Where did I go? Am I back?

There is a cruel irony to this post. I was ready to really start pounding away at the keyboard and manning the sketchbooks— I wanted to show you my working process as I started work on several projects. I even managed to pull this off with a portrait I had done for my friend. Then… silence for nearly two months.

What happened? Well, first on the list of hobby-crippling events: I moved into a new apartment with my brother and old roommate from college. This happened right at the end of July and carried through into the first half of August. Needless to say, there was a good bit of unpacking and cleaning to do; the previous tenants left us the absolutely lovely gift of an under-sink cabinet encrusted in black mold.

Yeah, my brother and roommate did a much better job of cleaning that up.

In addition to the woes of moving — nothing ground-breaking there — I visited my parents a couple of times. While that did not inherently prevent me from drawing, it did take me away from my set-up. Actually, I just forgot to bring my clipboard, heh… That and their scanner has a little story of its own, below.

It looked a bit different from this, but I'll spare you the details.

The real issue came shortly after I finished the final sketch, below. I was having some major problems regarding my lower digestive-tract. So severe were they, in fact, that I ended up missing three days of work and going on medical leave. Yay! Time away from work that I can spend making art! Right? Unfortunately, given the nature of the illness, I was… precluded… from any of my hobbies. I’ll leave that to you’re imagination. It ended up being chronic, which is also fun.

That leave lasted about a month — the last half of August, and the first half of September — which brings us to now. I finally got that old drawing uploaded, and I managed to get something done while I was out. I’ll let you see them, below!

You can find this on my DeviantArt, here.

I am a nerd. There is no avoiding that fact, I’m afraid. And, being the nerd that I am, I joined an online role-playing site. Essentially, I can play D&D with random strangers without having to worry about coordinating a sit-down game. My character is a tribal ranger, and her companion is a large hound. I drew the dog first, using a mastiff for the pose — I wanted a monstrous-looking form — and worked in the fur of a bearded collie. A big point for me was to have the braided fur along his sides.  It's a tribal thing.  The style is pretty rough and sketchy, but I think it might be alright for a graphic novel — provided I can work out the problems with the cross-hatching.

You can also find this on my DeviantArt, here.

And here is my character, herself. I stayed up a little too late working on this one and am still trying to turn my sleep-cycle around, heh. I wanted to mix my detailed shading with heavy outlines to make the drawing a bit more “stylized,” I suppose the word would be. That’s a topic I’d like to cover some day; I have what you might call an unpopular opinion of it. Mostly, I am happy to have had more portrait practice, and D&D characters always make interesting subjects.

I should also thank my mother, as she provided me with the materials necessary to draw those pictures above. I didn’t have my truck, nor did I feel well enough to drive out to buy anything. I am blessed to have a family that cares so much about me, as well as friends and acquaintances that are all concerned with my well-being. I’m not sure if any of you will read this, but if you do, thank you.

This brings me back to the issue of the scanner. My parents use a Kodak ESP 7 All-in-One printer and scanner. As I’m sure every artist knows: printers and scanners are some of the most frustrating pieces of technology ever devised. This is doubly true for printers and triply true for all-in-ones. Further aggravating the issue, I exclusively use Linux for anything productive, and Kodak is not a decent enough company to provide drivers for the operating system. It took about three hours of work, but I got the open-source ones working — to a better standard than the proprietary Kodak photo-center-thing, might I add (smug smile) — and could finally scan things from my parents' house. Oddly, the scanner refused to function when directly connected via USB to the computer, and only worked over my home network… This is particularly befuddling because one would think scanning over a network would be the harder of the two methods. Oh well.

I’m definitely going to do a post one day about my experiences as an artist that uses Linux instead of Microsoft’s Windows, or Apple’s macOS (I think that’s what they’re calling it now). Most have actually been quite pleasant, and I would never consider returning to either of the others — particularly not Mac. No one should use Mac. It is objectively inferior both in terms of software and hardware to essentially any other offering. Needless to say, it saddens me to see that the company has entrenched its grossly over-priced products in the art community — a community that is certainly not known for its ability to accumulate wealth. I’ll stop here before the rant takes off, and I’ll share the details about why I feel this way in a later post.

This as well, here.

And finally, we get to that drawing I’ve been wanting to show you for the past two months. I was finally able to scan it and upload it after returning home. It only took about two hours to draw and finally gave me a passable result with cross-hatching. I should clarify: I can crosshatch with pen a lot better than I can with pencil. That’s not to say that I’m good at it… in fact, I think cross-hatching is still one of the weakest of my skills. But finally, I am not completely unhappy with the result. The saddest part of this entire story is that the drawing’s really nothing special. It certainly wasn’t worth waiting two months for.

That’s about it. I’m afraid. Sorry about the long post, but I felt a bit of explanation was in order. Looking ahead, there doesn’t appear to be much of anything in the way of my old, regular schedule. However, I have learned my lesson about optimism and I am not going to jinx it! Suffice it to say, I am hoping my luck holds out.

No.  It says "no."  It always says "no" unless a "yes" would be more damaging.

Drawing Attila the Hun

Today, I will be showing my process for drawing Attila the Hun — a drawing requested by a good friend of mine.

To start off with, I rendered out the contour lines for the figure. I decided to take the East-Asian approach to Attila, as there is a theory that the Huns originated somewhere in eastern Asia. Other than that, however, not much is known about the Huns. They were almost entirely erased by the Romans. Their language has been forgotten, save for a few words that seem similar to those in the Mongolian, Turkish, or the Altaic languages (which sucks for me, because I love linguistics and ancient languages). So, I had to take some liberties with this portrayal.

Again, I stress that this step is the most important when completing the image. No amount of shading is going to help save a bad base.

After laying out the basic framework for the drawing, the rest is actually fairly easy. In this step, I filled in the face. I wanted to get it done first, because it will end up being the focal point of the drawing.

I then finished the hair and started on the fluffy rim of his helm. Sorry about the white bar cutting through the hat — I think my scanner messed up. The hair was actually fairly easy to fill in. Though, I learned during the framing stage that the bangs had to remain high on his forehead. If I went lower with the hair, it would have looked like he had a woman’s haircut. It also helped to keep the “square” corners (the very edges above his ears) of his upper forehead revealed. Ultimately, I wish I had been able to make the hairs a bit thinner.

In this step, I completed the hat. The fluffy part of the hat was actually much easier than I thought it would be.  Other than that, the conical shape extending upward was fairly easy to fill in.

And then I moved down to the wrap of fabric around his neck, as well as the quilted pad of armor on his chest. Perhaps, by now, you’re seeing what I mean by the framing step being the most important; I haven’t done much in the following steps other than shade. That shading has been almost entirely reliant upon those lines I set up earlier. The only other thing that went into the shading was a basic understanding of how light tends to illuminate the face — those triangular regions of lighting falling from the upper cheeks to around the nose, for instance.

I also added a bit of stubble.

Finally, I filled in the shoulders with fur. I was originally going to make this a wrinkled fabric, but realized that my shading more readily resembled fur. I liked the change and thus kept it. And that’s it. A few hours of drawing — most of it spent in the framing stage — and we have this. For the final image, I cleaned off those dots of material around the head and played a bit with the contrast.

That contrast bump makes it look a bit more like it does in real life — I’ve noticed that the scanner tends to brighten the images I draw. I think I might have pushed this contrast a bit too far in Sepulchre, though. I was more cautious with this image, though, and feel that my restraint paid off.

I hope to see you in the next post!

Not much of a conqueror, eh?
That looks a bit more like a knit cap.

Future Plans - Mid to Late Summer of 2017

It is no secret that things have been a bit dead around here… I think a spider’s building a web on my single June post, and some dust has been collecting atop those date blocks. But I’ve not been dead, I assure you — at least, no more than usually am. In fact, I’ve still been maintaining a presence on my DeviantArt account, here.

As a bit of a resolution, I am going to attempt (and ideally succeed) to increase my activity both on this site and over on DeviantArt. However, I have made the realization that I am probably not yet in the position to be giving out meaningful tutorials. After all, you haven’t seen much of my work on this website. And that’s important, if I’m going to be someone worth listening to when it comes to tutorials.

Good point...

To accomplish this goal, I’m going to make a few changes around here. First, as I stated before, I’m going to cut back on the tutorials (unless there is something that I can really help you with, like working GIMP). Second, I’m going to try to keep my posts shorter. If you can’t tell, I like to be verbose. Being verbose, however, makes posts a bit intimidating when I can only manage to free up an hour of time in a day.

Damn you, day-job!

Third, I plan to dedicate most of my posts to my projects and work (that is, instead of releasing half-baked tutorials). For now, my current projects are limited to a graphic novel — that I will explain a bit more in future posts — and an album of related artwork. The latter will be in the vein of that morbid stuff I usually draw. It will have a consistent style and perhaps some “lore” to accompany it. We will see. The idea is to, upon its completion, branch out into a different style.

Fourth, I will try to write posts about drawings that I am currently working on. I’ll also try to grab some scans of these as I work on them to show you my process. I also want to add color to my work.

See that gallery.  No color.

But the only way for me to really practice with it at the moment is digitally.

I hope you will find some of these things interesting, and I look forward to seeing you in the next post!

Now, about that dust.

Colors via Pigment and Highlighters

Colors via Pigment and Highlighters

In a bit of a diversion from the “Studying Feathers” series, I decided to explore colors. As I wrote in the first part of my “Using Values and Gradients” series, I have relatively little experience with color. Now seemed just as good a time as any to delve into the topic.

I was inspired to write this post upon looking at the color theory page on Wikipedia. Specifically, I was interested in the CMYK, subtractive color mixing diagram. Essentially, all printed colors are made using different ratios of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink. This goes a bit against the traditional theory that, to obtain any color, you must mix red, blue, and yellow. Mixing red, blue, and yellow tends to produce unsaturated or “muddy” colors, and usually “pure” pigments — or ones that directly resembled the desired color — were used instead of the mixtures. Put simply: if you wanted purple, you were more likely to use a pure purple pigment than a mixture of red and blue.

Today, we use CMYK mixtures to obtain all of the colors that we require, because using such a wide variety of pure pigments is impractical for the purposes of mass production. This explains why your ink-jet printer cartridges only use those few, odd colors.

Further delving into the topic, I found that this also explains those strange circles you see when looking closely at printed materials — each “channel” of the CMYK model is offset from each other by a given angle. Each channel consists of a screen of equally spaced dots aligned in a grid that, when rotated around a center point, produce circles. This is perhaps better explained by the diagram on the “Screen Angle” article on Wikipedia.

Knowing these few things, I wanted to see if I could — to some extent — replicate this effect using various traditional coloring media.

Colored Pencils

As you can see, the results were quite underwhelming. The first set of colored pencils did not have true magenta or cyan pencils. Opting for the red and blue in their stead provided the muddy colors expected by the information above. The second set of colored pencils again did not have magenta or cyan pencils either. It did, however, have pink and a lighter blue. The results were slightly better — some mixing can be seen in the overlap, but overall the results were minimally successful.

This is of course not to say that successful mixing cannot be achieved with any colored pencils. Again, I have little experience using colors in my own work. It also easily demonstrated in other artists’ works that a full set of “true pigment” colored pencils can produce an impressive range of realistic and vibrant colors. However, the success of CMYK-only colored pencils is not something that I have looked into.

Oil Pastels

Oil pastels are a distant departure from most of the media that I use. They are highly saturated and thick when applied to paper. In some ways, I would liken them to a dry form of acrylic paint due to the purity of the colors they provide.

As you can probably tell from the mixing of the “CMYK” pastels (using red instead of magenta, again due to the color not being present in my set), the results were surprisingly ineffective. The mixing was so weak that the colors appeared to overlap more successfully than combine. Obviously, pastels are meant to be blended with each other to form broad ranges of colors, and such a small region of application was not going to be suited for this purpose.

Therein lies the reason that there is an ugly, purplish blob next to this sample. I mixed the red and blue pastels to create a purple base by smudging them with my fingers and then added black to the bottom in an attempt to create a gradient. This again provided the muddy result expected by my research.

Sharpie Highlighters

I was running out of materials to test, and each of my results were rather depressing. Not wanting to give up, though, I tried one last thing: Highlighters. These, in particular, were produced by Sharpie and likely not intended for use in art.

Surprisingly, they actually mixed to produce a fairly wide range of colors.

The entire combination of colors possible using highlighters.  Also known as a "Color Gamut."

This entire range of colors was created using only the highlighters seen above. I have green highlighters, but did not use them to produce this result.

Each highlighter had a different range of “intensity” characterized by how many times it was overlapped with another layer of the same color. This explains why each range looks rectangular as opposed to square.

Put more simply, the yellow sharpie had a range of 2 (or 0-1, for the more technical readers). It was either there or not there, as adding more layers atop the preexisting yellow did not impact its intensity. The cyan sharpie had the widest range of 5 (or 0-4) intensities. And the magenta sharpie had a range of 4, or (0-3) levels of intensity.

The first range mixes cyan and yellow, the second range mixes magenta and yellow, the third mixes cyan and magenta, and the fourth mixes all three (assuming that yellow is present).

As a result, we have this wonderful mix of nice neon, and “tropical” colors that would perhaps be expected from the use of highlighters.

Ok, so this isn’t exactly the kind of color theory most artists are interested in — what colors look nice next to others, how color impacts mood, and how lighting influences colors — but it is an interesting base to the study, as printed art will necessitate an understanding of the CMYK color model. Even if you plan on working digitally, you will likely need to convert your work to this color model in order for it to look accurate in the physical world. It would make an interesting art-challenge as well — to use these three highlighters and some media for adding value to create a finished piece of artwork.

And of course, I just found it a bit interesting, heh.

Studying Feathers (Part 2)

Continuing with the idea of my previous post, I will briefly cover a few of the methods artists have used to meaningfully portray feathers in their work. Note that I won’t be using any of the original artwork to avoid infringing on copyright — which is a shame, because it muddles the point a bit.

The first several pieces established the most common motif in the rendering of feathers on birds: the use of curved lines to indicate the leading edge of the feathers’ vanes. In the case of the large primaries, these took the forms of full outlines around the feather. The smaller vaned feathers that covered the rest of the bird only had a small portion of their leading edges visible. These curved lines followed various wavy patterns to indicate the almost “stepped” appearance of the birds feather topology.

Aside from these leading edges, the primaries were individually shaded while the other feathers were treated as a mass with little variable shading. Another important thing to notice is that the rachis is not visible.

The technique of shading the leading edges of the feathers also appeared in this style. However, the feathers on the body of the bird — and particularly the coverts on the wing — were portrayed by blocking out sharp, flame-like shapes of darkness that then stepped upward towards bright white in a gradient. The primaries were again treated individually, with basic crosshatching that followed the direction of the barbs of the feather as opposed to arbitrary angles. Again the rachis is not visible in any of the primary feathers.

This style appeared to be the most popular — particularly among drawing tutorials. It also clearly demonstrates what I mean by shading the edges of the feathers. However, in contrast to the previous styles, this shading is accomplished with lines seemingly meant to represent individual barbs as opposed to entire vanes. The birds rendered in this style were shaded according to their own volume, with little consideration of the feathers.

This style breaks the motif. Instead, entire regions of feathers are shaded with flat colors that step up into differently shaped regions. Notice how the feathers look particularly sharp, thick, and again flame-like. The effect could be used to similarly represent long hair or fur. The edges of the bird sport large, wavy wedges of feather to help complete the texture.

Onto individual feathers. This first style consisted of no shading and only used outlines to convey the shape of the feather. The edges appeared to be created by following a basic, whole shape with breaks in the vane only appearing in the outlines around the clusters of barbs. The afterfeather did not have nearly the same amount of complexity as the vane. The basic idea of this style was to use as many tightly configured, curved lines to indicate the barbs as possible.

Not my best work, I will definitely admit, heh.

This style was very similar to the first individual feather style, but differed in how it portrayed the barbs. Instead of using a line for each individual barb, it used lines to separate blocks of barbs.

Finally, a very particular feather. This one had a very basic, rounded shape surround the rachis to indicate the vane. Little cuts were made into this shape to break up the vane. Some of these cuts were shallow while others went all the way to the rachis. Rather than using lines to indicate each of the barbs, this style used crosshatching to hint at their existence all along the edge of the feather. Additionally, crosshatching was used around the edges of the rachis to create a gradient effect on the vane. The afterfeather was drawn as a huge puff, with separate lines to indicate its extent instead of one contiguous outline.

These were only a handful of the numerous styles used by artists to draw feathers and birds. There are more observations to be made by looking at the works of other artists, and I encourage you to do your own studies.

Also, I must apologize for the long gap between this and the previous post. I’ve had a bit of a nightmare schedule at work and am also tackling another project to the side. Regardless, I am hoping to return to a somewhat normal routine of posting soon!

Studying Feathers (Part 1)

Recently, I have been wanting to draw something that’s feathery — but I won’t spoil exactly what it is yet. Looking back at my “Vulture” drawing, however, inspired me to study feathers so that I could draw them more accurately.

This will end up being a short series of posts, because I can see this topic getting a bit complicated. To start, I want to look into some of the basic science of feathers. If I know what feathers look like in real life (as well as a bit of how they work), I might better be able to approximate them in my art.

The only downside to starting with the science first is that I am not sure if I will succeed at answering some of my more art-related questions. I guess we will see about that in the upcoming posts. Regardless, I took to Wikipedia(a source that is just reliable enough for artists, granted they can compare what they read to reference images) to learn about the types and shapes of feathers.

The Basic Types of Feathers

There are three basic types of feathers: vaned feathers, down feathers, and “filoplumes.” The filoplume feathers are rarer than the other two and, from what I can tell, not very visible on the bird; they me be too specific for our purposes. The vaned and down feathers are the ones that we are more likely to be concerned with.

The stereotypical feather — the one we see most often portrayed in art — is the vaned feather. It is also known as a “pennaceous” feather, in more scientific terms. These are the feathers most responsible for a bird’s ability to fly and appear on the wings and tail of the bird. They are called “remiges” on the wings, and “rectices” on the tail.

The other type of feather is known as the down feather. It is much simpler, having only a shaft and relatively fewer, disconnected barbs (the barbs will make sense in just a minute). It resides beneath the vaned feathers and serves to insulate the bird. These feathers are most visible on newly hatched chicks and resemble those found on various fossils of dinosaurs.

The Parts of Feathers

The vaned, or pennaceous feathers have several components that are arranged like this:

The barbs are the little offshoots from the shaft that make up the visible, flat part of the feather.

The down feathers only have a shaft and a few wiry barbs, like the “afterfeather” in the image.

The Types of Vaned Feathers

Considering that we will more likely be drawing vaned feathers — especially when they are detached from the bird — it is important to know the different kinds of vaned feathers. There are three that we should be concerned with: primary, secondary, and covert feathers. They take up a formation along the wing that looks like this:

Note how long the shafts of the primary and secondary feathers are — all of this space is filled with the afterfeather and covered by the primary covert feathers. 

The primary feathers connect to what could be considered the bird’s “finger” bones. This means that they can be stretched apart during flight, which is important to know when drawing a bird in the air. The secondary feathers by contrast, connect only to the ulna, or “forearm” of the bird and cannot be spread apart. The covert feathers appear as two distinct sections relating to the type of vaned feather they cover.

The feathers that correspond with the humerus are known as tertial feathers, and do not connect with the bone. I suppose that means they are more prone to movement and compression, while not being entirely under the bird’s control. Otherwise, they look a good bit like the secondary feathers continuing further down the wing.

The primary and secondary feathers each have a different shape. The primaries are long and thin, while the secondaries are shorter and generally rounder.

I threw in the down feather for good measure. Remiges, again, is the more scientific term for vaned feathers.

So that makes up the bulk of what I studied on the scientific end of the subject. Now that we know the basic shapes of these feathers and how they are arranged along the wings, we should be better equipped to draw a more accurate bird. I don’t think you have to memorize the scientific terms, or their exact functions to draw a bird. But I do think knowing a bit about the inner workings of your reference can be an excellent way of improving your representation of it. I just hope that this post cut out some of the less relevant parts and left the more important ones.

In the next part of this little series, I would like to look at how feathers have been depicted in art of varying styles. Art is often a matter of problem-solving, and feathers present a fairly large problem. I am interested in seeing how various artists have solved this problem.

2D Animation in Blender

This post will be a bit of a departure from my usual topic of drawing. I don’t know if I have mentioned this yet, but I would like for this blog to be an exploration of many different kinds of art, and this post is a good example of that.

Today, I will be showcasing a little of my exploration into how technology can assist in the creation of art. Stated less pompously, I mean that I am using a computer program — in this case, for two-dimensional animation — instead of more traditional media. This post will not be a tutorial, as I feel that I have not yet learned enough to confidently share my knowledge on the subject (I plan to later, though). But I still feel that it is something that could be of interest to some of you, provided you are interested in expanding your artist’s tool-set into the digital realm. Perhaps you might want to explore this topic with me. If this is not something that interests you, or you are more inclined to stick to traditional media, I will return to the subject of drawing soon.

Blender

The tool that I am currently examining is called Blender. It is an open source, 3D modeling, animation, video rendering, and game engine software — a lot of things that sound right up a digital artist’s alley, or at least mine. It’s free to use, and you can get it here.

There are a lot of things that can be said about this program and its copious features, but for the sake of this post, I will keep to those that I am using. Blender allows you to sculpt 3D models. For my purposes, I am using simple planes (think flat squares). It also has a complex animation system that uses, most relevantly, bones — or armatures, as they are called in the program.

I used a different piece of software called Krita (also free) to create the shoddy image I later animated in this program (I was more interested in the animation than the overall presentation, heh). I will definitely be covering both of these programs in much more detail later, as they are probably of great interest to anyone looking into various digital art forms.

Cel-based Animation Technique

To illustrate what I am trying to do, I will share a bit of my limited knowledge regarding cel animation. The term “cel” in cel animation is a contracted form of the word “celluloid,” which was a transparent sheet onto which characters were drawn in traditional animation (before computers became capable of simulating these things). If you recall having an “overhead projector” in some of your classes, you will be somewhat familiar with this principle — you can draw on a transparent sheet, and lay another on top of it to draw something else on top of the previous image; both of these images will appear superimposed in the projection.

Animations entailed having a back-lit background, and then laying these transparent cels in layers over the background. The final image would be photographed, and then the next cels would be loaded on and the background adjusted if needed. To make this insanely tedious task a bit less impossible, animators split their characters into pieces that they could then animate individually and later overlay on top of the other components of the character. For instance, an arm would be animated on a separate series of cels, and then each of those would be placed on top of the cel containing the body.

What I am Doing

So you are probably seeing where I am going with this. I split up the following doodle into its component pieces — or into the things that might have been separated onto different cels in traditional animation.

It's like we took a hatchet to him!

I then realigned these things into the proper shape using various methods I will describe in detail later. Essentially I used planes for each piece of the dragon, and then used the bones in Blender to “rig” the image for animation. It ended up being a little rough, because I drew the dragon in segments first instead of drawing him as one entire character and then splitting him more logically.

The bones are those triangle-looking things.

However, the rig worked. The planes moved relative to the position of their bones, just as I had hoped. Sure, it’s no masterpiece — nor is it even that much of a challenge for anyone already mildly versed in Blender — but it is doing essentially what I wanted it to do, and I thought it might be interesting to see if it worked out.

It's a little rough, but I think it demonstrates what I was trying to do.

The more tech-aware readers might already see what I am trying to do here; I am really trying to replicate the functionality of a commercial software called Spine in a free alternative. That is essentially true, and just as Spine’s primary product is meant to create sprites for video games, so is this little project, here.

I am not sure if this particular method will be of much use for the more complicated requirements of animation meant for film — I will definitely need to look into finding more tricks to make that viable, if it even is.

In any case, that’s one of the things I have looked into during the past couple of weeks. I will write about my discoveries as I look further into this.