Tutorial Spawning of Bob - Safety with Pencils

Technical Aspects 4 - Technology

It is possible to do complex art on Microsoft paint, but it is tedious going because of the lack of layers. You make an error with your fifth level of colour and deleting will cut right back to bare canvas. You realise your error was a lot earlier and undo will remove ALL of your subsequent work which was fine. Having said that, Paint is awesome for doing simple touchups (my reimaginings of the winners of the Skinkathalon, for example)

I think that mid to high end photo imaging software like Corel or Photoshop allow you to do some mouse driven art. I note that @Hyperborean uses something called "Paint Tool SAI" to do her very dramatically posed gems. The big plus here is the ability to do several layers - each better than the last, or each adding something - another element, colours, textures, shading etc.

I know the pros use computer mouse, or a drawing pad and stylus way off to one side of the screen. I suck at that. If I can't visually guide my hand I can't draw straight lines or get things to connect. Fine erasing turns into swiss cheese.

Pre October 2014 my use of computer on drawings was limited to touching up pencil sketches and sometimes compositing existing images in different ways. Aside from smoothing errors or removing eraser lines the most useful thing for me was the ability to redraw eyes. Eyelines are important. The viewer needs to know what the character can see and not see in order to understand what they are reacting too, and eyes are the most important conveyors of emotion (followed by mouth, posture and hands) Sometimes I would just add highlights to the eyes, but it amazing how much more lively an image is with that simple addition.

Compare these:



This is a rare example of me doing freehand with the mouse in paint. (the rude arm)



I did do large areas of colouring on paint when I absolutely needed to, and in the image below I also duplicated, stretched and composited a LOT of skulls. I pencil drew a section of skulls about 2 inches by five and just repeated myself. The transition between every block of skulls was done by hand (mouse). It actually holds up to scrutiny pretty well, but it was hard work.



Compositing skulls, the Chaos Bunny, Bloodletter, rats and skull involved a lot of cut and paste between five or more open Paint documents.
These days I would just compose each element as a separate layer in one image and be able to freely manipulate and colour each one. 40 minutes tops.

Having said all of that, I still use Paint for almost every image because cropping to final size and adding dialogue bubbles is quick and easy on Paint, and I need to use the PC to upload and post things anyway.

TL;DR - basic, free software can be used to enhance freehand drawings. More complex image manipulation can be done on these but it ain't easy.

 

I have been summoned?



Its still in the works, just on hold til my graduate applications are done

 

Now that is what I call service!

 

Alright I am here this evening to give you....*pause for effect*
HOW TO DRAW LEGS ON YER LIZZIES


Now we are still going to be focusing just on the Krox since its easier and then you can just adapt what you will for smaller lizardmen units. A Krox walks with something called, "Digitigrade" which means its walking on its toes.

Our comparision for this will be a wolf, since we are familiar with canines. I cannot use the Chimp as our animal model such as last time since a chimp walks like we do, "platigrade" meaning we are walking on the WHOLE foot not just the toes. Now if we were drawing demons we would then draw them as Ungulates which means you got hooves...and are walking on your nails. (okay not exactly, more like your tippy toes). Also to complicate matters, Kroxs have tails, we do not, outside of our stubby lil tail bones that is. Ergo the butt muscle will different.

As you can see, we humans have a nice rotund tushy for helping us stand up right. A wolf does not need a tush, but a Krox will. Not as prominent as a human's but something to help the back keep its shape. Now the tail should be positioned just above cheeks. the top of the tail SHOULD NOT be coming out at the cheek top, that means the tail is literally coming out its sphincter and as you can see on the wolf...well, that's not where it goes. Now part of the tail will still be positioned with the legs but not the entire tail!

Now that we are done talking about lizard badonks, back to the legs. Our legs are very columnar, nice n straight! A wolf's leg will basically be an extended oval and a little oval coming off that, the same will be true with the Krox, just account for a little half circle to account for the glutimus maximus. Now with the wolf and the Krox, the ankle is up fairly high, this is where the rotation, like in our own ankles will take place. The toes can spread out of course but the extremis will not rotate and pivot like the ankle will.


Look how disgustingly broken it looks on the right, I can't even draw it its so broken.
Now to round things off, we will give you all a front view of the leg


Our legs, nice in straight! Lizzie legs, sorta bowed!

And thus concludes lizzie muscle/anatomy 2!

Next, up, y'all decide!

 

If it please ye, Mistress. Hands and feet. That's what I find hardest.

 

That I can do! Hands and feet a re like the worst but I can cook up something half way decent on them!

 

I've developed my own system, but am keen to learn any other tricks.

 

Here be another step by step sketch - using skillz I developed in the Feb April 2016 L-O art comp.

I probably put 6 hours of "multitasking" time into this (I was being paid to be at a meeting), but I lost an hour doing the wrong base colour, 3/4 hour messing around with backgrounds and captions. And maybe an hour doing one step at a time for the tutorial, instead of several in one go.

If the only thing you get out of this is "undercoat, base coat and layer" then you haven't learnt anything you didn't know from model painting - which is where I learnt all my 2D painting things. Weird. I am tagging @Hyperborean because I think the shading stuff might just save you hours of work for a comparable outcome.

My art comp objective was to draw an ethereal character with a starfield showing through the shadows on his skin. In the process I discovered that ANY dark layer, with stars or not, can be brought forward by gentle use of an erasing tool. Again I am using Sketchbook Pro on a 3rd hand iPad.

Rough concept art - could have done it in pencil then photographed it, but I just scrawled on the tablet.




Rough Lining in - spent most of my time getting the hands right



Final lining in - this actually needs to be about right.



Black undercoat - seriously



Blue Base coat - this layer sits over the black



I temporarily placed the lining in (layer 3) over the top, and created layer 6 which was block colour for eyes, nostrils, mouth and crest



Out comes the almost zero opacity eraser - I used the airbrush tools (large and small) and selected "erase" as my paint colour (below and to the left of the colour wheel) Then I erased blue base coat where there should be shadows. Why is this better than doing a black "wash"? Because a wash leaks out onto the blank canvas around the model and I need to do a precision clean up later



So you can see what I erased, this is the blue base colour layer (4) with the undercoat layer masked.


The next thing I did was create a new layer for "highlights" and use very low opacity white to pick out the upper edges (layer 7)



This is the highlight layer by itself on a black background. Spooky.

 

Still awake?


I masked layer 3 (the line drawing) to see if my shadow edges were hard enough yet . Nope.




So back onto the blue base layer with a herder eraser.




So things were a bit stark and without much texture. On the Blue Base layer I alternated light airbrush of blue colour and "eraser"



The layer 6 features need some attention here


And they got it




To see how I was going, I replaced the white canvas with grey and... Highlight flare around the edges and incomplete fill in the eyes.


Touch ups done.



This guy is pretty much done except for the horrible realisation that my joke target is purple!!!!!

 

Which was less of an issue than you might epect. In theory I just replace the Blue base colour with a purple base and redo the shading. In practice I had used some blue on the highlight layer (7) and the fine detail / feature layer (6)



Which meant I needed to do a partial rework of all three layers, but I think the residual blue around the eyes made him look particularly decrepit.



The modern internet is incredible - you can find a lizard with a moustache if you need a valid argument. But is there a single zimmer frame at the correct angle? Nup. I re-angled and stretched the top bar of this one, and repositioned the far uprights. This kind of modifications will void your warranty, but hey, I figure the gentleman in question won't be walking that far anyway. I placed the walker on top of the rest of the image layers and deleted the bits where fingers went over the top of it.



Backgrounds? I tried generic Old Folk's Homes, a few different gardens, then a bit of medieval looking stonework which all looked bad. Aside from anything else, they were often in direct sun, or at least too well lit to go with this guy. Another 20 minutes wasted, when in fact the obvious pick was to go back to the Hubble space telescope which was the partial inspiration for my art comp. Choose a cool colour back ground and image complete.

To optimise contrast, an ideal background for purple / orange would be a cool colour - green / blue. I have had to give n810 a slap occasionally for choosing complementary backgrounds for avatars - they just don't pop out enough for the small scale pics.




BUT.... Having done this, I remembered that the whole black undercoat idea occurred because I wanted to show star field in the shadows. By masking the black layer the stars instantly shone through on this image too. Everywhere except the crest and facial features section. Out came the spray can of erase and a few minutes later here is the finished product. Caption inspiration from Wife of Bob.



I wouldn't go to this much trouble for every sketch, but planning ahead to include shadow and highlight layers will help me get to finished product faster without so many sketch-sketch-sketch-dammit-undo-undo-undo dead ends.

Hope you get something out of that.

 

@spawning of Bob , you seem to forget I am glutton for punishment and do everything the hard way art wise.