at least I quite like how her face and hair turned out.  No link to the source because, well, I don't know where it came from.  I've had the reference I worked from for years, but Google reverse image search shows no such image.  It came from somewhere, and I might take a longer pass at it one day - at that point I'll share the photo itself I guess, but until then, if this looks familiar let me know so I can dish out the credit.

As you can see there's nothing much to it in the step by step - I was just sort of chilling out while I painted.  I'm surprised I left the hair so late, but other than that, not terribly exciting.

Time Taken: 20 Minutes
Software: Sketchbook Pro 2011

Not really a speedpaint, but I have no idea where else I'd stick it. It's a sketch of actress Yunjin Kim done in Sketchbook Pro, because I've owned it for ages and only used it about three times.  I didn't realise it was Yunjin Kim when I was doing it, because I only know her as Sun on Lost, and she spent most of the time with her hair up, no makeup and covered in mud on that show.  She looks rather better in the photo I based this on, but now I've done the image search to find a link to it I found some even better ones to base future stuff on.

Time Taken: 90 minutes
Software: Photoshop

One of those photos you randomly stumble across on Pinterest and think 'oh, I need to paint that.' So I did.  I did it in Photoshop because there were some aspects I thought would be way easier with a custom brush, and I have some in PS, and I don't in Art Rage.

It's mildly amusing to me then that once the background was done, most of the girl I painted with one brush, that happens to be based on the default one I use in ArtRage.  I like that brush.  Also, when I got to the tree I realised I didn't have a suitable brush to do the leaves, so I ended up making a new one anyway.  I could have done that in ArtRage just as well.  Still, I need practice painting in Photoshop, so this was as good as any to do in it.

Time Taken: 35 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

This one is so bad I almost didn't include it, but, y'know, showing off the horrible things is part of the whole point of the Blog, so here it is.  I based it on a photograph of Ashley Oakley on Deviant Art, but rather mysteriously she's taken all her stock images down since then.  Since it's awful, lets all just forget it ever happened.  I plan on doing a better one of her at some point, but I guess now I need to ask for permission to use any of the images I saved before she took them all down.  Hurm...

Time Taken: 2hrs 45 minutes
Software: Photoshop

Yeah, this one took a little long to be included in the speedpaint pile, but I didn't spend long enough on it to warrant it having it's own post, so her it is. It's based on Lance Guest as Alex Rogan from The Last Starfighter, but doesn't look that much like him if I'm honest.  No point looking for the source I based it on, as it's based on a few, which is likely how I managed to make it not look like him.

This time I did take advantage of something I could do in Photoshop that's hard to do in ArtRage - I straightened him up between the two rows shown here.  You can't tell can you?  Well, that was a waste of time then.  Anyway, one of the reasons it took so long to paint was that Tartan/Plaid lumberjack shirt.  Second one I painted in a row (the other is in the last post).  Not doing that again for a bit.

Time Taken: 70 minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

Okay, this and the next are sort of part of an unofficial series.  I didn't mean to paint two castles in a row with very similar palettes, it just sort of happened, but since I've done it I may as well do some more so I can get better at it because I'm not happy with either of them.  Not next, but just generally I'll add some more of these over the next year and at the end I'll take a look and see if anything improved.  This one is based on this public domain image by Wiki Commons user Villy of Esztergom Castle in Hungary.

So I start off trying to define the main shapes and then building it all up from there.  It all looks a little soft and lacking in contrast though.  Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I'll have some opportunity to find out.

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

And here's the second of the accidental series.  This time I have no idea where it is, but it's based on a stock photo from Mehrunisa Stock.

Same process as before, but I tried to make the contrast a little punchier.  Still made a mess of the Perspective though.

And that's pretty much it.  I'll be back in the New Year, and of course my resolution will be 'Be More Productive.'  We'll see how well that goes.  Oh, and I have been doing a fair bit of art that you've not seen, but it's for work, so obviously you can't see that.  By the time you do I hope I'll be significantly better, and can look upon it and cringe (even more than I do already).

Social Profiling № 10: Headphone Fun

Well, it has been a while hasn't it? This should come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention this year, so instead of prattling on about it I'll just get on with the post.

This is the last of this years Facebook Profile pictures, and given how long it's taken me to get through them this year I don't know if I'll be doing another set.  Certainly not next year, although I might still paint the occasional similar picture just for fun.  If you've no idea what I'm warbling about click here and work from the bottom up - all will be explained.

This latest one was one of the smoothest of the lot.  As a result there aren't all that many images in the following post, which is a shame in a way, but great for me as I've less to write.  Oh, and there's a short tale behind this one too.

So a long time ago I was in a group with a bunch of people (I'm not going into the group itself, that's for another time), ages ranged a bit from about 12 to 18 and I was in the upper end of the range.   The woman, then girl, who this picture was for was a couple of years younger than me, and we got on well as friends.  Fast forward a bit and I left town to go to University and what not, and we fell out of touch.  This happened a lot in those pre-Facebook days, because I am hopeless at staying in touch with people.

Anyway, I was back in my hometown a couple of years ago, out having a few drinks with some friends I had managed to stay in touch with (partly through my brother, who still lives there, and partly through Facebook, which really does have it's uses).  I say "A few drinks," but in actuality I was plastered.  This was a grade A bender that took us half way across town, visiting various pubs along the way, and when the pubs closed we hit the clubs.  Clubs are crap for catching up though, because they're loud, so we moved from one to another in the hopes that one of them would be more suitable for people wishing to continue their drunken slurring at each other.

We ended up at a club that can best be described as somebody's basement.  I'm not kidding here, it was a basement in a house that had at some point years before been converted into a club.  Even though this club had been there since before I could drink (many moons ago), I had somehow never been there.  I'll probably never go again - it's a bloody basement!  Anyway, while drinking up the drink I'd bought so we could get out of there I got a tap on the shoulder and a "Blimey, it is you!" in my ear.

Indeed, it was me, and the speaker was the girl I'd not seen for 20 years, who was now the mum of the boy in the painting you see here.  We traded details, and then after a fairly long chat I staggered out and decided to call it a night.  So, that's why this painting exists, because of a chance encounter in a basement while I was blind drunk at two in the morning.  Crazy days.

Oh, and she's also in a relationship with a bloke I used to work with around the time we knew each other.  Nothing to do with the story, I just thought it was a fun thing to note.

None of this has anything to do with the process of painting the picture, which was fairly unremarkable.  I did it in ArtRage 4, and the only thing of any note was that the Photograph it's based on was black and white, so I had to colour it as I went along, and I tried a new technique at the end to soften the results a little.  The end.

A Psychochronography in Blue (Part 5)

A little over 16 months ago I sent the following words to Philip Sandifer, the author of the Tardis Eruditorum books, for which I regularly do the covers.

"Just had an idea for the first Tom Baker cover. If I can pull it off it will be a most magnificent cover, if I can't then it'll be an okay painting on it's own. For now though I'll leave you with the words Chris Foss"

The first Tom Baker cover ended up featuring Jelly Babies, so the words Chris Foss were held over for the second Tom Baker book. If you've not seen the first, or any of the other covers I've done for Phil you can see them by clicking on the related number 1, 2, 3, 4, and also check out the tangentially related A Golden thread, and Last War in Albion cover posts.

Now, I know, you may be thinking "'Most magnificent?' this seems rather out of character for our usually predictable blogger." Well, I did add a caveat. But honestly, I'm the least qualified person to say if I succeeded in hitting those lofty goals. I do know it was one of the more challenging things I've ever done, and that you can decide if I did indeed pull it off by reviewing the image of the cover below.

Clicking most of the images gets you a larger view, as usual.

Chris Foss, if you're unaware, refers to the staggeringly influential and prolific science fiction painter of the 60's, 70's and 80's (mostly the latter two).  He's still working today, and I own a book of works by him.  He didn't just do Sci-Fi covers (he also illustrated The Joy of Sex), but it's what he's best known for.

So, anyway, as I've said, the history of this cover starts before quite a few of the others.  Before Volume 4 (and 1, oddly enough), before A Golden Thread, and before Last War in Albion.   The day I sent Phil the email quoted above I sketched out the following thumbnail.

This is the first time anyone but be has seen this.  You can probably guess why I'd not shown anyone the picture before (it's bloody awful).  But I had an image of what I wanted for the cover in my head, and I needed to get that down as swiftly as possible before I started second guessing myself.  This may be a craptacular mess, but it does capture all the major elements of the final cover, albeit with a couple of extra bits (the mooring tower and the 'belt' bridge) and without the planet.  The whole thing took less than 10 minutes with no reference, and served its function admirably.  In retrospect I wish I'd stuck closer to the palette, but that's a relatively small thing.

The next step was to work it out in more detail, so I spent a couple of hours building a ship and towers in SketchUp.  This would prove very useful for when it came time to light the painting (or should that be paint the lighting?), and lay things out.  You're probably thinking I traced the ship for the final image.  You would be wrong, but I did trace the towers.

I have no recollection as to why I didn't trace the SketchUp version of the ship because I didn't do so over a year ago (I'll get to why I'm not calling it a TARDIS in a minute), I even questioned myself on whether I incorrectly remembered not doing so when I was prepping the images for the blog, so I opened the original PSD (Photoshop image file) for this and took a look.  There's the render of the towers, neatly traced, and there's the ship, not remotely aligning to the one in the image here.  Lots of perspective reference lines though.  I've even got the perspective on the far side of the front wrong.

Really, I was making work for myself - I have no idea why.

The rest of this is near enough the final layout of the cover.  I cut the moon from the back cover, and removed the bridge between the towers (ok, by 'removed' I mean forgot all about it), and at this point I'd already decided I didn't want to mooring tower connected to the ship.  Other than the towers there was no tracing here - though I did use a reference photo of Mr. Baker - not that it was all that much use, since I had to modify it a lot so he'd line up with the towers.

This was it a month later (I wasn't in much of a rush).  Obviously I had a long way to go.  The planet was painted using the airbrush tool and a couple of masks, while the rest was all done with the Oil Paint tool.   Each element was on it's own layer (Mountains, Towers, Ship, Clouds, Planet), this was because I wasn't sure of how much 'atmosphere' I wanted on each element, or if I was going to need to repaint things (as I obviously had to do with the clouds here).  As a result you'll see the mountains and the Ship vary in intensity through all the following as I try to dial in a good balance for them.

So this seems as good a place as any to speak to why I'm calling the ship 'the ship' instead of a TARDIS.  Simple reason is that it's not the TARDIS, It's a spacecraft with a passing resemblance to the beloved icon, but also with lots of differences.  One of my rules for the covers has been that I never simply put a picture of the TARDIS on them.  Partly because that would be too easy, and partly because that way lies... issues, with trademarks and copyrights; the closest I've ever come to breaking that was with the silhouette of Pertwee's box on book 3, and even that wasn't exact.  I'm pushing it a lot with this one, and I know that, and because I knew I was pushing things I went out of my way to make it as inaccurate as possible while still having it be clear what it was based on.  Obviously there are design differences, but I also used no reference to the real thing when I was building the SketchUp model.

I also used no real reference to Tom Baker beyond the one mentioned above (and that was the only time that was used), as one of the other rules is that I never just copy a picture of an actor on the covers.  Again, I've come close, but there are always changes, and the closest I've come was Pertwee's silhouette on Book 3, except I drew that with a lot of guesswork as I couldn't find a good profile shot of him.  So in this case I'm painting some clouds that have a  passing resemblance to Tom Baker as the Doctor, but I didn't work from any particular photograph (though I did have some as general reference).  That's why there are three main attempts before I was happy that it was sort of recognisable (and this wasn't the final revision either).

So once I got all that done I took the cover to Book 1 (which I had started working on at this point), threw the painting behind the grime and wear and graphic elements, added a text box to the back, threw on a logo and sent the whole thing off to Phil for his opinion.

He swore in his reply. Phil never swears in emails (I'm guessing you don't spend a fortune and years of your time and effort on English doctorates just so you can swear in emails and spoil it all), so I took that as a good sign I should continue.

And then I didn't.  I decided that this style was far more in keeping with later in the decade as covers go, and that it didn't really suit the gothic horror tone of the Hinchcliffe era.  So I went and did something else for that, which also didn't have anything to do with Gothic Horror, but did feature Jelly Babies, and I felt we really needed Jelly Babies, because they are delicious.  I didn't even look at this cover again for a year.

Actually, looking at the dates again, it was exactly a year between that cover mockup and my returning to work on it.  That's... Weird.

When I did come back to it I decided I didn't like the Ship being such a dingy blue, and wanted something with a little more pop.  So this is where I started to switch over to a new blue, and really start to integrate the lighting. Before I was done though I realised it would be beneficial to have some sort of reference to work from other than the washed out looking SketchUp render.  I was still avoiding actual photo reference of the TARDIS like the plague, so I went online and found photographs of blue construction equipment, transport containers, buildings and doors.

I just took a look through my reference folder and they break down like this (These things interest me, you can move on down if you don't care):

Blue Industrial Things/Buildings: 43     Clouds: 16
Mountains and deserts: 58                      Chris Foss Covers and Paintings: 60
Foss inspired paintings: 25                     Other book covers: 35
Photos of Tom Baker: 5                          Pictures of the TARDIS: 0

That wasn't enough though, so I went into Photoshop, took the SketchUp image and started to throw things onto it to get a more specific representation of what I was going for.  You may wonder why I didn't just do the whole thing like this and completely replace the one I was painting in ArtRage.  Well, back when CG 3D modelling was first blossoming, Foss was still a large enough influence that everyone and their dog was building spacecraft in his style, and they had a very particular look.   That look was not entirely dissimilar to this rough mockup.  Not a look I wanted.  I could have worked on it a lot more, but I liked the look I was starting to get in ArtRage, so this became just reference.

Once I'd blocked in the lighting and base colours in ArtRage I decided I didn't like the blue after all, so I toned it down.  I didn't repaint the whole thing of course, I just twiddled with the saturation option, and pulled it back to something more reasonable.  Then I started painting in details.  Panel lines, paint discolouration, text, that sort of thing.  I think I spent about a week just adding detail to the thing.  The trick was balancing it so there was enough to look natural, but not so much in one spot that the eye was always drawn to one area.

At this point I'd added the mooring lines going from the ship to the towers, with the accompanying scaffold.  I kept putting off working on the Bridge (on the TARDIS this would be the lamp), and instead I used the airbrush tool to paint in the thrusters.  I wasn't happy with the result of that, but rather than just remove it I decided to have a think and get on with the Bridge while I did.

I also added a couple of references to other Sci-Fi things I quite like. The star on the side is a reference to Asimov's Foundation series (it's based on the Empire's logo, described as the "Spaceship and sun"), and very faint at the top of the white strip is an inaccurate map of Targ from the Mercenary series.  TE-TB-02 stands for TARDIS Eruditorum-Tom Baker-Two of course.

Oh, and I added windows as part of the detailing pass.  Not terribly exciting.

Did another mockup of the full cover at this point, and decided that the logo just wasn't going to work the way I'd envisaged it, so I needed to come up with something else.  While I was thinking my eye was drawn to a book of "Extreme Science Fiction", a collection I've had for a while.  It occurred to me that when I was a kid there were loads of these Sci-Fi collection books on the shelves (many of them with Chris Foss covers), so I thought I'd try replicating that sort of logo.

Instead of looking any up, I just used a reference I already had - a cover for Herbert W. Franke's The Orchid Cage.  The logo there isn't orange, but it's big bold text with a line underneath followed by the author's name.  I rearranged the elements, and then went with the orange based on a painting of a sun on a different cover as it really popped (and if I'd bothered thinking about my colour theory knowledge I would have known that to be the case anyway).  I was concerned with dropping "Volume Five" and going with just the 5 in the logo, but Phil has never commented on the change, so I guess he's fine with it, and Amazon didn't spit it back at him either.

I don't show it here, because it's boring, but that 5 went through several revisions too, the final one being hand drawn, rather than taken from an existing font.  Also, you may note that the image on the cover mockup has a lot more contrast than the ArtRage painting.  that's because I know from experience that the grime pass has a habit of washing out the underlying image, so this is a post process intended to combat that a little (I actually want it to happen a little bit).

With all that in place I felt it was finally time to take a crack at the mountains.  I had assumed this would be an easy task, which was why I left it so long, but it turned out to be the hardest part of the painting!  Even with a number of references nearly equal to the number of Chris Foss ones I still had a surprising amount of difficulty getting the mountain to look the way I wanted, while also giving it some details that might be found on a coat.  In the end I just said "Good enough!" and moved on, but I really need to look into better ways of doing that.  I do tweak them a little later on too.

The last image in this strip shows my solution to not liking the thrust flames.  I'll cover that in more detail below though.

So here's the almost finished painting.  Actually, I sent it to Phil saying I was done, but then I couldn't leave it alone.  There is one element done in Photoshop rather than ArtRage, and that's the smoke from the thrusters.  I did that in Photoshop because I have a brush that's originally designed as an oil smear for grime passes on texture maps, but I realised it might work well as airbrushed smoke or cloud too, and what do you know, it worked really well!

I've also added rings to the planet.  These were done in ArtRage, but the masks for them were done in Photoshop as it's easier to manipulate shapes there.  Originally I was going to stick with the moon, but I liked the idea of planetary rings spilling onto the front cover from the back.

I realise now that I've not covered the detailing of the towers.  Really though, that was one of the quickest things I did, and it's basically the same process as that used on the ship.

As I said, I couldn't leave it alone, so I went back in and took a final pass at the mountain and the clouds.  I think the result helps, although probably no-one but me will ever notice.  I also added some additional text and small details to the Ship, but you'd have to look very close to see them.

There follows an image showing a snippet of the painting at the size I actually did it (haven't done that for a while), and at Phil's request there's a link to some wallpapers if you happen to want this as your desktop background (if you want other sizes let me know in the comments or I'll have no way of knowing).

Phil's post on the launch is here 
The book is available here (there are more options in Phil's post too)

Wallpapers
Follow the link, then hit 'Download' or 'Actions>Download' to copy it to your machine - Sadly there seems to be no way to set it automatically as the wallpaper:
640x480      800x600
1024x768    1280x720
1280x800    1366x768
1440x900    1600x1200
1680x1050  1856x1392
1920x1080  1920x1200
1920x1440  2048x1536

And that's basically it; another cover done.  The longest I've spent on one of Phil's covers (in actual hours, not just because it took over a year), and since I do work for him at a flat rate this one is the greatest value for money too.  Nice :)

ADDENDUMS
Firstly, a spelling mistake made it through the first batch of copies - I'd written Wondeful instead of Wonderful in the quote.  So that was mortifying.  The mistake was corrected though (causing Phil some terrible problems - Yet more mortification), so new copies have no error.  If you got one with the error (I did!) consider it a special limited edition for early adopters.

Secondly, after writing the post, I did find a picture of Tom Baker in a completely different folder that looks remarkably like the one I painted.  I don't recall copying it (and if I had it should have been in the same reference folder as everything else), but it's conceivable I did and forgot (this was over a year before I wrote the post you'll recall), and entirely likely that it strongly influenced the result subconsciously if I didn't.  Given that my no copying rule has been around from the start, it's probably the later.

12 Squared

You may recall a few months ago I entered an Artrage competition on Deviantart.  I didn't win, and wasn't terribly happy with the entry anyway.  Well, I entered one after that with a picture of our cat Cameron (we had two, but the other one, Ferris, ran away and we've not heard anything of him in months), and then I got too busy to enter.

Last month I was still busy, but I wanted to paint something fairly finished before I went crazy, so I made some time, picked a picture of Peter Capaldi as The Doctor to paint, and was all set to go when I saw the latest Artrage contest was for "grids." One quick, and minor, rethink later I was all set to go.  You can see the result I entered below.

And there we have it.  Catch you next time!

Oh, all right, for the three of you that bother to read them (Hi to Ken in Guilford!), here's the step by step.  Click the images to enlarge as usual.

First of all, I'm nowhere near good enough to paint this off the cuff, so I needed some references.  I took the original photograph, which was a publicity still for the Doctor Who episode "Listen" and ran it through a couple of Photoshop filters to come up with three references: The cropped original, a 'cutout' version and a 'mosaic' one.  With that done, off! To Artrage.

First things first, I decided to shift the cool blues of the reference to a nice warm brown, but I kept the blues in the shadows.  I'd completely forgotten, but I'd used almost this exact combination before.  Guess I need to either work on my originality or embrace the Brown N' Blue.  

Anyway, I went with that and started roughing in the mosaic version of the picture.  Now, because the contest was about grids, and because Artrage just introduced a grid feature for the first time (hence the contest), I thought I should probably use one.  Well, two, at different sizes, for where I wanted to break up the larger squares into smaller blocks.  I used the unfiltered reference to guestimate what colours those smaller squares though be.  Despite the feature being available I didn't use 'Snap to Grid', rather I just filled in the grid squares one at a time.  It gives it a rougher look that I quite like.

Oh, by the way, the first image is a PNG because JPEG mangles some of the colours, as you can see particularly well in the top right of the left image above.  On the right is a WIP I posted to facebook (I rarely do that), wondering if anyone could tell who it was.  My friend Tommy got it on the first try, so that was promising.

So here I've gone ahead and started painting the more traditional looking bit.  Started with his eye of course, because where else would you start a portrait of Peter Capaldi?  I made a minor change to the location of his eyeball so it was looking more directly at the viewer with the new composition.  Also, I wasn't actually using the grids at this point except to occasionally to turn them on to check proportions and things.  They're fine for layout, but I found them distracting for actually painting.  

I did use the grids extensively for the yellow side of the face.  It's not exactly the same as the cutout version; I was trying to stick to the grid points for a more graphic look where the Photoshopped reference was more curved.  That was probably the easiest bit of the whole painting, and surprisingly fun given that it was basically join the dots.

At first glance you might not notice the difference between these three pictures.  If I'm right then you're looking at the eye in each one, at least to begin with.  I chose the placement of that eye quite carefully for that very reason, so I hope it works.  

Anyway, here I'm just painting the rest of his face and nose as well as filling in some more mosaic bits in the yellow area.  If you look at his cheek you'll see I tried to introduce a fairly sharp shade change there based on the location of the similar in the Cutout version.  In reality the transition there is a lot smoother, but I wanted to match the shape on the other side.  I do that for a lot of the shadow on that side, but that's the most obvious case (and especially right under his eye on the left of the painting).  I also did some more work on his shirt to make it marginally more obvious as to what it was.

Not much to say here - working on his forehead and blocking in his hair (literally in this case), extrapolating from the 'clean' and 'mosaic' refs again.  I was originally going to leave it as just squares, but the smaller and more contrasting ones there were pulling away from the eye, so I started to soften it and then thought "Damn, I just need to paint the hair don't I?"  I hate painting hair.

And these are the finishing touches.  Polishing up the hair, blocking out over his right temple (less distracting there I feel, though I may have still added too much contrast), and adding to the blocky background and cleaning it up.  I had a bright blue square through all of this (I used it for the base of all the other blues originally, and then just left it there), and since it wasn't too distracting, but still stood out from the rest, I decided to sign it there.  

And that was really all there was to it.  As a result of this I discovered a friend of mine knows Peter Capaldi (mind-blown), but as far as I know he hasn't shown him this image (I'm sure Capaldi has to swim through his pile of adoring fan-art to get out of bed in the morning, and the rest of the fan-mail to reach his cocoa-pops, so he doesn't need me adding to it).

So, keep your eyes peeled on Tuesday as I'll hopefully have another picture up - and its one of the more ambitious pieces I've ever done.  It's also Doctor Who related, because that seems to be a running theme through some of these posts, don't you think?


Oh... I won the competition by the way.

A Musing 6B: Trace Elements

You may recall, or more likely you may not, that in my last A Musing post I said I'd break down the various ways of transferring something from your mind onto a piece of paper (or screen, or piece of shale or whatever).  I said I would do it soon, and that was in April, which may cause you to wonder about my definition of "soon," but regardless, I'm doing it now, finally.

Assuming you didn't click on the link above and read the post (and you'll know if you did that I don't believe that you did for one second, so, sorry about that), you may need a refresher regarding what I think those methods were, so I'll list them below.  For now, all you really need to know is that we're covering the first one here.  It's tracing, just in case you skipped reading the post title as well as the linked post above.

So here's the list:

1. Tracing
2. Copying
3. Referencing
4. Knowing

I'm sure some of you are thinking "What about Abstracts?  What do they fall under?"  Well, I'm not sure that they always come from premeditation (which the list above is referring to).  Those that are planned would likely fall under knowing, and those that aren't would fall under Guessing, or Random, or Going by Gut or something.  That's not to put abstracts down - some of them look amazing, but it is to say that I don't do abstracts, so I can't know how they are arrived at. It's outside the coverage of the list anyway.  I mention it because someone brought it up after reading the last post.  Irrelevant to this one, but I had to cover it somewhere.  OK, done with that, let's talk Tracing.

Paintings by Bernie Fuchs, Canaletto, Drew Struzan, Thomas Eakins, John Constable, Johan Vermeer,  Norman Rockwell, and an illustration by Leonardo DaVinci - You can click the image for a better look.

You probably know most of these paintings, might even know their names, or who painted them.  Which do you think were traced, and which not?

Did you go through and guess?  Do I need to set up a Survey Monkey account to find out?  OK, good.  So the answer is all of them.  Well, sometimes.  Well, maybe.  Better to say all of the artists are suspected of, or have admitted to tracing, and it's highly likely that if they did at all they did some here (except DaVinci because any likely pieces from him have been lost).

You don't believe me.  Of course you don't believe me!  These are works by some of the most respected and well known artists alive or dead, surely you don't get to be respected if you trace!  But you do, and they are. Well, probably. 

Lets break it down a little.  

Fuchs, Rockwell, Struzan and Constable all admit to tracing, at least sometimes. (1)

Eakins, Canaletto and Vermeer are thought to have traced, but there is little hard evidence, and the claims as to how much they traced (if at all) are contested. (2)

There is no evidence that Da Vinci traced, but he did invent the technique used by Constable, and it is suspected he used it for some of his landscape studies even if not for work on his final paintings. He also suggested advantages to the use of the Camera Obscura by artists, but there is no real evidence that he used it himself. (3)

Other artists, such as Jan Van eyck and Lorenzo Lotto have also been suspected of tracing (the strongest proponents being artist David Hockney and physicist Charles M. Falco), but the strong consensus is now that they did not (or at least not by using the methods proposed by Hockney and Falco).

So where does that leave us?  All the artists here from the dawn of the photograph are fairly open about tracing, though Rockwell felt guilty for it.  He also says that he had to, because everyone was doing it and he needed to keep up, so that likely tells you something important. 

Commercial Art

In commercial art, tracing is not a rarity, but the only way to tell conclusively that someone traces is if they admit it, or are caught doing it, because some artists are just that good that they have no need to - and obviously there are also those whose style is so far removed from naturalism that tracing would be worthless - Quentin Blake clearly never traces anything..  

So it's not a rarity, but it's not like everyone's in on the big tracing arty-party either.

I know of many concept artists who create photo montages and then paint over the top, and I would consider that to be tracing too.   They don't necessarily declare it from the rooftops, but they don't deny either, and some leave their photomontage sticking out from the rest of the paint.  There is no shame in it, the ideas are as important as the finished result in their line of work - and none of it has anything to do with how it was arrived at.

And that, really, is the important thing - In a commercial setting it doesn't matter how the end result is arrived at, as long as no plagiarism is occurring, only that it is.

It should be noted that the majority of these artists can (or could) produce exceptional work without resorting to tracing, but tracing is a shortcut, and when you're up against the clock a shortcut will gain you a lot.

Let's look at it this way, when most people make spaghetti they buy the sauce from the store (at least here they do), and they buy any meat pre minced.  is that cheating? Or is the important thing that you got a delicious meal and it took you less than 40 minutes to make it?  Oh, a purist would say it is, but sod them, you've eaten and started watching Game of Thrones before they've managed to prep the tomatoes.

Now if someone asks for the recipe, hopefully you're going to be honest and tell them it's Ragu, because doing otherwise is being deceptive, and that's not going to get you any friends if they find out the truth behind your world class Spag Bol.

The end results are what matter - the process is really just of interest to other tradesmen, or should be.  Yes, there's talk, often, that tracing limits your artistic growth, is somehow deceitful (only when you deny doing it kids), results in identical looking work, makes you less of an artistic visionary, and so on.  Maybe true, maybe not - Probably true if that's all you do.

But look at the artwork on display above (and yeah, I'm breaking a personal rule on this one and posting other peoples art on my Blog - sometimes you need to).  Each of those works has a different and distinctive look - each is of the artist's own style, as unique to each other as snowflakes in a field.  Even if tracing I doubt I could produce a work as compelling as that by the worst of them, and most certainly not if I was painting traditionally rather than digitally.  Traced or not, these are works of visionaries, the end results of which capture the eye and the imagination in and of themselves.

Consider this, you see a Magician performing his routine.  You know he's not doing actual magic, he's using visual deception and slight of hand.  You marvel at the result - the signed card is contained within the artichoke, the assistant rests in two halves, legs kicking, eyes smiling, the freaking Statue of Liberty is missing!  You know it's a trick, you know, basically, how it's done, but you don't know the specifics and even if you did you probably couldn't do it yourself, because manipulating the cards, the hat, the blades and even the audience, takes skill, and it takes practice.

Art is like that - to do it well takes years to master, and if, once you're far enough along, you resort to shortcuts to get the piece done on time, what of it?

Fine Art

But that's professionals working to a commision.  What of fine artists doing it for the love of it, maybe making money as the end result, but maybe just a hobbiest? Well, at that point, again, who cares?  Maybe someone hates doing the layout stage, and tracing gets them to the point they enjoy, which is the actual painting or rendering.  Has any buyer of art looked at a piece they've fallen in love with and really given two figs if the underlying forms were traced or not?  Maybe a few, but likely not the majority.

Certainly not every artist traces. Probably most of those that do don't do it the vast majority of the time, but if they do you'd hope there would be admission if asked.  There's strong temptation not to anyway, given the amount of stigma associated with doing so.  And of course there are many artists whose works are more impressionistic, who don't need to trace at all because accuracy is not an expectation.  There is room for both, neither is necessarily "correct," they're all just making art.  To say that tracing reduces a piece of art is to say that photography does the same, and yet photography is considered an art form in and of itself.

My Stuff

So, you may have noticed that I fall on the side of the fence defending tracing.  Does that mean I do it then?  Does that make me a dirty tracer?

Yes, but not often.

The truth is that I like the process without tracing.  I like learning how to be more accurate in my representations without "cheating" (and I say cheating in that I feel as though I've let myself down, rather than any guilt over who sees what I've been doing).  But I have traced, I will trace again, and I have always stated when I have in the write up here on the blog.  The blog, as you know, is about honesty - I show you the shit as well as the shine, because denying it to you would be denying it to myself, and in doing so I would learn less from the process.

So yes I have.  Let's look at an example:

One thing in that image was traced.  Can you guess what it was without retreating into the original write up and reading for yourself?  No?  Good, because the process didn't really matter.  One of the three faces was traced, one used the grid method and one was done by hand (useful, given the other two can be used as examples in the next two related posts).  if you can't tell the difference then you know two things - The tracing doesn't drastically improve the end result, if just speeds things up a bit, and secondly, tracing doesn't have to be a rote copying of a photograph to still count as tracing.  Oh, you didn't know that second one?  I'll explain in a moment.

Before I do though, I'm serious that I don't trace often, but I have done so.  Not a single one of my speedpaints has been traced that I can recall (and if it was I'd have mentioned it in the write up), and only a handful of my other pieces were either.  This is important not because I'm ashamed of the times that I have (though I did feel guilty, as I've said) and want you to know that I repent my evil ways, but because I want you to understand that if you are the sort of person who frowns upon tracing I'll be clear and upfront about it here on the blog, so you know which pictures you should dislike.  I don't mention it when I post those images elsewhere - as I've said, if you don't care about the process you shouldn't care if it's traced or not, and if you do care then you'll come and read about it here.

Right, methods of tracing (all the following, unless stated, are derived from this stock photograph by AshleyShyD):

This is how your mom traces.  OK, not really, maybe your mom is Kelly Eddington, in which case she could trace the hell out of this - not that Kelly traces at all as far as I'm aware.

I have to tell you, this is really hard to do with a tablet. Doing it over the photograph with tracing paper would be easier, but this took the better part of an hour, and gave me a hand cramp.  When I transfer a sketch onto another piece of paper, as I did here, this is how I do it, but it is my least favourite part of the entire process. No fun at all, and at almost an hour I could have done a digital painting from the same source (and I likely will, at some point).  It wouldn't be as accurate, but it would likely be closer in spirit to the protograph, and more aesthetically pleasing.  The result is ugly, but possibly useful if you're going to spend the next 30 hours painting over it.

When I do trace (other than my own line art), what I do is more like this.

No, it's not pretty, it doesn't need to be.  I suppose you could do some weird things with it and pass it off as a post modern deconstruction or something.  So what's it like that for?   Mostly because it's only covering the bigger, more difficult angles and the overall proportions.  As I've said, I quite like the process, more than this wouldn't be as much fun.  I'm not sure I've ever shown a picture at this stage before (the one for the Doctor, above, I didn't show until I'd added details and sorted out the hair, and I think I may have put in more detail on the initial trace than this too - he's got a hard face to get right), and I usually don't, because unless you're me this isn't going to mean all that much.  The extended lines are to show me things that match up with other things by the way - so here I can see that the basic lines of the eyes and hair across the face line up, as does the peak of the nose at the brows and her pupil on one side, and almost the corner of her hair and her pupil from the other side. This helps with reading things from the original image - you can think of it as an image specific grid if you like (but grids are for next time) - these are much the same relationships I try to spot when speedpainting, but it's much less accurate when doing it by eye.  Compared to your mom's tracing, this one took about three minutes.

For a bit of fun I went back and traced the photograph again a few times more.

I was trying different techniques and different levels of detail here.  The idea in each was not to make the image itself pretty, but to glean different levels of importance from each - to show how different artists could approach the same tasks in different ways due to different priorities and mindsets. Obviously they're all still by me - but now I'm thinking I should do an experiment to actually get other artists to draw over the same photo and see what comes back, that could be quite interesting (but I won't delay this post any further for such an experiment). None of these took more than 10 minutes, and probably a lot less.

And finally this was an attempt to make the tracing in and of itself a fairly pretty piece of art.  I quite like it, but your milage may vary.

Conclusion

So is tracing cheating then?  Well, emotionally I still have a dose of the guilties whenever I do it, because I've always been told it was wrong, and I feel I've let myself down when I do. Actually thinking about it though, I'm much less sure, and feel it's probably just fine, provided the following:

• The artist is capable of a similar level of illustrative competence without relying on tracing, and is using it as one part of a larger process.
• Or the artist is using tracing as a method for working through, or learning things.
• The artist is honest about it's use if asked about technique (I don't think they need to mention it otherwise).

So on that first point, if you go back to the picture of the Doctors and feel that the one I've traced is better than the two I didn't then I really shouldn't have traced it, but personally I feel they're all of a piece, with none clearly better than the rest (one is clearly worse perhaps, but that's a discussion for another post - the one in which I covered the picture in fact).

I've also heard many cries of 'Plagiarism!' regarding artists who trace, but that could apply just as much to artists who copy anything that doesn't strictly belong to them. Whether they trace or not it seems pretty irrelevant to the argument to me.  So I think this is irrelevant to the whole tracing argument too; as long as the Artist is honest about sources it seems artistically fair to me (whether it's legal is another matter entirely, but I'm not a lawyer, so I have no comment there).

And really, that's all I've got to say about tracing.  On the Next A Musing I'll go into Grids, which are much less contentious for some reason, cover a lot of similar ground, and should make for a much easier post to write (because I don't mind telling you that this one took a lot more effort than most).  That one shouldn't be as long coming, as I want to get through these fairly swiftly so I  can talk about light, and how much of what you thought about it was wrong... possibly.

THE END

(1) Yes, I did just link to an Article in the Christian Science Monitor, it's not a site I frequent, but the article was relevant - turns out its nothing like it's title might suggest, so I learned something new there.

(2) It is fairly well accepted that if Vermeer traced at least the layouts for his paintings he likely did so using a simple Camera Obscura. However, an alternative (and more controversial) possibility was proposed by inventor Tim Jenison, and became the subject of the documentary Tim's Vermeer by Penn and Teller.  You can read more about it here.
(3) I read about his invention of the Glass on Easels technique years ago, but I'll be darned if I can find a reputable online reference to it now. He was Da Vinci though, so would you be surprised if he invented such a thing?  It often seems like he invented everything else.  Also, this article is off topic, but I found it interesting.