Meanderings and art

[rowyn]

I have so much in my mind that I want to write that I don't know where to start. I keep thinking "I'll post an entry" -- and then I don't, because I can't settle on a topic. It's ironic that, because I want to go too many places, I end up going to none of them.

I still want to write about my trip to Canada. I only posted a couple of short entries about it, and didn't really get to most of the good parts. I have some thoughts on love and sex and marriage that I want to set down at some point. I've got an auction I need to set up, but first I have to get a Paypal account, and I suppose I need to decide if I want a merchant account so that I can take credit card with it. And I have some scattered thoughts about art.

oceansedge put out a request for icons last week, and last night I did one for her. Because I was too lazy to find paper and a pencil, I did it entirely digitally. This was an interesting process

My digital sketching, even with a tablet, leaves a whole lot to be desired. I haven't settled on a method for doing pure-digital art. What I did for the icon was set the pen to solid grey, and roughed in really ugly, blobby circles for the face, so that I had a rough outline of where nose/mouth/ears/cheeks etc. would go. Then I paint over the sketch on another layer, and work on getting the details refined and accurate in the painting.

The weird part about it is how ugly the process looks. I spent about an hour on the icon, and for the first fifteen minutes it looked horrible. As in, "Wow, a five year-old could do better than that". [Edit: Rhetorical statement altered to clarify that no, I do not have a five year-old child at hand with which to prove this.] The next fifteen minutes, as I tested colors, were almost as bad. It wasn't until I'd been working on it for 45 minutes or so that it started to look all right.

This is very different from sketching with pencils and then using real paint. My early pencil sketches aren't all that great -- I've never liked my roughs as much as I like other artists' roughs. But still, I can sketch a person's head in fifteen minutes and have it be recognizable as "the artist was trying to draw a human head." This lioness was more like "what the heck is the artist trying to do? And would she please stop, because my eyes hurt from just looking at it."

I'm tempted now to do snapshots of work-in-progress, both real and digital mdia, just to showcase the difference.

Maybe if I'd had any real art training, I wouldn't be so haphazard about my methodology.

Comments

[oceansedge.livejournal.com]

All I know is I think she's wonderful!

[rowyn]

And your opinion is the one that counts! :)

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Oho! I saw it, and thought that it looked like Lady Rowyn's artistic style!

What an amusing and pleasant surprise to find out that it is!

===|==============/ Level Head

[kelloggs2066.livejournal.com]

I think it turned out fine! :)

[rowyn]

Thank you. I'm reasonably happy with the final product (and delighted that Vicky likes it!) It's just that getting there was ... strange. :)

huh???

[sandramort.livejournal.com]

What five year old daughter?!?

Re: huh???

[rowyn]

That was hypothetical, Sandy. :)

Re: huh???

[sandramort.livejournal.com]

*whew* Thought I'd lost my marbles! Especially since you'd have had to be pregnant when I last saw you, and you didn't LOOK pregnant... besides, I've talked to you bunches of times between then and now and you never mentioned progeny.

Speakign of blasts from the past, someone asked me for contact info for you. I wasn't sure whether if was classified info, so I gave him your LJ info and told him to p #mail you on FM. I was rather amazed that he remembered me... I didn't remember him!

Re: huh???

[rowyn]

Thanks for letting him know! And thank you for letting me know you'd put him in touch -- I hardly ever log onto FM any more. I might never have known he'd p #mailed me otherwise. :)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, regarding doing your art on the computer:

1) Draw large. Define your work area as something significantly at a higher resolution than the final product will be. This may have some perils of risking trying to get TOO MUCH detail into a small area in the final product (as witnessed with some of my overly tiny Sinai icons), but overall it helps if you can have a large workspace.

2) Reduce. It makes all the errors seem that much smaller, because EVERYTHING is smaller. Consequently, it's easier to put emphasis on INTENTIONAL details, by drawing them that much bigger.

I suppose it's something like scribbling with an ink pen - or doing a rough pencil sketch. If I try to describe a figure in a single course with the pencil or pen, it's going to look weird, disjointed, wrong. But, if I "scout" first with light lines, and then go back and over to darken in the lines where they're SUPPOSED to be, then the little light "construction" lines that are off the mark won't be as noticeable as the areas that I've darkened and bolded. The result is scribbly, but a shape still comes out of it.

In Photoshop, I find that, if I'm working with a high resolution image and I want to reduce it, my best bet is to convert it to RGB, and THEN reduce it. If it's an Indexed image (GIF), it uses a different algorithm for reducing the image.

With RGB, it "blends" the pixels. What was a "jaggy" solid division between black and white gets a thin line of grey at the dividing point when all is reduced. It gives the illusion of higher detail, though at some cost to clarity. (But considering that there are only so many pixels on the screen, it's not like there is any viable alternative.) If the same image is in Indexed mode, then for whatever reason, Photoshop is far less "smart" when it comes to blending colors while reducing; reduced images almost invariably look broken, highly pixelated, or like a bad photocopy. Fine details aren't merely greyed out - they're totally lost.

Now, for the final product, you may still want to convert the image back to a GIF, with a limited palette to keep the file size down. For that, I'd recommend converting it to GIF and using the "Adaptive" method, and selecting how many colors you want in the palette. (For line art, I typically can get by with just 8 colors of greyscale. Best to pick numbers that are exponents of 2; anything else, and you're just selling yourself short and wasting bits. That is, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. For color pieces, the palette you can get by with depends on more complicated factors - the simplest being how many colors are involved in the original picture before resizing. ;) )

[rowyn]

I do all my conversions-for-size to jpgs instead of GIFs. Getting the palette right for a GIF sounds like ... a lot of work. O.O

I think the reason my digital sketches look so horrid has a lot to do with what you're describing. On paper, my guidance lines are faint and I tend to erase the ones that are really off. But if I know I'm painting over a digital sketch anyway, I don't worry so much about getting the lines right. And my guidance lines are thick and dark, so that I can spot 'em easily. It's just ... different. The final product comes out okay, but it looks awful up until the end.

Oh -- I'm already quite familiar with drawing large. The original for that 100x100 icon I did for Ocean's Edge is 600 x 600, and the imperfections in it are a lot more conspicuous then they are after it's been shrunk to itty-bitty size. :)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I've had a little 'real art training' -- college art classes, probably no more than you had, since it was part of our electoral classes. Most of my sketchwork has come from practicing after college, stuff like going to the zoo and drawing animals. I highly recommend this sort of practice!

That said, I suggest you think of sketching, whether digital or analog, as creating probability clouds. The real picture you meant to draw lies somewhere in the clouds of lines you put down. You'll find it when you refine it.

Too many people insist that their sketches need to look perfect!

[rowyn]

I only had one art class in college, so you're ahead of me just by having classes, plural. :)

I've done a fair bit of drawing from life with human models, but I've never done much of the "quick sketches" from people or animals who aren't posing. There is *something* about drawing from life that gets much better results than drawing from a photograph. But Googling up a photo reference is soooo much easier ....

[aloyen.livejournal.com]

You have a 5 year old daughter? And she can draw better than that?

[rowyn]

That's R-H-E-T-O-R-I-C-A-L!

Don't make me use this on you. :)