Sketchy Von Sketcherson

I've been putting off updating the past few weeks because I didn't feel I had enough to warrant a post. Eventually, yesterday, I thought I should probably just gather what I could so it didn't look like I'd gone to Bermuda and been lost in the Triangle. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a huge amount of stuff to post. Well, alright, not huge, but far more than I've happily posted alone in the past.

A further surprise was discovering that very little of it was all out bad - this is funny because while drawing it I thought most of it was dreadful, and bemoaned losing my mojo to sickness. Perhaps I just lost my perspective... Or perhaps I've lost it now because I'm sick, again (I know, this winter's been crazy for teh sikcies). Either way, there's no good or bad this time, just "Not so bad" and "Not so good".  I'll start with some portrait sketches.

Not so Bad
Some of these look nothing like the folks they're based on, but look like quite nice pictures in their own right (That's supposed to be Robert Duval int he hat for example). Others, like Jezza Clarkson in the middle there, look quite like themselves. Still more, such as the girl in the top right and centre left, aren't based on anyone, but I still quite like them.

Not so Good
See? None of these are truly dreadful, and those that come close to dreadfulville are detoured away by having an odd charm to them. I have an especial fondness for the thumbs up chap with a mustache for some reason. Only one of these is based on reference. I think it's obvious enough that I'll let you work out which for yourselves.

Now it's time to move on to some figure and gesture sketching

Not so Bad
Nothing terribly exciting here - most, though not all, are based off reference such as the random pose viewer or anatomy books, but while not being terribly exciting they are fairly good. I've even used perspective on a couple of them...

Not so Good
Now I'm looking at them again I think there are some that should have been in the Not So bad image and some of those that should be here. Lots of these are borderline "okay" (despite that poor woman in the top right's hideous visage). I quite like the little fight scene, and Mopey Joe in the top left looks oddly like someone I know.

Next up, prepare yourselves, it's time for something horrible!

Feet
Feet are gross aren't they? Except for you, with your foot fetish; step back please and try and hide the grin. So, kinda icky, but also considered rather hard to draw. You'll not that I've rarely drawn them over the last year. This wasn't a conscious choice, I just didn't have need to, but it did mean I needed to practice. Expect quite a few feet and the occasional hand from now on because practice makes perfect no matter how boring it is for the observer.

Regardless, some of these look fairly good, some of them are a little freakish. Only two are based on real feet (and I mean real, not photos, no photo reference for once). One is mine, and one is my wife's. Don't ogle the wrong one mister fetishist please.

And Finally
Just some random sketches that I thought were fun. I now realise I missed one, so that can go in next months round. Why a dinosaur pirate with a robot parrot (Though at least one person thinks it's an alligator - I can live with that)? My son's birthday is rapidly approaching and he wants a pirate dinosaur robot party. He's turning 4, what can you do? I like him (Dino Pirate, Son is a given), though I wished I'd used some reference for his hat as it looks a little wonky to me.

Top right is a demon/fairy/bat-girl thing. I don't recal why I drew that one, but I sort of like her - maybe I'll do a more finished piece. Finally there's Guffaw the Mighty... I mean Thor the Mighty, from the upcoming motion picture experience. I'm quite looking forward to it, even though I evidently can't draw him.

Social Profiling № 4: Annette

Up until last week I knew bugger all about She-ra. Actually, that's not entirely true; I knew that she existed (in a not existing because she's fictional kind of way), I knew roughly what she looked like, and I knew she was the Princess of Power (and Eternia) and sister of He-Man. How I knew even this is a mystery to me as I've never seen an episode of the cartoon, or seen one of the action figures (as far as I can recall). I have to wonder if she made guest appearances on He-Man and I know her from those, in much the same way as Dora the (bloody) Explorer and Go Diego Go (hell of a name that) turn up on each others shows and yell at each other for half an hour at a time while solving simple issues in the most complicated way imaginable*.

Anyway, I knew very little about her, but this is no longer the case thanks to Annette, as you will see...

Click it for ENORMITUDE!

Yes, She-Ra is blonde, so clearly this is not really She-Ra. It is Annette in the last of the set of four profile pictures I decided to do for friends on Facebook (if you missed them you can find the others here, and here, and also here).

I've known Annette since forever. That's not actually true,but I've known her long enough that I have no recollection of meeting her for a first time. I know it was long before she turned 18 because she turned 18 on the same trip to Florida that Owain did, and I'd known her for some years prior to that. So we go back a ways.

Despite this I know probably as much about her as I did about She-Ra. Isn't that terrible? Oh, I know a lot about who she was, but much less about who she is now. Since we last really hung out (no, not like that, just platonic) lots has happened - it's been a looooong time. Far too long now I come to think of it. Anyway, the upshot of this is that I was left with a conundrum when it came to painting her picture. What to paint it of (You know the answer to this because you've seen it, but bare with me 'k)?

I could take the easy way out and just paint a picture directly from a nice profile pic (as I did with Owain, something I've already mentioned regretting), but that wasn't appealing.  At one point I was going to do her stepping out of the TARDIS (stop it will you? Platonic remember?), but while that was a reasonable idea it wasn't a great one, so I moved on. Eventually, after fretting over it for a while, I looked through the available pictures again and saw this one:

Now this time around I was tired, and the thumbnail made it look as though the fillies right ear was a Unicorn horn.  This seemed promising.  Then I found another profile pic of She-Ra (I can only assume it was from when everyone put up a favourite comic/cartoon character as a profile pic just before Christmas).  Even more promising!  Did She-Ra ride a white horse?  I had vague notions that she may have even ridden a Unicorn.  I looked it up.

She did have a white unicorn... With Rainbow wings.  Called Swift Wind.

I'll wait while that sinks in. Yes, She-Ra's horse was named after a quick chuff. You can't make this stuff up - although clearly someone did.

Anyway, other than having the universe's most flamboyant steed She-ra turns out to be a bit of a badass, and she sports a nice dress to boot. My course was set; Tonight Mathew, Annette will be She-Ra (That's a British reference by the way - Trust me non-Brits, they're rolling in the isles... oh never mind).

Firstly though I had to do something about the horse. It's a beautiful horse, but it's not particularly lively. Some reference hunting was needed. While I was at it I got a different picture of Annette, and references for the wings and dress and so on. Here are the most relevant.

Once I had that lot I started sketching.  The initial sketch was OK, but I didn't have photo of Annette open at the time, so I threw in a head from memory.  Once I'd bothered to dig out her mugshot I went back and fixed it.  Turns out Annette has a really difficult face to draw.  You can see she's very attractive from the photos, but she's got one of those faces that is hard to capture.  One pencil line's width off and your left with a picture that looks nothing like her.  I struggled with it for quite some time.  Eventually I said "Hell with this, I'll just trace her face!", brought in the photo to trace, scaled it and lined it up only to discover that the one I'd drawn already was pretty much exactly the same, just her hair line was wrong.  So I didn't trace it after all since her hairline would be hidden anyway. Hurm.

Here's the final sketch I worked from if you're interested:

So from there the rest was just painting. Rather than post a lot of images I'll just do that thing with the Animated gif so you can see the progression. Like so:

And there you have it.

I'm not totally happy with the results to be honest. Her anatomy is a little off, It doesn't look quite as much like her as I would have liked, the gold is a little unimpressive and her belt and leg are wonky, but I learned a lot and Annette seems to like it, which are the important things.

I did cheat a little with the colour correction (Where the dress and horse pop from grey to white in the image there). It was that or do a lot of repainting, and I was feeling lazy. Also, feathers are sods to paint, just so you know.

So the experiment is at an end. I may do it again some day, and I may paint some of those who weren't chosen as one of the four just for fun, although in those cases it'll be just a speed paint of a photo rather than a custom job. These really took somewhat longer than I'd intended - but I hope you'll agree that the extra time was worth it.

Incidentally I clearly lied when I said I'd have something to post between the final two social profiling posts. I have no defense (Other than illness and a weakness for video games), I've been slacking. I vowed to myself that I would do something creative every day, and I have done just that - unfortunately not all of it is "artistic" in the manner that would end up on the blog here. That said, I have some other things to post, I just haven't done it yet...

* If you hadn't realised already, I dislike Dora and Diego with a passion, but I'll sit through it with my Son. I do tend to spoil it for him a bit by pointing out the stupidity of digging under a wall when you could just go over it - or even around it as it's only 10 feet long... or was that Mickey? I should stop now shouldn't I?

Social Profiling № 3: Larry

If you've strolled into this post you can see what it's all about, and the previous related entries here (for Owain) and here (for Steve). OK, so hopefully everyone's now on the same page. Good.

I was hoping to get this posted about an hour ago, so it would count as an extra post for January, but sadly poor old January is now going to miss out on it due to a series of cockups. Actually only one cockup was responsible for the post's delay, the other two probably saved it from being even later (one was the loss of over an hours progress in New Vegas. Most upset about that I was).

Anyway, enough about all that rubbish. Hold on to your hats, it's time for Larry.

And there we go. Clicking the image will bring it up to eyeball searing dimensions, as usual.

Now Larry was an interesting one to do because I don't know him from Adam's (That's an in-joke kids, don't worry if you don't get it). He's the only facebook friend I have that I've never met in the flesh at least once. Why is he my facebook friend? Because I'm friends with his Brother and his brother commented on a picture of Captain America I did (You can see it here). So Larry saw the comment, and thus the pic and decided he wanted to be friends with me. Fine with me, but it does mean that everything I know about Larry is what's up on facebook, plus a little his brother's said about him.

So, I went and had a look at his photo's to see if I could find one that sparked something, and found this:

I liked that. I liked the juxtaposition of the serious looking Larry with the Hello Kitty rings. But just copying that wasn't good enough for me - oh no, certainly not. Larry's posture put me in mind of a certain Marvel comicbook character. He's not all that well known, goes by the moniker of "Wolverine" or something... I figured that since he'd become my friend over one Marvel character he'd probably quite like the other*.  Anyway, for that to work well. I'd have to shave a few pounds off, add some more hair and hope to heaven that it still looked remotely like him afterwards.

Here's the step by step - More words afterwards.

So as you can probably tell this one was done partly "for real" in that I started out on paper.  I felt this was probably the best way to get a real comic strip look to it.  I grabbed a photo of my hand in the same position as Larry's, but in a fist, and then started sketching.  Once I'd done that I scanned it, so if I fluffed the next bit I could still ink it in ArtRage.  Decided the Hello Kitty thing needed to be kept, but I expanded on it by adding the cork and the fry to the other claws (the cork is of course a reference to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) , and the fry is just something you might find on an actual three pronged utensil - though in retrospect it should have been a hot dog.

Once I was happy with the pencils I moved on to inking.  I went out of my way to make the inking rougher than I usually do it as I felt the looser style would work better in this case.  That's not to say I rushed it though... well, I rushed the claws because I couldn't find my French Curves (like a ruler, but curvy), but that came back to bite me.  Inks looked good, onward to Photoshop; via my scanner.

The 3rd picture is the Photoshop cleanup I did. As you can see I cleaned up the claws - which ended up taking longer than the inking did (with the French Curves I could have done it far faster, but I still don't know where they are).  I also added a highlight to his eyes and removed some of the shadow from his top lip.  I could have done this on the original, but it didn't occur to me until I was in Photoshop.

Then, for picture number 4, I took the cleaned up inks into ArtRage for colouring.  I sort of wish I'd not added the darker colours to his arm now as I don't like the result, but at the time I was happy with it.  Not much else to say about the colouring really - I used the Blue and Yellow from the foreground image, and intended to use them in a way that pushed the eye onto Larry's face as I found with the black and white version my eyes tended to stray to his ear.  at first the colours were the other way aroud, but I found that by placing the yellow on the right my eyes would move over to the left - I have no idea why, but it was an interesting discovery. Hmmm, I guess I did have a bit else to say about the colouring after all.

Finally I took the coloured image back into Photoshop to degrade it some what. The intention was to get a late 80's/early 90's comic strip look, and I think I succeeded.  The techniques used in the aging process were almost identical to those used in my Nick Fury picture, and my brother's Iron Giant card, but I discovered that by scanning tissue that's been crumpled and flattened you get a much better paper texture for use as an overlay, which was quite useful.

And that's all there is to it.  I'm still not sure if it's a good likeness, but Larry's brother Wayne was the first commenter on the facebook posting of it (consisting mostly of "hahahahaha") and Larry said it was "Awesome" and made it his profile pic immediately.  Score one for me (horrah!).

One more to go, and I do believe it'll be the toughest of the lot.  I may have another post before I get to that one though, so until the next time,

Exelsior!

 *I really should get around to doing a DC character one of these days.

Social Profiling № 2: Steve

Quick recap: Painting four profile pics for four of my Facebook friends.  You can see the first here; along with a better explanation. This is the second.

Since that first post I've managed to crank out the third in the series, but I'm still only at the point of writing up the second.  Will I get the third written up tonight? Unlikely, but possibly tomorrow (more likely next week).  But what of the second? The one of Steve? The one I'm supposed to be talking writing about now?   Well, if you'll stop interrupting we'll get to see it.

Okay? All done with the fidgeting? Good, let's get to the pic.

Click the pic to increase it's largitude.

So I've know Steve a few years, and up until recently he was a colleague of mine at work; we even shared an office for a few months. As a result of this I have a reasonable handle Steve's personality. This time I learned from what I felt was a mistake on Owain's and tried to make the profile pic fit the person, with the likeness being of secondary importance.

The first step was to go through the photos available to me on facebook. This did not take long as I found the photo below and just stopped there.

Really, what could top that? As it happens Steve is a musician (and actor) not a Chef, but this photo caught the perfect facial expression and level of humour. It reminded me of the Swedish chef from the Muppets. Now, throw in that Steve, as a musician, has a banjo he's very fond of, mix it all together and what else can you do?

Is it a good likeness of Steve? For being a muppet sure.  I'm actually not happy with the stance more than the face - the photo has him standing back and proud, while I've painted him slightly hunched.  It works, but it's not quite what I was going for.  Additionally his hat looks very rough.  in retrospect I should have spent more time on it.  Y'know what though? I could nit-pick my own work for hours. You know this, I know this, let's call the whole thing off...  No, hang on...  Here's the step by step (enlargeable this time):

You'll note that Steve's nose changes a few times in there. In the end I felt that having a human shaped nose was just kinda creepy, so I swapped it for a regular muppet nose after some other tests. Oh, and that is Steve's actual banjo Kermit is playing (though not to scale) - it seemed pretty apt to do that, but I think it took as long to paint as the rest of the image combined and it's still not quite right.

Steve seemed to like it, but didn't use it as his profile pic - that's A-OK by me.

Social Profiling № 1: Owain

Back at the start of the month there was a thing going around on Facebook. People would post something along the lines of "Paying it forward 2011. I will give something handmade by me to the first 4 people who reply, on condition that they repeat this message and do the same for their first 4 respondents." This popped up all over the place like a rather smelly chain letter, and struck me as being a bit, well, naff.

So I did my own which read "Who wants me to paint them a profile picture? I'll do four, two for the UK, two for the States if anyone wants one. There's a catch though - I get to pick the picture, and I can't guarantee it'll be any good. ;)
Anyone game? I'll do them over the next week or two (and unlike that paying it forward thing you don't have to do anything, not even use the picture if you hate it)."

I got 16 responses out of 140 friends. I don't know if that's good or not. Anyway, it's taken more than a couple of weeks, and I've only got two finished. I was going to speed paint them, but they ended up taking a bit longer each, and as a result they each get a post of their own. I randomly picked 4 of the respondents to do profile pics for (and it really was as random as I could make it) and started from the top of the resulting list of 4; my old chum Owain.

Clicking the image will make it rather larger.

I've known Owain for about 18 years, meeting him when he was a mere 16 years old. We had a lot of good times as part of a larger group, including making several very silly but extremely fun short films and taking our first trips to the US together in Florida where he turned 18 (coincidentally, one of the other profile pics I'll be doing was of Annette, who also came on that trip, and who also turned 18 while we were there).

After college we fell out of touch. We kept in contact by mail for a few years, and many was the time my day was brightened by a witty missive from the "Blonde Toss" as we called him back then, but the writing both ways dried up and I hadn't seen him or heard from him in about 12 years. Facebook has restored the connection to a degree, and I'm happy to say he hasn't changed all that much from what I can gather from his posts (this is a good thing).

So, enough background, how about the picture? Well, it's a failure I'm sorry to say. Oh, it's a perfectly good portrait for itself - it looks quite a bit like him - but it fails to capture him as it were. It's a good portrait of his physical presence, but not of his inner being. If it had been more graphic, or art deco (which is pretty graphic anyway) or done in the style of a good movie poster, or even just extremely silly, then I think it may have been more successful. Still, fail as a profile pic, win as a likeness, how's that?

I've asked him for permission to post the photo it's based on, but he hasn't responded yet so I'll leave a space here for when he gets back to me:

[SPACE FOR OWAIN'S PHOTO)

OK, photo permissions supplied, so here's what it was based on:

And here's the step by step.

Owain was in New York for his wedding by the way, he actually lives in Swansea, but having the Empire State building in the image was something that just worked for me, so there it is. I think the whole thing took 5 or 6 hours, though I really don't know why as it's sort of rough.

Not much else to say really. I hope to meet up with him next time I'm in the UK, but since I'm notoriously lazy about staying in touch, and he's not fond of pubs (Unless that's changed) I give it a 40% chance of occurring. Time alone will tell.

Cold in the Lazy Bones

By my reckoning it has been about three weeks since I posted anything. This isn't very good at all. In my pathetic defense there was a week in there where the entire household got sick, but this is sort of offset by much of my time being taken up with playing video games. Fallout: New Vegas and Little Big Planet 2 are both sink-holes for time, and it's easy to lose track until you realise it's too late to do what you actually mean to do, such as draw, or update the blog.  All that still leaves a week unaccounted for... perhaps I dropped it down the back of the couch...

As a result I've not only not posted, but I haven't done much in the way or art either. Oh, I've done a little sketching, which I'll cover here, and I've done two ArtRage paintings that I'll cover shortly, and some speed paints, but not a lot in comparison to previous months, and very little in the way of actually improving. I really need to get on with it or I'll never be any good. Anyway, on to the feeble number of sketches done this month.

OK, to be fair I have done slightly more than this, but these are the best and the worse. Not only that but they're a mix of referenced and "out of my head" doodling. I didn't do enough of anything to make it worth breaking them up into other images. I'll let you decide which are the best and which are the worst - This month I honestly can't decide myself.

That's it, move along.  I'll try to get another post with something fractionally more exciting in it done soon.

Why so Blue?

I've been meaning to paint a picture of my son for quite some time, and I'm really not sure why it took me so long to get around to it. I have lots of photos of him, some of them adorable, and I've done some sketches of him (of dubious quality) that you can see throughout the sketch posts of the blog. So why now? I really don't know, but I took a photo of him while we were out sledding that I just needed to paint. Terrible Father that I am; he was sad because the snow sprayed all over him when we came to a stop, and I snapped a picture; I did give him a big hug afterward though.

So I had my picture, but now how to do it. I could do a pencil illustration, or charcoal (because that worked so well last time right?), or pen and ink, but this one needed to be painted as it was partly the colour that drew me to it. Not a speed paint either (though still in ArtRage), something a little more challenging. You can see the results, and my challenges, after you click more (assuming you're not already reading the expanded post).

You can see a somewhat larger version by clicking on it as usual.

So what were the particular challenges to this one? Well, first of all I decided I was getting far to comfortable using pretty much just the oil paint tool. Yes, I have tried the watercolor tool here and there, and the pencil tool, and the roller (If you know nothing of digital painting or this otherwise means nothing to you that's OK). Anyway, I decided to paint this using the roller minimally, and the pencil, watercolor and oil paint tools not at all. This forced me to try new techniques.

The second challenge was that I decided to do it all on one layer. I failed at this, but only just. The initial sketch is on one layer (think of it as a projection), and the snow that's fallen on him is on a third layer. Mostly this is because the technique I was using for that has a fair amount of randomness to it and I wanted to be able to easily erase wayward spots.

Oh, and I didn't sample any colours from the photograph - I had to pick them by eye.  I think I did a pretty reasonable job of that this time.

So we'll get through the rest of this quickly because I want to go to bed tonight. First of all, here's the photo that inspired it, and the sketch that the resulting image came from.

If you're paying attention you'll see some differences, such as his hands being to big in the sketch, there being less perspective, and his head being at a different angle (he's also missing a finger).  I could have fixed those issues, but at the time I thought the match was good enough to start painting (in retrospect I wish I'd spent a little longer on it, ah well).

So I did start painting, and here we have a nice animated gif of the process.

I was going to capture the process to create a timelapse video, but I'm glad I didn't as this was done over several sessions and took quite a while. I don't know exactly how long, but at least 5 hours, so a video of it would take a while even when sped up. So you get the multiple saves I did for the purpose condensed into a gif.

I started off painting using art markers to paint his face and coat, and that is predominantly the tool used for those all the way through, as well as for his hands. For his hat though it was going to be difficult to get the woolly effect that I wanted using the markers, so I laid down the base colours with the art markers and then switched to using chalk and crayon for the pattern. This had the advantage of picking up the grain of the canvas, which looked enough like knit to suit my purposes. I still had to paint the stitches of the pattern individually, but it still saved a lot of time. I used a similar technique on his bobble, and then smeared it with the palette knife to get the furry result.

The initial snow pass on his hat was done with the spatter sticker brush I had previously created for this image back in September, and that I also used when painting this picture of The Doctor. Nice to have made more use of it since it took a while to create. Other snow layers were built up with the chalk tool and a new variation of the spatter brush that's a lot finer.

Finally I went over the whole image with the airbrush tool, just to add a little more definition to his face, add some light bleed around the edges, tidy up some blending issues on his coat and paint the background. This made a lot of difference to the finished image, even though I only spent a short while on the pass.

Now, I've had quite a few compliments on this one already, more than I would usually get, and I have a few theories about that.  I'm not sure that it's appreciably better than much of my other stuff, but it doesn't involve guns, swords, shields, vampires, zombies, dinosaurs, scantily clad women or grimacing men.  It's just a little boy looking sad in the snow, and I think people respond to that who usually wouldn't even click on the thumbnail.  "Awww, poor dab, how sweet," they think, "I like this!" they say, because they had an emotional connection they otherwise wouldn't get.  Food for thought there...  Or possibly just food for the mouth in the top of my hat that doesn't know when to stay shut.