RatCreature's Journal

Considering the many, many hours my recently revealed yuletart picture took, I thought I ought to get more than one post out of it... ;)

( picture heavy art process post )

I was attempting to do a grayscale value thumbnail for my Trekreversebang artwork as preliminary to painting it, and couldn't figure out how the shadows would look, not even in so far as to roughly fake it. So now I have resorted to trying to make a rough pseudo-maquette simulating at least the broad masses. Of course I don't model or sculpt, so I do not have any of the materials or skills needed for actual maquette making. Instead I am making a contraption from some old cardboard, toiletpaper rolls and play-do. >.<

Unrelated to this, I still do not have the newest Dresden Files book, because I ordered the UK edition (which was sold about four euro cheaper than the US edition by the German Amazon), and that apparently came out a few days after the US one. But I did just get a notification that it's in the mail, so it will arrive soonish. I hope.

I hate, hate, hate when supposedly water resistant ink turns out to be not water-resistant at all when you use it. I know, I know you should test every contingency, but I unwisely (very, very unwisely) assumed that when I put that black ink on paper with paint (the goal was to then scratch in the black ink) it would then be possible to paint some water-soluble color on top of the scratched off areas.

However it turns out that this black ink will get liquid again when painted on if it is painted over other paint. So the black seeped back into the areas that I spent hours carefully scratching and crosshatching a picture into with a razor blade. It was a Robin portrait that looked rather cool with the white on black, and I just wanted to give it some red and yellow color highlight effects. Now it is a blotch. Well, not completely a blotch, I may be able to rescue something, but it certainly won't look like I wanted it to... waaah!

Of course I should know by now that it always comes back to bite you if you are too lazy to actually test how different colors react onto each other, and just assume that they behave in a certain way, but still.

When I was drawing my latest piece, i.e. the SGA/Avatar fusion with Teyla as Waterbender, I was reminded again why I'm rather reluctant to try drawing fanart for tv/movie fandoms, my recent forays into SGA notwithstanding: I have a hard time with character-likeness if the character has to look like a real person.

Because my style of drawing is more comic/illustration-like than truly realist, e.g. that I like to have lineart, it needs a certain amount of simplification in facial features. Which then presents the problem of how to get there from the starting point of a realistic and fully rendered face. (Not that I can do realistic portraits, but in theory I mean.)

The first thing that usually comes to mind for trying to get a handle on how a character looks is to start with a photo of the character's actor or a screenshot of the character, and then somehow simplify from there. The reasoning is that after all basing your art on a decent photo works well enough for realistic character portraits in fanart, which are often recognizably based on promo pics and such. Yet this approach is somewhat hazardous as anyone who has seen a bad tv comic, one where the artist visibly just traced screenshots, can attest to. It's the phenomenon that in its extreme is lineart that you could even actually map over a screenshot and the lines "fit," yet if you look at the lineart alone it doesn't really look like the character at all.

The problem is of course in the nature of lineart. If you have ever tried to trace a photo, you've run into the problem that there aren't really any "lines", so usually you tend pick mostly the "high contrast borders" with a bit of abstract knowledge of how the form of the thing is thrown in. And this works okay if you have say the contrast of a leg against a bright background, but much less for things like facial features. And it is not merely distortions due to a specific photo, i.e. that depending on the light and angle your best guess for lines may not emphasize the really prominent features, but put stress on the wrong parts. It's that any reduction of photos to lines with a face makes it a caricature, even if you don't add intentional "distortions," simply because having just one line where there used to be color gradients introduces emphasis, and likeness decreases if you put that emphasis "wrong", i.e. not on the recognizable, outstanding features.

In theory this is not much of a problem, after all the goal all along is to draw the character, not to trace photos, and you just have to adjust your degree of caricature to compensate for the reduction of rendering, that is to figure out which facial features of said person deviate from the average proportion, the mean of facial features in a way, and exaggerate. I've read that even computers can do this with algorithms based on photos and make caricatures of people.

The problem I'm having is that so many actors are pretty people. See, I'm not that good with faces. It's one thing to spot how someone differs from "average" if they have huge ears (think all the Prince Charles caricatures), or a big nose, or a very distinct skull shape, but humans tend to find regular, even features more attractive, so tv characters are hard to figure out. It's not that there are no differences, obviously I recognize these people when I see them (well for the most part anyway, like I said, I'm not that good at memorizing faces), but I have no idea which features are the ones standing out most to me on a conscious level with faces like that.

I think it would be really cool if one of those caricature algorithms was made into a webtoy somewhere, and I could just give it a photo and it would warp the features to point out how it differs from the average face. Then, even though my style doesn't need outright caricature, I could use those hints for more subtle exaggeration suited for my purposes.

I guess I just wish some technology could help make up for my lack of talent/practice in character portrayal/caricature. *sigh*

I'm not sure whether there's even any interest, because the painting itself got less comments than usual for my fanart posts, so I guess there will be ever fewer interested in the unfinished inbetween stages. But I already made the photographs after all, so I decided to go ahead with the art process post.

( very image heavy )

Because some people find the production process interesting, I decided to do a sort of "making of" post. If you'd just like to see the finished fanart, go here.

( very image heavy )

Does anyone have tips or links to a tutorial or something that shows how to make things look not just wet but kind of slimy?

See, I'm attempting to draw some Temeraire fanart, namely the freshly hatched Iskierka. And I mostly have the dragon as a pencil drawing now, half out of its eggshell, though a bunch of spikes are still missing and I figure it ought to look a bit slimy still from hatching. Which somehow is harder to realize than I imagined.

This whole thing is turning out to be so much more trouble than its worth: first it took like a dozen or so thumbnail tries to get the posture not to suck completely, not to mention two attempts to make a small one work larger that failed, and I had to resort to a silly, foldable dragon wing model I made from bits of wire and paper, because I just couldn't visualize what you'd still see of the stupid wings (and they don't even show that much, though I guess that's part of the problem). Argh. </whining>

I'm terribly uncreative. :( I'm not even decided whether I should go for a simply practical and descriptive name, say "drawingpractice" (luckily still barely within the 15 character limit) or something more whimsical like say "slothsdraw" (I feel a deep kinship towards sloths in my drawing habits...*g*)

Feel free to offer names even if you are not interested in joining.

[Poll #1049330]

So, I always have this vague resolution that I should get back to daily drawing. I used to draw something almost every day once, not necessarily anything elaborate, sometimes just a doodle, but still -- then at some point that I don't even recall anymore I apparently turned into an inert sloth about that too (rather than just being a sloth with non-fun stuff).

Anyway, because of my chronic sloth-like condition my resolutions to draw more regularly never seem to work out so well, so I've been wondering whether there were any fandom communities for art to encourage daily drawing, like maybe with prompts or something? I think I've seen such comms for writing exercises? I just thought some more incentive or supportive framework or something like that might be useful to get back into the habit of doodling, or worth a try at least. Does anyone on my f-list know of such communities?

I just decided to be finished with my drawing of Bob and go ahead an post it (see my previous post). Considering how much time I spent on it, it kind of sucks, partly because I tried new (to me) things, like surface textures, gradients and such digital stuff. It's not horrid or anything (well at least I don't think so) but just now I had the urge to put some disclaimer thing in the notes, i.e. listing all the things I know that are wrong with it like "I know the lightening doesn't look like firelight and the shadows are all wrong for that! and that the various metal textures suck! and the wood too! and that the candle light is all wrong, that that one candlestick turned out a bit too small and the other candle a bit too large..."

But I suspect that kind of thing doesn't go over any better for art than it does for fanfic. I myself quite dislike it when an author tells me at length all the ways their story sucks, and often I won't read it then, and with art I'll probably still look, but inevitably my attention will be drawn to all that is wrong (in the artist's mind) with the drawing, so that doesn't improve its impact any, though depending on how the artists talks about it it can be interesting from a technical viewpoint. Obviously I could have just not posted, but I spent hours on it and it's not that bad.

Beyond just being sick of the drawing after spending many, many hours on it, part of the problem is of course that I lack the skills to correct what I see is wrong with the drawing. I mean, okay, the size issues of that candlestick I could have easily corrected had I noticed earlier, not just towards the end, but it is far easier to see that the lightening and shadows don't look like what you want than to create the effects you want. So I get the urge to say that I know of the problems to not appear stupid/inept/oblivious/whatever to technical issues and give a "better" impression (well in theory, even if the realization lacks), but it's not like that makes the drawing any better, and in fact may even influence perception of the drawing negatively. Though I'm not sure whether people mind notes like that for art as much as for fic.

Anyway, I compromised by dumping my disclaiming in an extra LJ entry afterwards. And out of curiosity, a poll:

[Poll #975503]