InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "this is totally wicked!"

RatCreature (ratcreature) wrote,
@ 2008-03-18 20:20:00

Current mood:	frustrated
Entry tags:	drawing, whining

Aaargh.
I'm so frustrated. I'm in the process of drawing an illustration for Trinityofone's SGA/HDM story Dæmonology, and it has John and Teyla and their respective daemons sparring with each other and you can see Ronon's and Rodney's dæmons watching (these two themselves are somehow offscreen), and it's been an exercise in frustration.

There's the two humans fighting in the background plus a snake and a mongoose in action in the center, a wolf and a mouse watching in the foreground, with their relative sizes dependent on perspective, then there's the stupid foreshortening making everything harder, and I've been trying to get the rough pencils finished for *days* now. (Yes I'm that slow/inept.)

I suck at perspective. I tried constructing their relative sizes in relation to the eyelevel, and so on, but it never quite works. I've done all the different elements several times now, I have like twelve pages with sketched people and animals by now, sometimes everything, sometimes just one part, and I think I arrived at something that doesn't look too horribly wrong, though it doesn't really fit completely with my perspective help line constructions either, but now I'm wondering whether I should just proceed or go to find some knowledgeable artbeta opinion pointing out the errors.

I mean, I'm not sure if I'd have the motivation to start over yet again, if it was seriously wrong. I just want to finally get to the fun parts of drawing the details, and then inking and coloring it, because I am sick of mentally rotating cubes for foreshortening and to figure out relative sizes and such. This is supposed to be fun, right? Who cares about perspective... (gah, I'm starting to sound like the people posting their fanfic without a spell check. *cringes*)

I hate perspective and foreshortening so much. (I know I would probably hate these less if I practiced more, but I'm lazy.)

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	goss 2008-03-19 04:54 am UTC (link)
	Oh man. Foreshortening. bangs head repeatedly I have the greatest respect for anyone who can do that foreshortening thing and have people not looking deformed. I seriously admire your persistence. Good luck with the drawing! cheers you on (Reply to this) (Thread)

ratcreature
2008-03-19 05:34 am UTC (link)

I've had someone on LJ offer advice, after showing the pencils so far (http://www.ratcreature.net/tmp/daemon_pencils.jpg), and she suggested resizing stuff (http://pics.livejournal.com/astridv/pic/000b39f8) but the problem is that the effect I was trying for (and failed) was to make it look like the viewer was looking at the scene from the eyes of the wolf lying down in the foreground, and get some distortion to indicate that. I'd really like it to seem as if the viewer was sort of crouching behind the head of the wolf in the foreground, but don't really know how to get there. :/

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goss
2008-03-19 06:01 am UTC (link)

*nods* Hmm...

If the perspective is from the wolf's POV, then (to me) the size of the wolf should be a lot bigger, or at least the eyes should be above the floor, not below. *thinks* Since the wolf is closer to the floor, the ground should probably be a flatter thinner plane too, more horizontal. (I could be wrong though. :b)

Or maybe you could distort the surrounding background so that it all curves upward and over the wolf. More stylized, so everything sort of looms.

Interesting dilemma... I have to go get dinner, but I'm free rest of the evening if you wanna swap ideas. :)

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ratcreature
2008-03-19 06:23 am UTC (link)

It's after 2am here now, so I'm already way past my bedtime and off to sleep soon, but thanks for the suggestions. You're the second person to suggest that I could achieve the lower viewpoint if the floor was smaller/the feet level closer together, so I shall try that tomorrow. My first sketches were actually with the sheet horizontal an less area for the floor,so maybe that was on the right track. And you have a good point about the wolf, I think the problem I had when I put him higher... *diggs through heaps of discarded crap* ...right somehow I didn't manage to have the wolf head not obscure most of the action I really wanted to be visible.

Actually I think that was about the point when I tried a vertical sheet to still give it a large size but have more room for the other stuff, clearly in retrospect that may just made things look even wonkier. I mean that's a problem of course that I want the viewer to sort of feel like they look on from the perspective of the wolf and frame their experience through that observer, but obviously if I really crouched behind in the wolf and took a photo, I'd just get a huge hairy wolf head and little else in the picture. Kind of like in these sketches when you are in cinema sitting behind the woman with the huge hat... Actually maybe the cinema isn't a bad analogy for what I want, you are a bit higher than the heads before you, so you still see the screen, but the row heads in front of you are still anchoring your viewpoint. I guess I want the wolf be like that feeling.

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