Rat Creature's Journal

When I was drawing my latest piece, i.e. the SGA/Avatar fusion with Teyla as Waterbender, I was reminded again why I'm rather reluctant to try drawing fanart for tv/movie fandoms, my recent forays into SGA notwithstanding: I have a hard time with character-likeness if the character has to look like a real person.

Because my style of drawing is more comic/illustration-like than truly realist, e.g. that I like to have lineart, it needs a certain amount of simplification in facial features. Which then presents the problem of how to get there from the starting point of a realistic and fully rendered face. (Not that I can do realistic portraits, but in theory I mean.)

The first thing that usually comes to mind for trying to get a handle on how a character looks is to start with a photo of the character's actor or a screenshot of the character, and then somehow simplify from there. The reasoning is that after all basing your art on a decent photo works well enough for realistic character portraits in fanart, which are often recognizably based on promo pics and such. Yet this approach is somewhat hazardous as anyone who has seen a bad tv comic, one where the artist visibly just traced screenshots, can attest to. It's the phenomenon that in its extreme is lineart that you could even actually map over a screenshot and the lines "fit," yet if you look at the lineart alone it doesn't really look like the character at all.

The problem is of course in the nature of lineart. If you have ever tried to trace a photo, you've run into the problem that there aren't really any "lines", so usually you tend pick mostly the "high contrast borders" with a bit of abstract knowledge of how the form of the thing is thrown in. And this works okay if you have say the contrast of a leg against a bright background, but much less for things like facial features. And it is not merely distortions due to a specific photo, i.e. that depending on the light and angle your best guess for lines may not emphasize the really prominent features, but put stress on the wrong parts. It's that any reduction of photos to lines with a face makes it a caricature, even if you don't add intentional "distortions," simply because having just one line where there used to be color gradients introduces emphasis, and likeness decreases if you put that emphasis "wrong", i.e. not on the recognizable, outstanding features.

In theory this is not much of a problem, after all the goal all along is to draw the character, not to trace photos, and you just have to adjust your degree of caricature to compensate for the reduction of rendering, that is to figure out which facial features of said person deviate from the average proportion, the mean of facial features in a way, and exaggerate. I've read that even computers can do this with algorithms based on photos and make caricatures of people.

The problem I'm having is that so many actors are pretty people. See, I'm not that good with faces. It's one thing to spot how someone differs from "average" if they have huge ears (think all the Prince Charles caricatures), or a big nose, or a very distinct skull shape, but humans tend to find regular, even features more attractive, so tv characters are hard to figure out. It's not that there are no differences, obviously I recognize these people when I see them (well for the most part anyway, like I said, I'm not that good at memorizing faces), but I have no idea which features are the ones standing out most to me on a conscious level with faces like that.

I think it would be really cool if one of those caricature algorithms was made into a webtoy somewhere, and I could just give it a photo and it would warp the features to point out how it differs from the average face. Then, even though my style doesn't need outright caricature, I could use those hints for more subtle exaggeration suited for my purposes.

I guess I just wish some technology could help make up for my lack of talent/practice in character portrayal/caricature. *sigh*

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.)

Though I don't draw professionally or even all that often, I still have a habit of collecting interesting visual things for reference or inspiration. Even with libraries and these days internet image searches it is not easy to find the exact kind of interesting picture you need when you need it, or sometimes you don't even know what exactly it would be you need to realize some vague idea. Or at least it is like that for me, so if I come across something that is visually stunning, unusual, interesting, seems like a good inspiration, or a possible reference for something I might draw some day I keep it.

Like, if I'm at a used book store, I habitually look if there's a bin of old cheap National Geographic or other travel magazines and leaf through them to see whether any have cool photographs, if I see an interesting picture on the internet I will safe it, and so on.

Obviously after a time this results in an organizational problem if you ever want to find anything again. So I'm wondering how others deal with this.

It's not so bad with the books, I just have a shelf with books I got for their pictures, like for example collections of photographs from the 1920s, 30s and so on, books of animals, places, people, cars, design... It's harder for the magazines because things like National Geographic aren't topic specific, so I never know whether I decided to keep some issue for pictures of some place or some animal, or even whether it was in the title article. Which makes finding things again a bit harder.

Digital stuff is the least problematic in some respects, because I have created a bunch of folders labeled by topic for photos (reference for buildings & cityscapes, landscapes, actions, clothing, animals, plants, objects, symbols, textures,... with some having subfolders) and some other folders for art by other people, and yet another set of folders for fandom character reference, so it's not hard to find which folders to browse. The main problem is that I don't always know where I got some image from, because it's so much easier to just save a picture than to save it and add something to its meta-info field. That isn't a big problem if I just use it as inspiration or reference some parts of it, but if say a landscape photo was to serve as main reference for a drawn background I might want to acknowledge that, yet often by the time I use something I have no idea where it came from anymore.

Photos I've taken myself before having a digital camera are more of a mess, because those are mostly in big boxes, and most are kind of boring holiday photos with some cool landscapes and animals scattered inbetween. But the worst are the boxes of, well I guess "junk" fits, i.e. stuff I've kept for because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Much of that is also paper, like exhibition catalogs, flyers that looked interesting, clippings from newspapers or magazines, posters, but there's also stuff like feathers with a nice pattern, stones, tins, even some bit of metal that rusted in an interesting way, and so on. I mean, I try to keep the non-paper junk down to one box or so, because I really don't need to go down the road of people who end up smothered by their packrat piles collapsing on them, but well, I'm not a very tidy person to begin with, so it's an uphill battle. I guess what I really need would be del.icio.us tagging for RL objects and/or a physical search engine, but I fear that level of virtual home and computer merging is still a way off into the future.

So, how do you deal with organizing your reference and inspirational collection so that is actually useful for you rather than a pile of messy clutter? Do you have some kind of system? Or just really good spatial memory?

I'm not sure whether there's even any interest, because the painting itself got less comments than usual for my fanart posts, so I guess there will be ever fewer interested in the unfinished inbetween stages. But I already made the photographs after all, so I decided to go ahead with the art process post.

( very image heavy )

Gah, I hate clothing folds so much. Maybe even more than foreshortened limbs, though it's a close call. Also, why did I bother to waste ages trying to arrange these limbs and body parts correctly when it's all buried beneath all this cloth anyway? I have resorted to draping rags over a wooden puppet to see how folds may fall, and it is not even helping.

Next time I'm trying to do a slashy sketch and figure out how to make the heads and limbs fit together, it's going to involve Plastic Man. Seriously, this would be so much easier, if I could just stretch out one person as needed -- longer, shorter, thinner, whatever -- to fit the other body. And you could avoid all these annoying issues of foreshortening and perspective and bulk hiding parts of each other. It would be easier to make the pose look dynamic too.

Too bad I'm not into Plastic Man. Sigh.

Also, I fail at finding suitable reference pictures, no matter that everybody says the internet is made of porn. Of course the problem might be that I'm not looking for a sex position, but for a picture of one person restraining another against a wall with the arms held overhead by one hand, the other caressing the head, while there is ear licking going on. And from a certain viewpoint too. My google-fu it failed me. These are the moments I'm cursing descriptive writers I'm trying to illustrate.

I did find a rather cute picture of two ear-licking polar bears (unfortunately also pictures of dogs with some sort of icky skin disease -- ew). Meanwhile I tried to figure out the logistics via sligtly fleshed out stick figures, but not with great success.

I think I'm going to give up on trying to make stick figures fondle each other, and rather play another round of Samegame Hexagonized...

Because some people find the production process interesting, I decided to do a sort of "making of" post. If you'd just like to see the finished fanart, go here.

( very image heavy )

Sigh. I know why I like coloring digitally. I think I shouldn't have gone with turning the background dark. I thought the red Iskierka would look more dramatic against a dark background, kind of like on the book cover, but I don't think it really works. However-- no undo for coloring with acrylics. Woe! :(

Fandom: Temeraire Series by Naomi Novik
Characters/Pairings: Iskierka
Media used: only pencil so far
Rating/warnings: G, none
Notes/comments: I seem to be on a dragon kick lately. But I like Iskierka. I hope she looks enough like a baby while still fitting the description that they look just like smaller versions of the big ones. But making the head long and lean like I normally do for dragons to make them look ferocious didn't work for me for a baby dragon. The hatching pose took a ridiculous amount of time to get right. Maybe I'll do a real process post once it is inked and colored, showing excerpts from all the steps that were like tooth pulling, like the dozen thumbnails and head design sketches, and failed attempts. OTOH that would be kind of embarrassing, now it looks like I sat down and just did a pencil drawing as a process step...
Preview:

( the pencils are behind the cut )

Does anyone have tips or links to a tutorial or something that shows how to make things look not just wet but kind of slimy?

See, I'm attempting to draw some Temeraire fanart, namely the freshly hatched Iskierka. And I mostly have the dragon as a pencil drawing now, half out of its eggshell, though a bunch of spikes are still missing and I figure it ought to look a bit slimy still from hatching. Which somehow is harder to realize than I imagined.

This whole thing is turning out to be so much more trouble than its worth: first it took like a dozen or so thumbnail tries to get the posture not to suck completely, not to mention two attempts to make a small one work larger that failed, and I had to resort to a silly, foldable dragon wing model I made from bits of wire and paper, because I just couldn't visualize what you'd still see of the stupid wings (and they don't even show that much, though I guess that's part of the problem). Argh. </whining>

Subject: some random dragon
Media: pencil, fine liner pen with waterproof indian ink, acrylic paint, a bit of color pencil
Rating/warnings: G, none
Notes/comments: ( lengthy notes on my process, because this is the first time I used acrylics to color a drawing and felt rambly, feel free to skip if you just want to look at the picture. )

Preview:

( the finished drawing and a detail of the head in a larger size are behind the cut )

Subject: some random dragon
Media: only pencil so far
Rating/warnings: G, none
Notes/comments: I deprived my rats of some of their usual hours of outside time and managed to finish the pencils of a dragon without anyone eating my kneaded eraser. I'm planning to ink and color it with traditional media, since my tablet suffers from rat damage-- as long time readers may recall from previous whining entries.

While I managed to tape the chewed through cable together, somehow this works less well for the strands of USB cables than for power cords, and it behaves oddly now and craps out on me frequently.

Anyway, I thought it best to preserve the pencils before I ruin it through inking without an undo function as safety net. I included close-ups of some of the details, seeing how I bothered to add the suggestion of scales and such details, you might as well see them properly.

Preview:

( pencils behind the cut )

Attempting to draw while rats have their outside playtime in the same room is impossible. They keep trying to grab and eat my kneaded eraser for one thing. I guess I'll just waste some time on the internet instead...

So I got The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards out of the library, because of my vague intention to draw more this year, and look for exercise ideas. Well, actually I got the German translation which doesn't have anything about brain sides in the title (and I wouldn't have borrowed it if it had, frankly).

Anyway, my overall impression can be summed up as: "Wow, that's a lot of pseudo-scientific 'wawawa wawa' (you know, like the adults go in the Peanuts?) for a couple of simple drawing exercises." Seriously, I skipped most of the endless and idiotic "brain modes" talk (or whatever it's called in the original) about supposedly "tricking" your brain into something to browse for the actual drawing stuff, and it still grated on me.

Some of the exercises sounded okay for drawing practice, but you could have probably cut about 200 pages of mumbo-jumbo from the total 300 pages without loosing any significant drawing content.

I've posted new prompts at slothsdraw, which I'm crossposting here because for these prompts I also put up 18 pages of scans from a couple of drawing books' sections on body language, and I thought that might be of interest for others who like to draw, even if they haven't joined the community.

I posted more exercise sketches at slothsdraw, and the result of me practicing silhouettes is actually sort of fanart, because the jumping silhouette with the city background in that drawing was supposed to be Nightwing patrolling.

Also, I'm actually surprised that I managed to do all five exercises I picked for the first week.

I posted another result from a drawing exercise at slothsdraw.

...not all of the ones I posted yesterday, just the one for practicing to draw expressions, but I thought I'd post the result, because that also gives me the opportunity to pimp slothsdraw again without being too much of an obnoxious spammer.

Take a look, there is content! Join! *please?* The first exercise prompts (complete with helpful and inspirational scans from drawing books even) have been posted, and now there's my two sketches.

ETA: Obviously that previous post was supposed to be posted in the community. *headdesk*

I created the drawing practice community as slothsdraw. Membership is moderated for now, because while in my previous poll there were an equal number of responses in favor of moderated membership as against it (with most indifferent), the majority also replied that they'd feel more comfortable if there was the option for members to f-lock their art posts, and f-locking isn't very effective if anyone just has to click to join without even a cursory check by an admin whether the journal is legit.

The welcome post with the community description and rules is posted here, and the first of the weekly posts with five drawing practice suggestions is online as well.

Feedback on both and any other suggestions are of course welcome, as this is my first attempt to manage a community. And please join the community if you're interested, and pimp it as well if you might know others who might be interested.

I'm terribly uncreative. :( I'm not even decided whether I should go for a simply practical and descriptive name, say "drawingpractice" (luckily still barely within the 15 character limit) or something more whimsical like say "slothsdraw" (I feel a deep kinship towards sloths in my drawing habits...*g*)

Feel free to offer names even if you are not interested in joining.

poll @ my LJ