The Sleeper's Den

I haven't gone "all digital, all the time" or anything; I have just been reconnoitering in the Mysterious Land of Photoshop. Two things I have tried on the way are painting without line art and line art without painting :). NATURALLY I am happier about the latter attempt than about the former. I guess I have to come to terms with the fact that, well, lines are love, and that in all other fields I'm even more amateurish. Eh.

OK, introductions:

The painting (which could have looked better, but was certainly fun to do) depicts Shelby Sweet, an OC belonging to Haius, who won my 30,000 kiriban at dA. I was rather happy with the picture when I had just done it - probably because I had seen it grow step by step. In the meantime, I think things are wrong with the proportions of the face and the colouring is too ... bland. Whereas I can mix a good skin tone with watercolour, I am clearly not succeeding with Photoshop. Also - though it is not relevant to this particular picture - it bugs me that I still have no idea how to get that particular kind of smoothness that Japanese-style digital colouring tends to have. ( Read more... )

Our second guest is Morgana, who helped me discover the new brushes in CS5. I guess I basically started off with the intention of finding out whether or not these new brushes made the idea of doing line art digitally more appealing. The answer to that question is yes - but so far, I still like my pens and brushes more. Still, I might turn out a digital concept sketch now and then.

I guess the thing that bothers me most about working digitally, apart from the brush quality, is that I just don't find it as comfortable as drawing on paper. The simple fact that you can move a sheet any way you like is something I miss. Sure, CS4 and CS5 have a function that allows you to turn your digital sheet, but somehow the effect isn't the same - at least not for me.

Anyway: ( Morgana )

Next time: non-digital stuff.

Illustrator classes are almost over. That means I should have mastered the basics by now. The teacher let us take a look at the material covered in the next series of classes, and boy, we have only just scratched the surface -_-. Whether I'll be able to take more classes will depend on ... several factors. I'd love to learn more, though. I see great art on dA that has been created with a mixture of Photoshop and Illustrator, but I haven't a clue how to get those kinds of effects, so...

Anyway, we'll see.

The teacher showed me something we haven't done in class yet: how to vectorise a raster image with LiveTrace. It's fun: it allows me to blow up a small drawing and turn it into a fully-fledged illustration. I'm sure it must be possible to do much more with it than I can do just now, but I'm only a beginner. Have a look below :).



( Lot + Morgana )