ratcreature | Aaargh.

I'm so frustrated. I'm in the process of drawing an illustration for Trinityofone's SGA/HDM story Dæmonology, and it has John and Teyla and their respective daemons sparring with each other and you can see Ronon's and Rodney's dæmons watching (these two themselves are somehow offscreen), and it's been an exercise in frustration.

There's the two humans fighting in the background plus a snake and a mongoose in action in the center, a wolf and a mouse watching in the foreground, with their relative sizes dependent on perspective, then there's the stupid foreshortening making everything harder, and I've been trying to get the rough pencils finished for *days* now. (Yes I'm that slow/inept.)

I suck at perspective. I tried constructing their relative sizes in relation to the eyelevel, and so on, but it never quite works. I've done all the different elements several times now, I have like twelve pages with sketched people and animals by now, sometimes everything, sometimes just one part, and I think I arrived at something that doesn't look too horribly wrong, though it doesn't really fit completely with my perspective help line constructions either, but now I'm wondering whether I should just proceed or go to find some knowledgeable artbeta opinion pointing out the errors.

I mean, I'm not sure if I'd have the motivation to start over yet again, if it was seriously wrong. I just want to finally get to the fun parts of drawing the details, and then inking and coloring it, because I am sick of mentally rotating cubes for foreshortening and to figure out relative sizes and such. This is supposed to be fun, right? Who cares about perspective... (gah, I'm starting to sound like the people posting their fanfic without a spell check. *cringes*)

I hate perspective and foreshortening so much. (I know I would probably hate these less if I practiced more, but I'm lazy.)

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Want me to take a look? Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes helps. Or, you could just mirror the drawing; usually when I do that the parts that are off jump at me right away.

Thanks! I uploaded the pencils I have so far here:
http://www.ratcreature.net/tmp/daemon_pencils.jpg

Shouldn't be a problem to fix, since the perspective is shown in the different sizes of the characters... no lines to redraw. My suggestion here (http://pics.livejournal.com/astridv/pic/000b39f8).

I'd just paste each of the figures onto its own layer in PS and try which size works best in relation to the others.

(actually I'd probably also move those two in the background a little further to the right, so you got some kind of triangle going in the structure.)

(also, in my version the mongoose and the kobra need to be moved a little further down, otherwise they appear too large in relation to the humans in the bg)

I looked at your suggestion, which made John and Teyla more equalized in size, like they would be if you'd look at the scene with human eyes I think, but the thing is, the perspective I was trying to get was to be on a low eye level as if you looked at the scene from the eyes of the wolf lying down in the foreground, not really a frog perspective as such with extreme distortion, because the animals and humans are a bit away, but it was not supposed to seem like a human looks at John and Teyla, but as if the wolf (or the mouse I guess), does.

I see what you were getting at. But to get such a diffence in size for the two humans, you'd have to be closer. Since your observers are further away (with the mongoose and the snake inbetween) that perspective wouldn't work. I think that may be where your troubles with this pic stem from.

(if you looked at it with human eyes, both their heads would be about level (with Teyla's just a bit lower just because she's smaller).)

Do you have any suggestions how I could get the impression of such a lower viewpoint across? I'd really like it to seem as if the viewer was sort of crouching behind the head of the wolf in the foreground while looking at the scene, even if I had to draw them over for some other kind of perspective distortion or something to achieve this, rather than just resizing the elements.

Do you have any suggestions how I could get the impression of such a lower viewpoint across?

I think so. You should be able to do that by getting all of their feet levels closer together - that lowers the viewpoint. lemme see if I can get a workable sketch...

How about this?
Minimal changes - it uses all your elements, and the difference in position isn't all that large. (http://pics.livejournal.com/astridv/pic/000b5qxs)

also same elements, slightly rearranged (http://pics.livejournal.com/astridv/pic/000b4e3h)

Thank you! Yeah, that looks better. I'm going to try it more like this tomorrow, when I'm not half asleep. Though I suspect that either I'm going to need to cut parts out of the frame or use a larger format horizontally, or something, because the rearranged composition doesn't look like a standard paper format anymore. But this is a big help.

As I finished the pencils taking your suggestions into account, I meant to ask you how you feel about being thanked in the artist's notes for suggesting improvements when I'll post it eventually? It still needs coloring, but I'll probably finish it over Easter, and I know different people have different preferences wrt to having their name mentioned in these contexts. In case your preference is dependent on how much your input helped, I uploaded the inks here:
http://www.ratcreature.net/fanart/daemon-inks_screenres.jpg

As I finished the pencils taking your suggestions into account, I meant to ask you how you feel about being thanked in the artist's notes for suggesting improvements when I'll post it eventually?

Oh, sure, that'd be cool. Not necessary, but definitely appreciated.
There are people who don't like being credited that way?

Looks good, btw. Looking forward to seeing it colored.

There are people who don't like being credited that way?

Yeah, I've seen it more for fanfic, but since most meta issues are similar, and just fanart less often discussed I assume etiquette to be similar as a rule. It mostly happens when someone asks for a beta reader, and then the author heeds only some suggestions, or rewrites things more afterwards, and the beta doesn't get to "sign off" on the final result, but because they provided assistance the author thanks them, so their name ends up on a story that may have typos or weaknesses and they are embarrassed to see their name associated with it. I've seen quite a bit of outrage over that, and the consensus in those discussions seemed to be that it is a social faux pas to mention that someone helped without asking for permission to connect them to the end result first.

The opportunities to give offense in fandom without meaning to are endless.

Aaargh.

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