A Pirate's Life

Yeah, I missed a couple of weekends and haven't sorted out the sketching from two months ago yet, but I was busy. I'm here now, and ready to show one of the things I've been busy with. It's the first really finished digital piece I think I've done since November, and it took a while. I have some other stuff coming up I'll briefly mention first though.
I was working on a cover for Book 4 of Phil's TARDIS Eruditorum series, but we've both agreed it would be better suited for book 5, so I need to come up with other ideas, while still working on the #5 cover (it's a reasonably big job). I've also got this months sketches to scan in, and then I have to decide if it's a separate post from the previous two months or not (probably not, I didn't do all that much), and another speedpaint post is almost ready (I just want to do one more speedpaint for it).
Saints Row IV is out next month (probably this month by the time I post this, which means I should probably do a post about my work on the previous one before it's irrelevant. Beyond that I'm almost done with another painting class, so I'll be posting the results of that too. Remember the last one and set expectations accordingly. But now, on with this post...

You can click that to get a rather large version.  Hopefully your browser can do a half decent job of re-scaling it to fit your window.  You can enlarge the rest of the images in this post as well if you want a better look, though none of them are this large.

The story behind this one isn't terribly involved.  It's based on this stock photograph from Dingelientje-stock on DeviantArt and has been in my Favorites collection there for quite a while.  In the usual course of things I would probably have forgotten about it unless I stumbled across it while browsing my Favorites, which I do on occasion, but this one just kept popping up for some reason.  Every time I saw it I thought 'that would make a good painting' and then I'd move on.  Finally, when I was in a mood to actually do a portrait I stumbled across it again and thought 'Of course, that one!' and got started.  Really I just liked the puppy peeking out of her shirt, and in fact the initial name for this one was just Puppy Shoulder.

So I actually spent a little time sketching the layout for this one.  Not enough time apparently as it's still way off (sometimes I get it almost perfect, other times I'm way off - this is somewhere in between), but somewhere between 40 minutes and an hour.  The image on the left here is simply a quick sketch to get the very rough composition, taking about a minute, and then I filled in the detail that you can see on the right over the remaining time.

This is the blocking in process.  It's not supposed to be particularly pretty, and it really isn't.  Mostly it's just getting the rough masses and areas of colour blocked out.  Unlike my usual technique, where I keep the line art on a layer above the painting for constant reference, this time I kept it below and painted right over it (as I would with real paint), trusting the blocked image as a guide. I  didn't go quite dark enough with the shadows and her hair is the wrong colour here, but it was more important to me to identify that there at least was a shadow, and get the rough shape of her hair - the rest could be tweaked on the next pass.

Which was this one.  Still a little rough, but you can see I'm smoothing out the transitions and adding detail to her features as well as getting her hair the right color.  There's about 90 minutes or so between each of these stages, and while I would do further passes on most of the image her ear pretty much stayed at this stage all the way to the end.  Likewise I didn't really adjust the shirt after this except to add the stripes.

I had a little panic attack at around the point I finished the image on the right.  I have one at some point in any work I do that takes more than a couple of hours.  I start doubting the picture and wondering if I've just wasted my time.  Usually I reach the conclusion that even if the end result is terrible, the time will only have been wasted if I don't finish it or give it my all, and then I'll get back to it.

You can see the stripes here.  I did cheat a little with the stripes, because rather than spend the effort of making them darker as they went further into the shadow I just painted them on another layer and then used ArtRage's Multiply Blending mode to do all the hard work for me.  I did go in and tweak the result once I'd flattened the image, but still.  Despite the 'cheat' adding the stripes still took over an hour - I could have done a speedpaint in that time ;)

No cheating for her headband though, except with real paint I probably would have needed t paint the scarf white, darken the shadows, and then paint the black over it, while here I could just paint the white and grey straight over the black.  I didn't notice until this point, but firstly I realised the scarf had Skulls and Crossbones on it, and then I noticed that the skulls had hearts for eyes, which is pretty awesome.  I was tempted to not bother doing that in the painting, because who'd notice?  But then I decided it would be a really nice detail and made sure I matched it as best I could. This was also the point I decided to change the title to A Pirate's Life (Originally it was going to be A Pirate's Love, but was she the love? Or the pirate in love? And would my wife get the wrong idea?  Life it is then!).

The final panel here may look the same as the preceding one at first glance, but her hair has had an additional pass along the top and side.

These three may look almost identical except for her tattoo, but I made a number of tweaks to her face, including smoothing some of the shading, improving her eyes, changing her eyebrows, tweaking her nose, adding detail to her lips, and adjusting her cheeks.  Hard to see at this size, but fairly obvious at the size I was painting.  Those changes may be more visible in the GIF below.

The tattoo itself I'd put off until the end as I thought it would be nightmarish to do.  Turned out that other than being a little time consuming (The line art for the flowers took about an hour, and the rest about the same) it wasn't too bad, and actually quite relaxing.

This is just an image from the end of each of the 4 main passes at the painting, to give a better look at the progression.

And this is a GIF of the painting stages at the end of each session I worked on it (mostly between 1 and 2 hours a time).  20 odd hours reduced to a few seconds...

Finally, just for a bit of fun I took the painting and ran it through some adjustments and filters in Photoshop in order to change the mood.  I think the left one looks more romantic as a result, while the right one looks more dramatic and candle lit, but the real one is the one at the top there.  Maybe I'll paint something candle lit looking next... Or not.

A Collection of Pleasingly Structured Lies (№ 1)

I have depressingly little to report. I have started several pieces, but most of them are some way off from being something I can show. I scanned two months worth of sketches, but have yet to arrange them into something I can display (and if you're a regular reader you'll know that's a pretty major undertaking, which is why I decided to do it less often, but now I realise that just means I have more to do when I get around to it). I haven't done any new speed paints (though I'm hoping to do one today), but I have done some speed sculpts. Digital sculpts you understand, if it was real sculpting materials I would just be showing off a blob of Playdough.
I also started a new painting class with Paula McCarty, so there may be something to show there in a few weeks. Other than that? Not much. Nothing to show anyway. But I don't want to leave you hanging, so since I can post pretty much whatever I want on here you're going to get a little fiction.

I don't write. I am not a writer. I am a story teller though, as I suppose many people with kids are. At bedtime my son insists I tell him a "Story from your mind," whereby he picks two random things (invariably robots and something, or, when that is banned for being overused, a cat and a refrigerator), and I have to tell a story about them. I have yet to write any of these down, although some of them may be worthy of me doing so.
I had to write this down though it wasn't a story for my son, it was a story for me. I had an incomplete dream (I rarely remember dreams), and decided I had to know how it would have ended, so I wrote it down and completed it. I'll leave you to it, and hope you enjoy it, as my tale telling is rarely something I draw attention to.

Until the next time - fiction!

Quite Another Dimension

Two men sat in the sunlit room, one either side of the table. Both men were highly regarded doctors in their respective, but unconnected fields.

"So," said one, "You claim you have succeeded in your attempts at trans-dimensional travel?"

"Claim?" came the others response, "Yes, I suppose 'claim' is fair, as I have no physical evidence that my experiments were successful."

He elaborated, "It is not my physical being that travels you see? Such a thing would be a physical impossibility, and in some dimensions a liability. No, it is not my person that travels, rather my consciousness is transferred into my closest biological equivalent in whichever dimension I arrive in."

The other doctor looked interested, "Closest biological equivalent implies you do not always transfer into your physical duplicate. Have you transferred into others?"

"Quite so. There are an infinite number of dimensions you see? Thus an infinite variety of alternates, only a small number of whom are my biological duplicate. There are a few billion versions of me out there, a few trillion at most. In the vast majority of accessible dimensions the closest thing I can transfer into is very little like myself. I have been a potential sibling a few times, some of them women; I transferred into my father's duplicate twice, once my great-great grandfather, and on one memorable occasion a snake."

"A snake?" the other cried in disbelief, "but how could you possibly operate the controls to return?"

"Well, I didn't need to. The machine works on a timed mechanism. As I said my physical being does not travel, and this goes for any other physical object as well, so taking controls to bring myself back would be quite impossible, and, as you have now realized, quite inconvenient.

I said earlier that this lack of physical transfer avoided some liabilities, one of them being that I may appear in a dimension where the natives breathe a mix of nitrogen and methane. Quite inconvenient to arrive as an oxygen breather in such an environment. But the problem is avoided, as is the problem of operating controls. the machine brings me back after a preset time, with my physical form being seated in a chair within the machine while I am gone."

"In the machine... unconscious?" The other doctor seemed to find this possibility even less believable than the snake, the incredulity evident in his tone.

"From your tone you will be happy to know that I am not unconscious during my travels, no. My physical form must have quite an interesting adventure of its own I gather, as the consciousness of whoever I posses in the other dimension must go somewhere, and so it temporarily occupies my form here. I discovered this the hard way when I returned to find some considerable damage in the lab. I couldn't afford to risk the machine becoming inoperable while I was out of my body, so I installed timed restraints. They lock when I leave, and release when I return. Quite simple really."

The other seemed impressed by this solution to the travelers problem, and made a note on the pad before him, one of many he had written in the last few minutes. He looked up again.

"Tell me Doctor, have you done this often? Does it hurt? And when will you do it again, I would be most interested in observing."

"Why yes, I have done it several times, although after the partial destruction of my lab I have done it less often, and to a more strict schedule. I had to change locations after that as well; the others in my building were quite disturbed by the violence of my dimensional alternate on that occasion, as well you might gather.

It is interesting you ask about pain. early on in the experiments I had very little, just a slight discomfort, but recently I have returned with a level of quite extraordinary pain. I had not thought to wonder why this would be until now, but it did seem to start when I moved labs.

As to when I am trying this again, I believe I have scheduled time in the machine tomorrow morning at about ten o'clock, if you would be free to attend then?"

The other stopped his now relentless scribbling and looked up once more.

"Ten AM? Yes, that sounds perfect. If you'll excuse me though I have other matters to attend to now, and I'm sure you could do with some rest before tomorrow."

He reached over to the intercom on his desk and pressed the switch,

"Orderly, would you escort Doctor Frederick back to his room please?"

After they had left he turned to a third figure, shrouded in shadows and obscured by sunlit dust motes in the corner of the room.

"I believe I'll see him in the morning for his scheduled cranial electro-therapy at ten. I'm afraid he's still quite delusional, although seemingly quite harmless. I doubt we'll have a repeat of his performance at the Davidson Institute here. Are you agreeable to the continuation of his treatment?"

"Yes," said the woman, the Traveller's wife, "He clearly needs all the help we can give him."

Slow; It's the New Speed!

Okay, okay, I'll post some of that art stuff this blog is supposedly here for. Today it's speedpaints (sort of) as you may have gathered from the title. A while back I said I would post these speedpaint updates every four paints or so, but this time there's a couple more. I've also said that speedpaints generally take less than an hour and a half... Not so here, for reasons I'll explain with each paint. I'm cutting my preamble short this time (though there will be general update info at the bottom), so let's go look at 'art'!

Time Taken:40 Minutes
Software: Art Rage Studio Pro

On occasion I like to just paint without any reference (or at least minimal reference, such as a photograph of something else entirely). This was one of those times. The result is not great, especially so for taking 40 minutes, but there is a reason for the extended time taken over this one, and that's that Microsoft are gits. How is Microsoft responsible? Well, every copy of Windows comes with tablet drivers installed. This makes sense, especially if you're using a tablet PC (there would be no way to turn them on if they weren't already), but it doesn't makes sense that these are so difficult to disable, especially when using a third party graphics tablet such as a Wacom (which I am). You have to disable the various parts of the Windows ones in several different places, and there is no documentation (that I could find) on where all these are located, or how to turn them off. So I had just done a reinstall and hadn't managed to disable the built in ones yet. This piece was painted with everything slowing down every time I made a stroke, weird little graphical do-dads appearing every time I clicked down and text popups obscuring everything whenever my cursor stopped moving. Really MS, would a button in the Tablet prefs allowing you to disable everything to do with your built in tablet stuff be too horrible to ask for?

None of this excuses the horrible result of course, but at least I could have done it more quickly.

Time Taken: 190 Minutes
Software: Art Rage 4
Source: This set by Faestock
Stages: Link

Yes, that's right, I'm counting a picture that took over 3 hours as a speedpaint. At least this one turned out better than the last. Why did this take so long? Well, I still hadn't managed to remove all of Microsoft's Tablet stuff from my system, leading to a fractional (but significant enough) delay every time I made a stroke, but also because I was using Art Rage 4 for the first time. AR4 has made some fairly significant changes to the way the Oil Paint features work. In many ways they are now much more realistic and more like oil paint, but that change is disadvantage when speedpainting since knowing the medium is a good chunk of how you maintain a reasonable level of speed (after this I decided I could not get rid of Studio Pro, and would use both packages as my mood changed my requirements - more familiar or more powerful). So between the two things this was already trending to be a long speedpaint. Eventually I decided just to take it a little further than most, which pushed it even further over time. I like it though - if this was real paint I'd probably be ecstatic about how well I'd done.  You can see the stages for this one (and some of the others in this post) by clicking the link by "Stages", and you can click the image to enlarge of course.

A pause now to speak of Deviant Art, and more specifically the stock to be found therein. DA is an artists social network. Think facebook, but dedicated to art of all forms. Of course as something that basically amounts to a huge gallery with social extensions this does mean that a huge percentage of the things to be found there are people who use it for their personal pictures, people who hang out there to look at other peoples pictures, people who rip off other peoples pictures and pretend they're their own (or don't pretend, but post others stuff anyway), and people who delight in posting nothing but pictures of their penis/labia/nipples (bending the 'no pornography' rules to the limit).

All that has given the place a bit of a bad rap in some circles (I'm sure the name DeviantArt doesn't help), which is a shame because as well as all of that it is a community of amazing artists and aspiring amazing artists; storytellers, cosplayers, photographers, seamstresses, illustrators, painters, sculptors and more. Every time I go on there I'm just a couple of clicks away from something that will probably knock my socks off and make me feel artistically useless (and that's actually a good thing). As well as all that there's also a group of extremely generous people (mostly women, but some men) who take and make available stock photography.

Stock is great - there are usually a few rules (Such as 'let me know what you're doing with this' and 'nothing to naughty, thank you'), and more rarely payment is required, but after that you can do with it what you will, which is great (I'm not actually sure about the rules of painting based on stock, rather than using the stock directly, since I see people painting things based on not-stock all the time, seemingly without permission, and that doesn't seem to cause much of a fuss. Grey area? I dunno).

Quality is highly variable, but quite a few of these folks supply photography that is every bit as good as the fully commercial stuff you can nab from shutterstock or Corbis. Even those who are shooting under 40watt bulbs with their first gen i-phones are making an effort, and supplying inspiration and reference to unimaginative schlubs like me. So a large number of my speedpaints are based on photographs from DA's Stock community, and for that I salute their efforts. For your part, if you like a piece I've done that's clearly based on a DA stock piece (I usually say, as I do above and below) then please take a moment to go and check out their work as well as mine via the link provided. Thanks.

And now back to our scheduled programming.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes
Software: Art Rage 4
Source: This Image by Random Acts Creative
Stages: Link

Not much to say about this one. I like it (it's even signed!), but it amuses me that it looks more like John Snow from Game of Thrones than the actual guy it's based on. Slow again - I think that's just going to be a common state with Art Rage 4 pieces as getting good results with the new tool takes a little more work (but as I said above it is potentially more powerful)

Time Taken: 80 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CS3
Source: This stock image by AmethystDreams1987

This one also took a while, but you'll notice these are A) getting faster and B) done in a wider variety of software than usual. I have real difficulty painting in colour in Photoshop for some reason, but I figured the only way I was going to improve was to start doing it more regularly. As a result you may see more PS paintings from me from now on. 'Funny' story with this one, I struggled and struggled with it, and then when I was done with it (gave up in frustration more like) I discovered the pressure sensitivity for the tablet was not working. Humph.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes
Software: Art Rage Studio Pro
Source: This Image (found while looking for car pictures. Does not compute)
Stages: Link

Back to Studio Pro for this one, and with all the tablet stuff working correctly at last. Still no earthly reason this should have taken over an hour, but I quite like the result. There, I can be brief, see?

Time Taken: 45 Minutes
Software: Art Rage 4
Source: This Image of 'Toolkitten' from Random Acts Creative
Stages: Link 

I was trying a new technique for this one, and it didn't quite work (mostly because I muffed her face :?), but the resulting style does sort of match the goth aspect of the original source if nothing else (IMO anyway). Really don't like how her face came out, but I am quite pleased with the corset. I'll try this technique a few more times and then, if it's working out, I may share it (I used it again below).  Oh, and Toolkitten is also a ridiculously accomplished artist as well as being the model for this, so go take a look at her stuff eh?

Time Taken: Not sure, but less than an hour each.
Software: Sketchbook Pro 2011
Source: Picture of my wife from a few years ago

Two studies of my wife, chosen mostly because of the really tricky angle. I did the first one (the pencil style one) and hated it, so I did another, which is a better likeness but I'm not sure about the style. Might try it again one day. As it happens the first was just eyeballed, which didn't go so well, while for the second I tried that new technique.  So, I guess technically these aren't speedpaints, but I have no idea where else to show them, so shush :)

Time Taken: 60 Minutes
Software: Art Rage 4
Source: Picture of Swansea's Castle square, taken a while back.

Not much to say about this, it's a picture of my hometown. Mucked up the perspective on the building in the background. Messed up most of it actually, but people I know from Swansea seem quite fond of it anyway.


And that's it. I did have some updates to write at the bottom didn't I? This post has been so long I've forgotten what they were though. I did finish out another sketchbook recently, so I guess a sketch post is due shortly. Other than that I still have several pieces planned, but I think I may finish something more spontaneous first. Stuff to look forward to either way. Oh, and as it happens I got a great comment the other day on one of my posts. I thought it was someone trying to sell me something at first because it was pretty glowing (better than my previous unknown commenter who simply posted 'this sucks'), but also because almost no-one ever posts (I've mentioned this before. I was even amazed when my wife posted on the last one - this is a very rare occurrence), which is why this is worth actually mentioning - yay :)

A Musing 5b: It's Just an Illusion (Part 2)

Let's talk some more about optical illusions.  If you missed the first part of this series (and this may be the last part, unless I think of something else worth saying) you can catch up here.  That's not required reading to understand this part, but it may be of interest.  So, illusions! Fascinating things.  In the previous part I discussed how illusions help us understand art.  This time I'll be looking at how they can also make the artist's life hell by lying about what we're seeing when we are trying to reproduce it.  This issue doesn't effect all artists - some people just have the natural power to overcome at least some of these illusions, and for others you can either learn tricks to get past them, or use "mechanical" means to do the same.  That is not what this post is about though.  I'm not going to go into every optical illusion that causes problems, just a small number of prevalent ones or I'd be here all week.

Shortly after writing my last entry io9's Esther Inglis-Arkell wrote an interesting post about people, blind from birth, who regain sight later in life and have trouble processing what they see.  You can read it here. It's not entirely relevant to the point of these posts, but it is interesting that it would seem the brain processing images into something useful is something likely learned while young, which tallied nicely with my 'Visual shortcuts and Illusions making the understanding of art possible' argument of the last part.  Especially relevant was the following passage:

"Another area that many newly-sighted people find inexplicable is paintings and other visual representations. They can comprehend real objects, but not painted ones. When they do understand what the paintings are meant to represent, the shadows that are meant to define space and give shape just look like dark marks on the painting. Which, technically they are."

This isn't especially relevant to the illusions I'll be talking about today, but I thought it was of interest to the general topic regardless.  But enough of that, onto today's subject.

So you're there with your easel, or your monitor or what not.  Beyond the easel you have your life model or still life, or a photo pinned to the frame, or (in the case of my speedpaints), your reference on a second monitor.  Great, your reference is right there!  Reproducing it on the canvas should be as simple as making marks in the same locations as the source and calling it a day, right?  But getting them in the right place is a lot more difficult than you might think (unless you actually are an artist, in which case you know exactly how difficult it can be).  Darn.

Between looking at the subject, and then looking back at the canvas (or monitor, or whatever) you're storing information temporarily in your brain that you then need to parse and turn into hand movements that reproduce what you stored.  It's not a long time, usually a fraction of a second, but even that is enough to garble the information a little.  This is not related to optical illusions of course, but the problem is compounded by the fact that what you saw and stored in your brain for parsing wasn't accurate to begin with.  And even when it is correct, what you put on the canvas won't look accurate when you compare the two at a glance.  Does that seem fair to you?  Me either.  Let's look at some of the reasons why.

The Leaning Tower Illusion

So there you are with the side by side reference and work as mentioned above, and you're drawing the arm of your model.  You check out the source to the right, and transfer it to the work on the left and it looks wrong.  The arm is clearly at the wrong angle.  Try again, and it's still not right.  You finally get it looking pretty close and carry on but the nothing seems to match up.  The arm can't be at the right angle, but it looks correct!  What gives?

The Leaning Tower Illusion, that's what gives.  I've known of this illusion for years, and I'm sure most artists have too, but (to my knowledge) it hasn't been formalized until recently.  Basically, when looking at the same angle side by side they will not appear to be the same - one side will appear to lean more than the other.  This effect seems to become more pronounced the more in perspective the object appears to be, which is not a great help when painting people, buildings, cars and the like where anything might be pointing into the distance.  For years I thought I was just hopeless at judging angles by eye, then I became vaguely cognisant that it was due to an optical illusion, but not to the extent that I bothered to experiment to find out if it really was.  But then, when researching this post, I discovered this:

Yes, that's the same photograph twice, and yes it's the leaning tower of Pisa, but you'll probably find the effect works on any form with converging angles (see below).  The right image appears to be leaning at an entirely different angle than the left.

You can click the image, or here, to be taken to the Best Illusion of the Year 2007 contest page where this is documented in more detail, though as I've mentioned I think most artists were at least a little aware of it already.

If the image on the left were a painting, and the one on the right a source photograph (or even the real tower) then you can see that the artist would pretty quickly begin to question the accuracy of his work, possibly second guess themselves, overcompensate, and then discover later (maybe when the painting was on the other side of the source) that his painting wasn't accurate at all.

Sad painter!

So why does it happen?  I have a vague idea.  If I had to guess, based on the fact that it seems to occur to a greater extent the more the apparent lines converge, then I would say it's specifically a quirk of perspective.  It's not due to the separation of our eyes as the same thing can occur if the images are one on top of the other, and it barely occurs at all if the lines are perfectly parallel.  Look...

In this image we have the same image of an approximate leaning shape twice.  They look parallel to one another, because they are.

Here's a similar image, and this time the two identical images seem to be at slightly different angles.  There is no actual perspective here, but when the brain sees lines converging it automatically reads it as something receding into the distance, even though it's just two lines.

So my theory is that since the vanishing point (the point where the lines would converge) on these shapes in the second image, and the photograph, is in a different spot, then the brain is convinced that they cannot be parallel, as two parallel objects in perspective would have their lines converge in the same place.  If they are not parallel then one object must be leaning more than the other, and thus that's what the brain tells us we're seeing.

Other Common Perspective Illusions

The above isn't the only way that perspective in images can cause problems, another is that the brain tries to compensate for it, a lot.  This is most obvious with bold and stark examples, but it does it in even very complex ones.  Take a look at the following image (you can click on it to go to the source):

That's quite striking right?  Visually the man is obviously smaller in both images, but on the left he appears to be larger than on the right, even though he's the same size in both.  The brain has adjusted the apparent size of the figure based on his location on the ground and is compensating for it in each case.  It would be difficult to base an accurate sketch just from glancing alone  in this situation because not only would the brain make mental adjustments to the source, but also on the work itself, compounding the problem.

 A similar illusion can be seen in reality.  Place your hands out with the palms facing you at arms length, slightly to either side of your head.  They seem to be the same size because they are the same distance away.  Bend your elbow to bring one of your hands closer to you, but still keep one to either side of your head so they don't cross.  The hand looks larger, because it's closer, but probably only by a little bit.  Now cross your hands one in front of the other, and you should see that that difference in size was much larger than you thought.

Your brain, what a complete git.

From elsewhere in the page I got the above example from is this wonderful nugget:

"The visual system compensates for perspective in making judgements about size. It is striking that we are so unaware of this."

Another thing, as well as size, that our brains compensate for is the angle of perspective.  I don't mean as in the Leaning Tower example, but rather the brain tries to make things look flatter than they actually are.  I've only been able to find a paper on the brain compensating and making sense of photographs and other 2D visual stimuli (such as TV, videogames etc) even when not seen from their optimum viewing angle, which you can read here.  But it is my belief that this applies not just to the photographs themselves, but also to the objects within the photograph, as well as other objects in the real world.  The brain tries to compensate for things being angled away from us by trying to make them more orthographic (that is, the lines appear slightly more parallel than they should in order to reach the correct vanishing point/point of convergence) .  I'll demonstrate this with a speedpaint at some point, but not today, although it has been in evidence on some of my previous speedpaints.

The Eye Level Illusion

Finally, lets look at one of the most significant things the brain likes to do, especially so when trying to match a likeness for a portrait.

It lies about the proportions of the head, and it does it constantly.  Weirdly I couldn't find any links referring to this phenomenon as an optical illusion, but it's common place enough that I can't believe it is anything else. How commonplace?  Well, almost every online guide and book about portraiture will have a list of common mistakes and how to avoid them in it somewhere.  Number one of those mistakes in almost every guide is that the eyes are commonly drawn to high on the head.  That's probably the most common mistake made by any artist starting out.  Evidence?  OK, how's this:

That's not one of mine (though I've made almost the exact same mistakes many times), that's Vincent Van Gogh's.  One of his earliest known sketches you can clearly see that the man's eyes have been drawn too far up the head and the ear looks a bit close to the eye (I still do this with alarming regularity).

Why does this happen?  Well, my guess is that there's nothing of interest above the eyes, or between the eyes and the ear, so the brain just say "Balls to that then" and edits it out.  And it does this when you're looking directly at the source!  So I know what you may be thinking at this point - "Okay, smartarse, if that's the case then why don't we go around seeing the world like the Van Gogh sketch above? Clearly we don't, so therefore you're wrong.'  But if the brain does this all the time, then it will still do it for an illustration just as much as it does on the source (be it a photograph or an actual person), and since the eyes on the illustration are too high, they appear even higher still.  Look, this one I can illustrate with an existing (albeit not very good) speedpaint.

Without taking too long or measuring, is the red line in the following image closer to the top of her hair, or her chin?

If you said closer to the top of her hair then almost everyone agrees with you, even though it's not actually the case.  Hell, I'd agree with you, and I painted it and know darn well that red line is right in the middle.  Don't believe me?  OK, here it is again, feel free to measure this time:

The green and red boxes are exactly the same size.  In fact if you compare their sizes at the side of the image, rather than in the middle where her face is it becomes very apparent that they are the same size.  If that's not an optical illusion I don't know what is.

And it doesn't just apply to eyes (although that may be where it's most apparent), but to all sorts of things - quite commonly the aforementioned distance from the eyes to the ears, or the ears to the back of the head, or the distance of the chin to the nipple line.

Just to be extra devious though it sometimes does the reverse, and decides that a gap between two things is much less than it actually is because of the extra detail it contains.  Take a look at this next image, and note that the black bar on the right appears closer to both the side of the image and the red bar, even though the distances to both are identical for the black bar on the left.  The extra detail of the circle pulls those details closer.

The Comparative Colour Illusion

Finally, there's the problem with accurately gauging colours and tones.  I'm not even going to write this one up as there are stacks of articles with very good illustrations of common problems in accurately identifying colours and shades in an image or scene.  I strongly recommend this one here.

So, WTF?

So with all these things happening to distort our perception of what we are seeing, it is extremely difficult to create a painting or illustration with any kind of accuracy at all.  Often accuracy is not actually desired of course, and it is the stylistic deviations from the reality of the source that make many images interesting, but even so if someone's commissioned you to paint their mother-in-law you should probably aim to get a reasonable likeness.  Some people do have an innate ability to see past some of these illusions, and still others have taught themselves personal tricks to work around them.  I am not one of those people, chances are you aren't either.  So how does anyone manage to reproduce anything with a reasonable level of accuracy?

Well, they either get things wildly wrong (which is often the case in my speedpaints you'll note), or to a greater or lesser degree, they turn to mechanical means to help with the problem.

But to discuss that in more detail there will need to be a part three (although despite the title it won't have much to do with illusions...)

Interlude: Thoughts on the Blog's Future

So I've been debating with myself for some time over certain aspects of the Blog (there's probably a dirty pun there if you look hard enough). Every post so far has some images, and those images are either exclusively by me, or reference for something done by me, and this was fully intentional.  This has its advantages; after all, this is an art blog, but also some disadvantages.  For one, it means that I can only post about subjects I have images for, rather than any old thing, and for another it means I can only post as often as I have work to show.  Sometimes though I want to talk about other things, sometimes art related, sometimes just random things that I want to vent about.  Sometimes I want to write something that may require images that I didn't take, or paint, or use as reference.

I think this post is only the third time I've written written a post with no image content, although this one at least has an icon, the others didn't.  Interested in what I have to say rather than show?  Carry on then dedicated follower (you mad crazy fool).

I've decided that since I have a perfectly good blog here I'll use it for more than posting my artwork and progression.  Not all the time, I won't be posting about what a delicious Sunday Dinner I had on Monday (although I did as it goes, the Yorkshire Pudding was amazing), but occasionally. Could be movie reviews, could be my thoughts on a book or TV show.  Probably won't be political or religious (why bother? I don't follow either to a great extent and it would likely upset people).  Irregular, as I said, whenever the mood strikes me.

More frequently (I'll be aiming for probably once a month) I'll post a something brief about another artist that impresses me, or inspires me.  Those may be of more interest to the regular readers of the blog, over some random artist's thoughts on the latest J.J. Abrams film (extremely fun, if rather vacuous, if you were curious).  There will also be the existent A-Musing posts as well, except now I won't feel duty bound to supply my own images if others are perfectly sufficient (they'll all be credited where possible though). I don't have titles to distinguish the new types of post from the regular ones as yet, but I'm thinking something along the lines of "Mad Ramblings" and "Artstanding".  They'll carry icons similar to the one heading this post as well, as a more visual indicator.

All that should mean that the blog gets updated a little more regularly (I'll be happy with three times a month), even if it's not always with my own personal progression.  Regarding that progression, to be honest I've had difficulty keeping my motivation up lately (you may have noticed a distinct decline in speepaints or more finished works).  I'm really not sure why this is, but I'm fighting to not simply stop altogether as last time I did that I didn't start again really for a decade, and this blog is the result.  I've recently finished another book cover, although you probably won't see that for several months, and I've started on the next (the most ambitious so far, and possibly the most ambitious of all of them).  I've also begun work on a painting I've been putting off doing for about 18 months.  I think getting it done will clear that aspect out of my head and allow me to move on.  Who knows, it might be the issue... But more likely it was looking back on old work for the retrospective and realizing I still wasn't terribly happy with many of the things I've produced.  Practice makes perfect and all that, which is another reason I refuse to give up n this long term growth project.

If you've made it this far then well done, you deserve a reward.  Do you want one?  Well, maybe if I get some comments regarding your thoughts on the above I'll have a competition or something.  Do a sketch for you to win, or a digital piece of your choosing or something of that ilk.  Since comments are rare I'm betting I won't have to follow up on that promise, but it sounds like fun if there's enough interest.

That's all for now folks, next up should be a speedpaint post, unless I decide to write one on Doctor Who or Orphan Black in the mean time. I can do that now, how liberating.

The Three Year (and One Month) Retrospective

As I mentioned last time, I did have quite a lot planned for the blog's third birthday.  I had images of all the major stuff I've done laid out for comparison, a sketch from each month since the blog began laid out in a time line and a few things more.  You don't get any of that.  Firstly the drive with those images on died, including the original scans from the sketchbooks, but that was OK since I had all of them uploaded.

Unfortunately on the day I went to get the uploaded images Flickr (where I uploaded the first years worth of images for reasons I've now forgotten) changed how things are linked so those early images also appear to have gone.  I have lower res versions on facebook still, but you can imagine I was a bit fed up with the whole thing by this point.  Oh, and my sketchbook fell apart, which really capped my lethargy for the whole thing.

Over the next few months I'll slowly transfer the images from facebook (those I also placed there) back over to the blog so there's still a record of the first year of progress.  No point having a blog about progression if the first year is a blank after all.  So after all that I've cobbled together two images for discussion below.

Sketches
So improvement is most apparent here.  The sketches from 2001 are from the first couple of months, 2011 about a year later and so on for the latter two images.  In terms of poses and form I think I've actually backslid since 2012, which is a bit depressing.  This may be because I haven't been keeping up on gesture drawing, or maybe for some completely different reason, but elements of the anatomy are improving.  I'm hoping it's a case of two steps forward one back; we'll find out next year.

In terms of faces and such there is steady improvement though, so that's good.  Before next year I hope to have made more progress with expressions as right now everyone looks  a bit blank faced.

I am happy I went through this though as even I can see a clear improvement between the 2010 and 2013 sections.  It's slow going, but progress is definitely being made.

None of these are from reference by the way - since I hadn't done much from reference recently I figured I would stick to the stuff I sketched without any.  I most certainly need to do more stuff from reference again as it helps improve other areas.

Speedpaints
Each row here represents a different year (and at the bottom right you can see my latest, which I have not yet blogged about).  I think there is less obvious improvement here than there was in th sketching to be honest, but there is some.  The time taken over these varies wildly, with the latest one taking much longer than almost anything else.  It's possible the improvement is only because I'm more likely to take my time now, but in fact the last one took longer because I used ArtRage 4, and the controls for painting don't lend themselves as well to speedpainting as those in 3.5 Studio Pro - at least not until I'm used to the differences.  It's still a contributing factor though I'm sure, but I am making some progress.  Now all I have to do is produce more of them.  In the first 6 months of speedpainting I cranked them out, now I can go a month an not paint anything.  Wonder why I've lost the desire to do them all the time...

And that's it.  Teeny tiny retrospective for the third anniversary.  I'll try to do something better next time around.  Hopefully there'll be more to show :)

Next month I'll have a speedpaint post at some point, and hopefully my second post on optical illusions.  Not much more than that though - I'm going to do the sketch posts a little less often because they're a lot of work and they rarely get read. I left an unresizable image in the last one that I only just noticed and apparently nobody else did either (or they did and didn't bother to let me know).  That sort of shows how worthwhile doing the layouts for those is given that it takes me ages to do ;)  So yes, I'll post when there are things worth posting still, but I'm not going to bust my hump just to have something to stick up here - if I keep that up I won't enjoy it any more, and then I won't post anything...

Sketching For April '13

So first of all there was supposed to be a retrospective this week, celebrating 3 years of the blog.  No, that's not a long time compared to some, but for me it's a very long time indeed. Unfortunately the hard-drive with all the images for it, as well as some for my next post on optical illusions, died.  There was more on it than that of course (a terrible speed paint and vast tracts of my reference material - most of my art was backed up though), but those are the two that most have an effect on this blog.  So I still plan on doing both the Retrospective, and the other A Musing post, but that'll have to wait until I get my act together again.  I'm not sure why the drive died, but it's probably because of a static spark or getting jostled wrong when I was trying to transfer it over to my new PC.  Yes, I finally got myself a new PC; built it myself in fact. Other than a handful of small issues (and the large one regarding the drive) it's been a relatively smooth transition.  Far smoother than I thought it would be at least.

So other than ll that this has been a good moth for sketching, even though there are only two images in this post.  I filled about 10 pages in the last three weeks of April, which is rather more than I have been achieving.  None of it is directly from reference (although much of it is inspired by photos and the like, but not drawn until much later), and some of it I'm quite pleased with.  You'll note the lack of an image woth the worse sketches of the month - that's because while there were some hideous ones they were all ones that were mostly rushed.  Those below are ones I either spent a little time on or that turned out well despite being done very quickly.  OK, on to the images.

Head and Face 
Just a bunch of heads, more or less replacing the old "Free Sketching" heading which tended to be mostly heads anyway.  I'll still use the old title if I draw anything more varied, but for now it's bonces. I was mostly focusing on necks and unusual head angles this month (I still can't draw them well from above and below - I'll get there.  You'll note I did a little bit with the hair as well - not much, but more than usual. Hair is something I have terrible trouble with - especially finding styles to use.  Most of the guys are bald, but I think that's because bald guys look slightly less odd than bald girls (nothing wrong with bald girls incidentally, it's just not that common).  The skull in the top left was for the retrospective, but since that's delayed I've shoved it in here as well.  I'm quite pleased with the large portrait of the girl in the top right too.  It's not perfect, but I think she turned out better than almost anything else I've done thus far.

Figures and Anatomy
Less impressive than some of the heads, but still progress I feel (I have been focusing on this stuff a lot less than the heads after all).  Not really much to say except for the self evident bit that there's still a long way to go with my more extended figures.  Oh, you'll note I've gone back to noisy grey as a background - saves time setting these images up as I don't need to be quite as extreme when cleaning up the original scans.

I really do need to do some from reference this month so I can begin tweaking where my errors lie and that sort of thing.

And that's all there is for now.  Apologies again for the delay in this months other planned posts - I'll get to them as soon as I can.  Until then, happy birthday Blog!