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.

Less Haste, More Speed

Well, hopefully this is the start of a turn around, as it's only been a week since I last posted. With three speedpaints done then; not enough to show, and seven to show today that's four paintings in a week!  OK, it's actually not since I found one of them down the side of the virtual couch, but still.

Basically last weeks post showed me that I'd been neglecting things far in excess of the amount of other things I had to do, especially for speedpainting.  Usually I wait until I see something I want to paint, and then think "I should paint that."  Time allowing I do so.

Recently though there's been a disconnect between when I see the thing, and when I have time to paint, and with other things crowding my brain I've forgotten about the likely image, or my mood has changed and it doesn't appeal any more.  So now I'm going to make a more concerted effort to stack up likely candidates separately from the rest of my references, so they're easier to go through when I want to paint something quick.

Anyway, you don't care about any of that, you just want to see pictures, right?

Time Taken: 65 minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

After all I just said about keeping references around, here's a painting I did without any.  I realised it had been a while since I'd really thought about the form of the skull - which is of course an enormously useful thing to know when doing portraits - so I thought I should paint one. This is the best skull profile with headphones and a rose I can currently do in 65 minutes.  Don't like the rose?  Here it is again with the rose removed, because it was on a separate layer and my friend Laura said she'd like it more without.  Yay for layers!

So there you go - no references (which is why the teeth are way off - I never really learned teeth in any detail), just me poking at my graphics tablet for an hour in ArtRage.

Nothing amazing to see in a step by step either (I'm doing more of these - it's as much for me to remember how I approached things in future as it is for you to see how I did it now).  The only real thing of note is that I quickly tweaked the shape of the skull so it wasn't as elongated, and I remembered that unless you have an unusually huge jaw it doesn't angle backwards like that - so I'd fixed it in the 4th image here.

I don't recall why I pointed the rose at the back of the head instead of the front - I suspect I didn't think about it at all.  Yeah, it's cliched, but I wanted a bit of stronger colour and something I could paint fairly recognisably with no reference - so rose it was.

Time Taken: 60 minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on this

This, to me, is a good example of how rusty I am doing these things.  Time was when something like this might have taken me half the time; though I think the end result may have been weaker.  Even so, it's an OK piece I guess, despite not really capturing what I liked about the original Photograph, which was it's grainy old documentary look.

Here's the step-by-step (I've chopped off the top, which didn't change much), where I've not really gone for block shapes beyond that of her hair, and instead I've just sort of placed slight blob shapes that eventually coalesce into the more recognisable forms.  It still amazes me how little is needed for the brain to process that something is a face, even if it's not a specific one - that second image explains essentially everything that's going to come  by the end in terms of the position and basic form of her face and hair, while leaving the rest of her body utterly ambiguous - even though I stick to that same basic layout for it right to the end.

Swift Sugar has a bunch of photos in this style; I'm almost certain I'll be returning to them for another painting at some point in order to get closer to what's appealing about them.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4.5
Based on one of these (I can't link to the exact one, but it's in there)

I'm not a fan of this one.  There are aspects of it I'm quite pleased with, but overall I think it's mostly just a blobby mess.  I usually do portraits, and I like doing portraits, but occasionally I like to try something else, and this urban, near post apocalyptic scene appealed to me.  I think I could have done a pretty good job of it if I'd taken a lot longer, but as it is it's a long way from good.

I think the failings come early too.  for something like this to be effective you should be able to squinch your eyes and have the tonal range still make sense, which helps make up for slightly uneven edges and slightly skewed perspective when you get that initial read, but here it really doesn't.  I do quite like some of the worn brick, and the rubble and vegetation in the foreground reads quite well as being in shadow, but overall I think I need to spend more time on layout and getting values right if I'm going to try something like this again (and probably I will).  This was my first piece done with ArtRage 4.5 too, where they've introduced a grid feature.  In this case I might have been wise to use it.

Time Taken: 20 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4.5

I have terrible difficulty when painting with no references.  I know guys who can do it, who only use references for specific things, rather than general layouts, and I am in awe of them.  this is what happens when I just go for it.  I dare say that with years of practice I might get half decent at doing this, but for now you end up with scribbled messes like this one (and, more rarely, ones like the skull up top).

I like some of the ideas in here (Topless while not showing anything, the underwear blending into the bed and so on), but it didn't capture much of what I was actually aiming to achieve.  Maybe I'll have another crack at it one day with more planning, but not as a speedpaint - just off the cuff, this one is a failure.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4.5
Based on this and this

Speaking of the grid feature, as I did before, I used it a little for this one.  I've long had issues with painting things in perspective, and I've gone into some of the reasons for that before, so for this one I divided the image using a 2x2 grid; basically a crosshair.  This was after I'd already taken the original and cropped and rotated it into this composition to work from, and decided I was going to try and match the less extreme palette of the second picture more than the original.

So the crosshair helped me with the layout a bit, without being enough of a grid that I was trying to match every little thing and slowing to a crawl as a result (and this one took far longer than it should have to begin with).  This one was also one I almost gave up on, right before the last image of the top row in the sequence.  That was 45 minutes in, and at that point  the picture is usually starting to come together, and this time I just didn't feel that it was.  So I decided to give it 10 minutes more, and if it was still dreadful I'd give up on it.  The next image in the sequence was about 10 minutes later, and it had improved enough that I decided to carry on. Quite glad I did - I'm fairly happy with the end result despite it taking an additional hour.

Time Taken: 55 Minutes
Software: Art Rage 4.5
Based on this and this

This is an odd one.  I'm not terribly happy with it - it's okay, but to my eyes not exceptionally good or anything.  So it's amusing to me that's it's been one of my most popular images for a while in places I've shown it.  Clearly I am a terrible judge of my own work.

It does mean I'll be doing something along these lines as a finished piece eventually though, because while I'm not happy with the end result it was a lot of fun to paint.  It came about because I really liked both of the source images, and couldn't decide between them, so I thought "why not have both", which has strangle turned out to be the phrase of the week.  Anyway, it was fun to blend two things together during a speedpaint.

Here's the progression, and for a change I'm handling it like a 'real' artist, blocking in the basic shapes, then the major lighting forms, and then building up on top of that.  My personal favourite stage here was the first on the bottom left, where I'd just roughed in her hair, I just like how she looked at that point.  Once I'd introduced the tule behind her, which really doesn't read as such, it just didn't feel as solid to me.

Anyway, the central two images at the bottom do have some differences, despite that not being the case at first glance.  I cleaned up her neck a little, and did some fairly major remodelling of her nose  and facial structure, as well as increasing the amount of eye makeup.

Finally I tried using some very different settings for the oil brush tool when approaching her hair (stiff brush, low pressure), and threw in some red highlights to bring some of the drama of her makeup into her hair.  Someone commented that she looked like Harley Quinn from Batman; maybe that's why this one has been quite popular.

Time Taken: 5 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

This is the one I lost down the back of the sofa.  I did it months ago, not really as a speedpaint, but more as a test of a technique, and then I forgot about it.  Essentially I was trying to come up with a quick and easy method of painting Kirby Krackle, and this was my solution.  It's quite a nice technique for other things too, and is actually very simple - you can see the crackle as you paint, rather than having to run a bunch of filters after the fact.  While  prepping the following image was in fact the first time I'd ever seen the images look like that, as I'd painted the above one with all the layers in place.

So this is less a step by step and more of a 'how did I do that?' (again, as much for my future reference as your interest).  For those curious it's four stacked Photoshop layers  The bottom layer (on the left) is the actual painting, the next layer is the rough pattern to be seen in the krackle, with fairly low opacity to let the painting layer come through (in this case it was a noise layer with the Reticulation filter run on it, and a 25% opacity).  On top of this was a threshold layer, to give it the hard contrasting dots look.  Finally I threw in a red multiplied layer to give it the slightly garish look of Kirby's energy or nebula renderings.

Working that out took a while, but this particular use of it took only 5 minutes.  Its not a great picture, but I found it a lot of fun to play around with.





(As a by the by, Blogger has been having a lot of technical issues today, making writing this post a lot more arduous than it usually is.  No matter to you, but it sure was to me)

Feeble Sketching - January to March '14

Well, I have no idea where the last 6 weeks went.  I know I've been busy, but it's not like I have a lot I can show for it.  3 speedpaints since the last speedpaint post (I think that's an all time low), so I need at least one more before I can post about those; a book cover - which was a fair time sink, but not that bad - and again it'll be a little while until I can post about that; and a whole bunch of work stuff that's off the table for years to come, if I can ever show it at all.  So I've been busy, and when I haven't been I've been spending my time playing video games and watching TV.  I have sketched too, but not in a terribly constructive way.   All in all it's been a bad few weeks for anything worth putting on the blog, and let's face it, it's not been the best year for it either.  Hopefully things will smooth out soon.  Until then, here are some terrible sketches I did between January and March of this year.

So January was the most productive month of the three, but as you can see, there wasn't a lot of quality in with the quantity.  Of all these sketches there's only one I actively like (the woman close to the top left corner), and the rest is downhill from there.  I've been told the more fleshed out sketch on the right side (near the top right corner) looks a bit like 'Flowers' from Agents of Shield, and while I watch the show it wasn't consciously supposed to be her.  The only other sketch of note is the large headed tentacle fellow near the middle bottom.  He's actually based on a pattern of condensation I saw on the garage window one morning.  I should probably take him further one day, but for now this is as good as he gets.

February had some moderately better stuff than January, but not a lot of it.  This is basically everything I drew that month, bar a handful of thumbnails so faint I couldn't scan them.  Really not much else to say about any of them really.

Again, this is basically the totality of my sketching in March.  Well, I say that, but it's only if you don't include all the robots.  Nothing exciting, though I'm quite fond of 'bewildered superman' near the left side, and I really have a soft spot for the woman in the bottom left.  For some reason she reminds me of Michelle Pfeiffer, despite looking not a jot like her (Hmmm... I should do a Michelle Pfeiffer painting soon).

So that was it for three very disappointing months. I think the next handful were fairly sparse also, but things do pick up a little further along.  Maybe I'll get around to posting the next few next month, leaving only one post before I'm back up to date.  I actually finished off my latest sketchbook today; the first one that took over a year to fill (which should tell you something).

Sorry for the lack of, well, anything, recently.  I'm hopeful I can get that turned around fairly soon.

Social Profiling № 9: Smile!

And here, finally, is the post I was planning to put up last week.  All the prep work on the images was done for that post, so this should go fairly quickly.

Before I begin though, I'm going to digress and mention (for my own future reference, as much as your general interest), that in the last week one of our cats has gone missing, and we have a large hole in the house boarded up with plywood from where the new sliding door was supposed to go in, but couldn't because of rot in a support beam.  The frustrating thing about the later being that the former could have come home, but would have no way of letting us know because his usual entrance is now covered with boards.  Bugger.

Oh, and a stray cat showed up at one point (possibly to relay a message from the missing one, which was useless since we don't speak cat), stayed over night but ran away when it was time to call animal control.  One of those weeks.

Anyway, enough about me, and on to the wonder of fake paint!

You may note that there are two versions of this painting above, each a slightly different colour.  No I'm not trying to riff on Andy Warhol (but running out of steam after two images), I just can't decide which version I like best.  The original is on the top, the second one is colour tweaked in Photoshop.  Neither of them is the colour of the original photograph, which was straight black and white.  You can enlarge all the images by clicking on them by the way - some of them you may need to.

So, learning from my terrible layout sketch from the last one I decided to A) Forego all that m'larky up front and just start painting and B) use a grid this time.  I didn't use a grid for long, just long enough to get the big bold shapes in roughly the right places.  I stopped using it somewhere in between the first and second stages above.  Even then I put his eye in the wrong place.  It didn't take long for me to notice and fix it, but long enough that  it irritated me when I did.  It's more or less right in the last of these stages here.  For this one I saw no reason to change the composition of the Photograph at all - the original photograph was already fantastic, so I left it as was, but just painted it in sepia tones.

Here's me, refining the facial features.  There's really not much else to say about this one.  Hmmm, OK, so the photo this was based on had a fair amount of damage in places, so I had to infer quite a bit about the left side of his mouth and chin.

This piece, by the way, is of the person's father, who has passed away - as has mine, you may recall.  This bit is relevant.  So when my Dad died my mother commissioned an artist to paint his portrait to give to my Grandmother.  I was never terribly impressed by the painting (though it is vastly better than I could do, especially with real paint), there was something off about the eyes that lost a lot of his character.  Anyway, I didn't want the same thing to happen here for someone else, so I put more work into it than I probably otherwise would have.

I have no idea if I succeeded in capturing that character or not, but I did the best I could.  Oh, and another coincidence - this person has also hired me before.  Two out of four - it's not like I get hired all that much! Very strange coincidence.

Oh, and I cropped it off, because it hadn't changed before the next set of pictures, but I'd blocked in his left hand here too.

Some very minor work continuing on his face, mostly at his hairline and at the base of his nose, but the majority of this sequence is spent on his right hand and shirt.  I never did get around to detailing out his little finger, but I don't think it's noticeable in the final piece unless it's pointed out... Which I just did...  Way to go me, now you can't unsee it.

Not much to say about the shirt, except that I've shaved off an awful lot of his shoulder since that first block in, giving a bit more definition to the cloth and his neck.

I've also painted in some of the damage that was in the original photograph in the third one here.  The small pieces of damage I didn't do, because they weren't helping the piece, but this big swath of light burning in the bottom and the right of the picture I thought looked great, so I added it here.

Finally getting to making the camera look like a camera.  I debated over whether to do the lens freehand, but eventually I used a stencil (I argued, with myself, that if it was a real painting I could cut a mask out of a piece of card for this bit).  Only the outer circle was done with the stencil though, and I painted over the result afterward so that the circle wasn't too perfect and in conflict with the rough nature of the rest of the picture.  More on the camera in a moment.

Here is also where I painted in his hair, and did some general blending before adding the trees.  Painting his hair was interesting - I went a little too detailed to begin with, and you can still see the remainder of this as a slightly noisy patch right at the top of his head.  Painted over that with a bigger brush though, and ended up getting it to look like his fine buzzcut even though the individual strokes are quite large.

I faired less well with the trees behind him, but I got them to the point where they weren't too distracting.  I was tempted to leave the background being much more stark and graphic, but I wanted it to be evident that he's outside, so the trees had to happen.

Finally I took it into Photoshop and played with the colour values for the second version.  The bit in Photoshop took all of 10 minutes.

If you're interested, the camera is a Falcon Minette, or a Miniature, or a Minicam Juniour (my money is on the former). Apparently these were made back in the 40's, which feels period accurate to the photo, though I had it pegged for the 50's when painting (which it could be - they made things to last back then).  The easiest way to tell is from the label around the lens.  Amusingly I didn't think of doing the corrections to see what it actually said until I was finished and working on the thumbnail for the post, at which point I'd painted the logo from a reference that was backwards and rotated and blurred.  I'm quite pleased at how close I got to the real thing as a result.

And that, for this tale, is the end.