Rat Creature's Journal

I'm wondering what other people do with their preliminary sketches and stuff. For each actually finished piece of fanart I end up with a pile of more or less awful and hideous half abandoned sketches, rough composition doodles, sketches to work out body parts, perspective, color, textures, sometimes just a couple, sometimes dozens and more. I have packrat tendencies in general, so it is hard for me to throw things out, but otoh, what do I need a pile with failed sketches of mishapen half-finished stuff for, once I have finished the work?

So I'm curious what other people do:

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*

With all the posts about yuletide and some fans pimping the newly created yuletart (a fanart holiday exchange for all fandoms except HP), I've been thinking about signing up for the latter, but then I read the rules for the sign-up, which ask you for offering to draw in at least ten fandoms, if I understand the sign-up correctly.

The form is a bit oddly phrased, it asks for "At least 5 fandoms you would like to get art of:", "At least 5 fandoms you want to get art of the most:" and then "Any other fandoms you would be willing to give art of:", which is unfortunate, since first, it assumes that I'm able to offer in all fandom which I'd like to receive, which has to be bad for matching too, because I'd be more than happy to get art in a dozen fairly popular live-action fandoms which I don't draw in, and second I have to come up with ten fandoms I can draw in, which is a high number. I mean, I think yuletide only asks for a minimum offer of three fandoms for people to write in, even if most people seem to offer more. At least that high number makes sense for better chances to match people, with the fandom choice being wide open like this, so I can understand it.

But I don't think I can reasonably offer that many. While I do have many fandoms, I don't draw in live-action fandoms, so those are all out. That leaves only my comic and book fandoms, and okay, the main universes of Marvel and DC comics I can do, and to fill this out a bit more I could maybe count Sandman as separate fandom, then there's Dresden Files, and maybe LOTR, though I never tried drawing that before. And I've drawn Muppets already at least once so I guess I could do that, though I'm not that familiar with all of the canon or the movies and such, but still that's only six. I don't do a manga-influenced style so that leaves out Avatar, too. Maybe Watership Down? I mean, I've never actually read the book, just watched the movie, though I've always wanted to, but I think I could read it and manage rabbits. Perhaps Temeraire, otoh I suspect I'd suck at drawing the dragons, and worse, period costumes and stuff would probably need a lot of research. I have no clue about that stuff and never even watched any of these Age of Sail movies, so offering that would probably lead to disappointing disasters as result.

Sigh.