Wednesday, November 24, 1999

L & L for Imaginos - In Color!


The line work is mostly undisturbed from the grayscale original. The biggest revision (read: "nuisance") was smudging out edge jaggies: somehow, during the resampling down to display size, the layers interacted to create horrible fringes. [Editor's Note: I eventually discovered that flattening the image first makes resampling go much more, uh, smoothly.]  I also removed the old pencilled cast shadows, in favor of a separate airbrushed layer.

While colorizing this image, I discovered a nifty timesaver for skin tone shading. I have a lot more experience working in black and white and grayscale, so it didn't take me long to smooth out my initial pencil cross-hatching into gray modeling. But grays look dead and horrible overlaid on a skin tone base. Using Photoshop's "Image -> Adjust -> Curves", I remapped the grayscale values to a variable-hue gradient, running from dark red through sepia to pale greenish beige tones to white. Much nicer overlay for the two base tones I used here. Also very quick-- and repeatable.

The gradient from green "lawn" to blue "night" added some depth, but it needed more cues. So I loaded a temporary image with Gaussian noise, applied a motion blur, and "tilted" it back with a perspective transform. Had to make it real big, to have enough height left after tilting.

Gnabbist

Tuesday, November 09, 1999

The Redoubtable Geomette

Here's a sketch I did while trying to figure out what the heck Poser was doing to the hips in neutron's "Pumpkin Lady." So, using some Hogarth constructive anatomy tech, I applied the yaw, pitch, and roll <G> that neutron so patiently described in his response to my questions. Keeping the upper torso oriented toward the viewer, I went ahead and filled in the rest of the figure.

Sorry about the diminutive image dimensions, but this is the scale I work in for quick, direct-to-photoshop sketches. Coloring was a very simple imitation-marker rendering on a layer behind the imitation-pencil layer.

Gnabbist


Beware the Redoubtable Geomette:
she's got a Magenta Triangle around her head,
and a Transparent Hollow Sphere--
and She's Not Afraid To Use Them!!!
(Now, if we could only figure out how to use them...)

Friday, November 05, 1999

Miss Terki

               "So-- what exactly did you say you were going to do to the turkey?"

Several verbs were popular answers to Miss Terki's query...