Getting A Head

This one was also done by request and there is more of her to come!

Animation 2

Alright - so here is a goofy little walker. The trouble I had with this was the tracking of the feet to the ground. The first thing I did was created the stepping movement pattern and copied that loop to the rest of the frames. Then I moved him key-frame by key-frame from left to right. The problem is that I couldn't get the foot that was on the ground to be in the exact same spot at each keyframe making it kind of sway a bit as he walks.

Animation!

So I got me some animation software! It was just some cheap software I bought off the shelf - but it appears to be real easy to use and seems to be potentially really powerfull - for me anyways! It's all vector graphics, bone deformations and stuff I'm still learning about but here is a quicky animation I threw together after a couple of hours of exploring! - Haha - it's so lame!

Bird is the word!

So I drew a birdy... not really much to say about it. The tail-feathers gave me a lot of trouble, but the rest of it is kind of "it is what it is".

Super Duper

This image was actually drawn at a friends request - which was different and fun because I got to kind of bounce it back and forth with him until it was what he wanted. It's pretty simple - a basic outline with some coloring added to it. I have left out the lettering that was added to his chest because because it is specific to my friend. I only mention the lettering because without it there seems to be a big blank spot on his chest. The lettering incidentally was one of the hardest things to get on there because I had to write some custom software to deform it to his chest (Paint.Net does not do deformations).

Facing Failure

This face is from another blog that I follow that is absolutely amazing - Here. I wanted to try and draw the face alone - but made several mistakes.
First I drew this at the image's actual size. I ended up turning up the magnification of the entire drawing to 400% while I tried to free-hand this and realized that it was difficult to draw in any detail with a bunch of blocks. Because of this I turned to using some gray-scale colors to try and do shading which turned out poorly both because my tools are freebie tools and I really didn't know what I was doing or how to use them. Another issue I ran into is that I was really focused on the face and the features that stood out to me the most (such as the smile) which ended up becomming larger than the other features. I could have made the head itself larger to fit the face better and this would have made things more proportional, but by the time I came to that conclusion I had already woven in a lot of the shading and hair. The hair is weird - I would like to know how some real artists do this. Anyways - I want to make sure I post the good and bad alike!

Painting A Painter

So this guy ended up with almost 20 layers and 5 main parts - Head, Body, Front Hand, Rear Hand, and Gun. Each part had a layer for the outline, shadowing, detail, fills (to block out lines from lower layers) and cut-aways (to cut out parts of a lower layer that are more in the foreground).

Anyways it took some time to get this one right but I used some tips I picked up about drawing "frames and skeletons" to get proper placements and proportions. I'm not saying it came out perfect - but it was easier than the wrinkle kid.

Monster Truck

Ya... this one came out pretty goofy - but I swear that it looked better in my head. Anyways - I could really use some ideas if anyone is actually reading this, please feel free to offer any inspiration you might have :)

Wrinkles and Pockets and Stuff

Overall I feel alright about this one. I was trying my luck at clothes and wrinkles and stuff like that. I don't actually like how the shadowing around the hand in the pocket came out. There is some debate about his left arm being too long (I actually went back and made the sleeve shorter) but whatever :P

Freehand of a Freehand

So today I google searched images of hands because they are so painfully hard for me to draw. I found another blogger who has been inactive for some time that actually had a sketch of a hand - and it looks like he also used a tablet to draw it - so I thought I would try to make my own copy of what he did. It unfortunately did not turn out so well for me (I'm the one on the right).

I started with the joints - kind of mapping out where the joints of the fingers should go with little lines and proceeded to draw the hand base and then fingers.

A whole lot of erasing and scribbles later I had something resembling the palm and fingers of a hand with no thumb. But oh the thumb - why is it so hard for me to get the shape of that right? I never really did - so I just left it at my best attempt.

Gradients!

So Gradients are really cool - but oh so hard to use practically! At least in Paint.Net anyways.
So here - I used mostly the line tool to make a basic outline of a girl. I used a photo to kind of guide me with stuff like shoulder width - head size body ratios and stuff because I tend to make heads either way too big or way to small. The neck is always hard to make look right and then by the time I get down to the waist, the person I'm drawing will look like an alien. Hips are difficult for me - especially girl-hips. I also learned something new about legs after studying the photo is that they almost seem to need to be drawn in 3 sections instead of 2. The knee actually will have it's own "thing" going on. I didn't even bother with the feet because that was just turning into a pain.

I discovered and utilized "Layers" allot when making this. After getting a basic outline I made a "solid" white silhouette that I could then use to for selecting all or sections of the girl using the wand tool. I've been working on what to assign to the various buttons on my tablet and have found alt, ctr, and shift to be among the most useful - especially when adding/subtracting selection shapes.

Next I worked on getting the "shadow" in to give her a little depth. This was my actual goal for this project to start learning how to use gradients on something other than very basic shapes. Wow - it's not easy to do either. It took me all day to select the right parts of her and then use multiple, overlapping layers of linear gradients to make it "curve" around her various shapes. Another big issue I ran into was that when I had only a section of her selected and I made a gradient - I had to go back and smooth out the edges of the selection with yet another gradient layer. I wasn't entirely successful at that either - you can see this around the hips and inner-thigh.

The shadowing was indeed the hardest part of this for me and took a lot of time. It would be nice to know how real artists do this. The cloths and all the other detail were relatively easy to accomplish in comparison and thanks to the whole "layers" thing I can have a whole bunch of clothes that switch out with the click of a check-box.

Cats, Dogs, What's the Diff?

So my actual intention here was to draw a cat head - but it of course decided that it was going to be a wolf instead.
Not really having any artistic training or knowing where to start I decided to take what I thought would be a logical approach to this - start from the closest object and move my way back. So I of course started by drawing a nose. While it may seem like just a poorly shaped blob to YOU - it was really hard to get it into what shape it does have. I was having a good deal of trouble because the pen would wait about a half-second before responding to my movements each time I put the tip down. This was due to a setting - I'm not sure if it is a windows-native setting or not - but I later found and disabled this setting that would make your pen stroke be with a "right click" rather than a "left" if you held it still for a second on the tablet. This was seriously annoying because it would add a half-second response delay to everything I did with the pen.

Anyways - I wanted to proceed to finish drawing this wolf by starting with some claws but found that was easier said than done and then decided to just add some radial lines to make it look like a "pouncing".

Tools Rule!

The image you see here is "Hermia" - my Fiance's cat. Many-a-student has seen this cat drawn on their papers next to their grade. Maybe even YOU have seen it, if you've ever taken any of my fiance's classes in college. I'm not actually sure if seeing this kitty is a sign of a good paper or not - perhaps it just appears randomly with no rhyme or reason.

Anyways - I showed you my fiance's kitty drawing in order to help explain the source for MY kitty drawing.

The kitty you see below was actually my version of how my fiance draws cats - but I decided it was time to explore what lies beyond drawing things free-hand. I know that there are a lot of times that artists draw things free-hand, but I am going to need a few hundred more years practice before mine could ever be used for anything.

Anywho - This is me exploring the Line and Circle tools.
My fiance was amazed at how smooth and symmetrical my supposedly free-hand drawing was - which was fun to allow for a bit before introducing her to shape tools.

We've actually super-imposed kitteh into many situations that made us laugh - so this has definitely paid off in plenty of good times.

Ground Zero

So I did manage to recover some of the stuff we were messing around with while in our initial "discovery" of the tool.

On the right was a trace of Angelina Jolie's face. While we were all very impressed with how awesome it was that we could trace Angelina Jolie's face into the computer it actually appears that my skills are so far lacking that I was even able to make that look like a 2-year old did it.
The face you see on the left was my first attempt at a free-hand drawing. I think I kind of started with a head shape and filled in stuff - of course thinking the whole "eraser" feature was really, really cool. It was like drawing with a pen - which I have decided I like better than drawing with a pencil, but you can erase it. And the cool part is that it doesn't destroy the paper when you erase it or leave little hints of stuff behind (like a pencil eraser does). Oh - and the eraser never gets dirty and starts to smudge stuff around rather than erase. It's really cool!


One problem I do have is drawing straight lines. When I'm tracing it seems that the lines come out pretty smooth - so I know it's really just me, but as you can see on the drawing to the left - everything is really thick. That's because I had to keep running my pen up and down the lines to even them out - and erase around the line where I went too far astray.

Where it all started!

So, I guess I really can't say this is where it "all" started - because there isn't really an "all" yet. The fact that my first post is, in-fact, titled in this way is more about what I want to do, rather than what I have done. Anyways, here is the story:

My birthday was nearing and my fiance was probing me for ideas about a birthday present. I of course would always do my best to reply with something completely not-revealing, not because I expected her to read my mind or anything, but I am just not a guy who really thinks about things that I want to possess. For her this was especially difficult because I come from a world of technology and computer programming, and she comes from a world of literature and academia - (did I even spell that right?).

Having no clue where to start or where to end my fiance ventured forth on a mission to find a gift to please her aging house-geek. I'm not actually sure where her adventures lead her but after a very long work-week I came home to a big, silvery present on my bed. Truly unsure of what to expect I opened the gift the way any gift should be opened - which is with as much torn and destroyed packaging as possible. When I saw the gift she had chosen I realized she had found something about technology I knew absolutely nothing about. It was a tablet input device - you know, that thing the artists at my company use instead of a mouse!

I do admit I was a little at a loss when I saw it. I mean I really, really wish I could do the things that I see artists do but haven't had day-one of training or experience. I also had kind of always wanted one of these things to be able to play around with it - not because I know what I'm doing, but because they are just cool! It was a big one too! Not one of those little "starter" ones that you see in the store and wonder "how would you even draw on something so small?" - It was really nice!

Anyways, I immediately set to work discovering what all the buttons on it do, how to configure things, and how to make it work with Paint.Net (you know, that freebie art program that is better than windows paint - but not as powerful or confusing as Photoshop). I think my first order of business was to trace the picture of my face on my security badge to see how accurate it is - (which being able to "trace" stuff is just all sorts of awesome btw). Then My cousin and I found a picture of Angelina Jolie which also required tracing. Finally we each tried to draw stuff free-hand, but that failed miserably.

I kept at it, though, trying to learn new things - looking stuff up on the Internet and such. Then one early Saturday morning I got the big idea that it would be fun to kind of post to a blog as I go. Sort of a "this is what you get when you give hi-end artist tools to whatever the opposite of an artist is" thing.

So here I am - posting my horrible (possibly painful) art to the entire world wide web for all to fear - I mean see. I'm even going to start off with the stuff that I've done so far before starting this blog (which isn't much - but it is more than nothing).

Aaaaand - should some artist or pretty much anyone that knows anything about this stuff happen to find their way to my humble blog I would sure love to hear what tips or advice you may have for me!


- Mark