Another Here

I’m pretty sure she knows it’s a multi-post.

I created this image using the same basic approach as the War image last month. It took three and a half hours. The original is 3200×2000 resolution, as usual. Everything except for the raindrops was painted on a single layer. I also have color balance and hue/saturation adjustment layers on it to cool the colors of the image slightly.

Even though this technique seems to work out OK-ish for me, I just don’t know if it’s what I should be doing. I feel like maybe I should be doing more exaggerated stuff, with brighter colors and simpler shading. Not only for time purposes, but because I kind of feel like if you can’t do excellent shading with just two values, you’re not going to be able to handle more complex shading.

I’ve uploaded a wallpaper-size version for those who may be interested.

Spending:

I also downloaded a game for my PS3. Even after that, it still leaves about $18 in my entertainment budget, which is fine, since I went so over budget on food:

Finally, I’ll be turning off comments on the blog before I leave, so if you can’t comment on anything while I’m gone, that’s why. Talk to you in a couple weeks.

She knows it’s a multi-post.

This week’s drawing brought to you by Wipeout Pulse, “Disco Ball”, and the letter R.

Same size as usual, 3200×2000. Took about 3.5 hours, if I remember correctly. Except for the bloom, all the color was done with a solid, variable-width brush in PS, and the original lines were done with ArtRage, as usual. I didn’t really have anything special in mind for shading, and I certainly achieved nothing special. When it comes to flat shading, I think I like the Faito image better.

I’m not sure how much of a difference it made not listening to podcasts all week. Besides when I was drawing, I think I should have also made exceptions for times when I was cooking and eating and so on. Though I must say, those were the main times I wanted to listen. I didn’t mind not having them on the drive to and from work, or while I was at work. I think a more serious drain on my mental energy is games, which is something I’ve known for a long time, and haven’t actually managed yet to do anything about.

Spending:

More than my $50 budget, but not entirely ridiculous. This would have been less if not for a couple unusually expensive meals.

GTA IV would be hotter if Niko were a woman.

Also, for those wondering what I do at work all day, I basically make things like this.

Never again.

This is exactly what I don’t want to do when I’m drawing. All told, this took around 10.5 hours, and because I was so pissed off by the end of it, most of it is way below what it should be.

This is one of my characters from City of Villains. I did a portrait of her almost two years ago for an ArtRage review I did for the FT podcast, and I felt like going back and doing another one.

This thing just got to be more and more of a problem as it went on, and it pretty much consumed every evening from Tuesday through Friday. The initial sketch took slightly longer than it should have, but it was looking promising. Then I got it in to Photoshop and it all went downhill from there. I think I mentioned on last week’s podcast that last week’s drawing was the minimal-shading extreme. Well, this is the maximum-shading extreme – and it’s not even complete – and it’s much, much worse. Not as an image, but as something I’m willing to inflict on myself on a regular basis.

I worked at way too high a resolution for this image – the final is 6000×6000, and about 150 MB. The only part with any detail at all is the face, so the rest is just wasted space. It also caused Photoshop to chug more than I’m willing to tolerate. In the future, I’ll probably limit my images to around 3000 pixels on a side, unless I have a good reason to go above that.

I think I said that maybe I should embrace the super-tight style, since it’s what I seem to keep doing. No. This is what happens when I do it: it takes forever, makes me really, really mad, and doesn’t give me results I’m satisfied with. In terms of technique, this image is pretty similar to the huntress image I did for the first weekly drawing. There’s just a lot more of this image, so it took a lot longer.

Of the past few weeks’ drawings, I think I’m happiest with the “War” image so far. “Faito” was silly, but at least it was fun and not too onerous to do, and could conceivably get much faster. “Huntress” and “Myrta” are OK, but took way too much effort and don’t have any life or energy at all. I liked “Sunset” the least, because even though the sky turned out all right, the rest of it was really lame and reminded me more than anything else of doing FT characters.

Starting next week, I’m imposing a four-hour limit on these drawings. If I hit four hours and they aren’t done, I’m just posting what I have.

Hmm. The colors on this one look much less sickly on my PC.

Anyway. So I said I would try doing stuff with less shading. This is about the one extreme that I’m willing to try. If I had much less shading, I think I’d just be using completely flat colors. That could work if I had outlines, but I didn’t want any for this. Having now gone to this extreme with the goofy colors and no lines, I don’t think I’ll be doing a lot more of it. I prefer line-art when the shading is relatively flat, and though the acid-trip color scheme is interesting, I found it too annoying to have to pick whacked-out colors for everything.

I wanted to use colors in a way I hadn’t before, and though I did that, I found myself wishing I had more colors. Specifically, I wanted to use shadow colors that weren’t obvious and would be nearly as bright as the light colors. This is difficult, since if all the light colors are in the same neighborhood on the hue wheel, then their shadows will all wind up in the same neighborhood too.

Start to finish, I think this took around 4 hours, which doesn’t compare favorably to past weeks’ images, considering how much less is going on in this one. I did a sketch of the girl in the pose I wanted in ArtRage, then brought it into Photoshop and did all the fills separately. I intended the girl to be even more exaggerated and anime-like than she wound up being, but I guess that’s not within my range. I also intended to have an explosion in the background on the left, but once I began to realize how long the whole thing was going to take, I gave up on that idea.

I made the mistake of doing all the base colors as Photoshop vector layers, since I’ve seen other people do it (with different software) and it seemed to make sense in light of the fact that I didn’t intend to do any blending of values. This was a bad choice, since I’m not very proficient with the vector tool in PS, and using it was slower and more cumbersome than just doing all the base colors with a 100% opaque hard-edge brush.

Without a style of my own to develop, what I’d like to do is start assembling samples of the styles I’d like to explore. That may help me figure out what I like about them, what makes them work, and how they differ from each other. At least I don’t feel too bad now about not going down this particular road.

Back on Wednesday, I mentioned that Tabula Rasa did a “come back and play for free” promotion earlier this week, and groused about Turbine sending out a seemingly similar e-mail for LOTRO that turned out not to be such a promotion after all. Well someone there must have been listening (thanks!) because now they are reactivating everyones’ accounts from the 8th to the 12th, and I am all over that shit. Reinstalled the game and patched it last night – which only took five hours – and I’m ready to go.

I’ll probably go mess around with my old characters on Meneldor, but if there’s a big gathering of you guys on a different server and you want to log on and mess around some evening while the promotion is up, post here and say so.