Avatar for Grace

Dancers at the Café Alien

Emerald: Aliza: Kiara:

Oooh [giggle]-- Me, Doctor? Now there's a shock... Yah, who'da thunk it?

A humble tribute pic, for one of our number who often employs kicky color schemes. I do appreciate getting to view those "women of intense color." (Hmm, no wonder this project dragged on.) So once more (and not often enough)-- thanks neutron!

Now to hope that the extrapolated rear view of the avatar's head is recognizable. Oh, and to another of our rainbow warriors: the 8-ball's there, honest-- it's just hidden behind the blue dancer from this angle. I'll show you the layers sometime. 8^b*

Gnabbist

Two Dancers

Looks like I'm about to get interrupted again-- so here's a little work-in-progress sample to let folks know I'm still alive. 8^b*

These are a couple of supporting characters from an upcoming color pic. I'm finding that working up a fairly finished grayscale "underpainting" is a big help to me in the coloring stage. I have much more experience working in monochrome-- so it makes it easier for me to work out the values, composition, etc. What the heck, an "underpainting plus glazes" approach worked well for classically-trained oil painters for centuries, right?

The initial stage is fairly pencilish, as in the Aliza figure here; I gradually develop it into a monochrome "value painting," as in the more fully-rendered Kiara figure. Color layers for tone are applied "below" the value painting (which I'll occasionally tint to sepia for skintones), and highlights are applied above it.

Gnabbist

Cute AND Ratlike?

After RT's Jenki Ratkin character. It's an interesting challenge, trying to combine "cute" and "ratlike" characteristics... 8^b*

GIF versus JPEG

jestr wrote:
> Would you recommend .gif over .jpg?
> I thought .gif was mainly for animated bits.

For pictures with large solid-color areas and a modest palette, yes, I would strongly recommend GIF over JPEG format. For pictures with gradual-toned ("gradient") areas and thousands or millions of colors (like a photograph or a painting), I'd recommend JPEG format. (For a posting copy only-- you should always save the original in your paint program's native format. More on why in a bit.) I use each format when each is called for-- see my gallery site blog for examples of both.

Using the picture you posted as an example: The original BMP was 393,190 bytes; your JPEG was practically as big at 386,709 bytes; and a copy saved as a GIF was 70,080 bytes. (!) That is significant, since your entire audience is not on high-speed connections. The GIF also perfectly replicates every pixel in your original BMP, while the JPEG has changed and recolored some (zoom in and compare) as part of its compression method. That is to say, JPEG is a "lossy" algorithm, which is why you NEVER use it for a master copy-- ONLY for publishing to the web. Since you used just 102 colors in your original, that fits comfortably within the 256-color palette allowed by GIF.

Side note: PNG is another non-lossy format, but with less restrictive palette limitations-- IIRC, it can encode 24-bit color (16M colors) with an 8-bit transparency channel (for nice semi-transparent shadow effects, etc.)-- but it's not as widely supported (yet) as GIF and JPEG.

It was immediately obvious the first time I saw this picture that it belonged in GIF format-- this is exactly the kind of image that GIF was designed for. And a photomanip or painting or solid-modeling computer rendering just as obviously calls for JPEG. If an image is kinda in the middle regarding "solid vs. gradient" color areas, try saving both GIF and JPEG copies, and see which is smaller and/or looks better.

Hope this helps.

Gnabbist

Sage

With all the mechanical failures (real and virtual) around here so far this year, it stands to reason that my Wacom would start acting weird. It was "skipping"-- in the middle of a stroke, its data stream would contain bursts of near-zero pressure readings. Not very pleasant for drawing.

Pulled and plugged its connections a few times, to try to ensure good electrical contact, and loaded a more recent driver. It seems to be behaving properly now-- here's what developed out of my test scribble in Photoshop. A bit "artsy," but what the hey.

I'm getting REAL tired of perpetually having new breakages to fix...

Gnabbist

Bodécious Babe

An homage to the general proportions, at least, of Vaughn Bodé's curvaceous little bundles of femininity.

One technical curiosity: this was drawn using an old SummaSketch tablet-- decidedly not a pressure-sensitive tablet! The variations in line density were instead built up by using a Photoshop brush at partial opacity.

Millennium Minus One

"A disgruntled personification travels back in time to protest the theft of her thunder-- while the culprit, oblivious, parties on."

Man, these color jobs take up a lot of room. I tried backing off the JPEG quality, but this was as low as I felt comfortable posting.

Historical Curiosity Note: This is a modification of a cartoon I did under my everyday identity, for the cover of a club newsletter. Essentially, I replaced two New Year's Babies with New Year's Babes. That's traditional imagery, right? 8^b*

Gnabbist

Stalking

"Be vewy, vewy quiet: I'm hunting a wascal..."

Kneeling

A casual invented pose-- a bit abstracted/expressionistic/cartoonish.

Levitation Subject

I guess everyone's taking it easy on the internet today... 8^b*

Happy Y2K, everyone!

Gnabbist

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come

"Yes, Ebenezer, YES! Do continue... I'm about to... I believe I shall... Any moment now... It's quite imminent, I'm nearly certain..."

Stamina, however, was a cause for concern.

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

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...)

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...

1999 Halloween Jam

Here's my contribution to this year's Halloween Art Jam.

Naturally, lack of time (and my faulty memory) ensured that I left out some of our artists' alter-egos and companion characters. Here are the ones who did overcome those obstacles, listed in (more or less) left-to-right order:

Brimstone ... the critic, borne by two of his amazonian lovelies ... FNmagic ... Random, accompanied by his character Heratic ... a "cleverly" disguised spambot ... WolfPup, with his character Mistress Cyn ... my Gnabbist avatar (who has assumed a mesomorphic shape for this party) ... JNG's "Nathan" alter-ego (about to savor his coffee) ... some guy in the window, wearing a blank false face and a robe made of some high-tech bi-color fabric (Note: this is not a sanctioned avatar) ... the construction worker from my site ... Degem (on the railing), thinking about preparing some pumpkin pie ... itieu, (at the window), behind an 8-ball ... Ryoko, accompanying Ryoko's Toy ... JamNut

Leaving A Light On

A rough initial sketch that I didn't develop further.
To absent friends...

Drawing with an Art Tablet

Bic wrote:

Hey guys,

How the hell do you get used to drawing on this thing? I figured since my scanner was down, I should start learning how to draw with an art tablet, but it's driving me nuts!!!

Any tips or suggestions?

Do you find it easier to draw straight on the screen, or 'trace' a pencil sketch? I know I'm missing obvious questions but it's beddy bye time....

I include a sample of my measly sketches, (at the moment I feel better drawing with a ball-point pen!) These were done from scratch.

Any thrown bones would be gladly gobbled up...

Actually, your sketches are quite reasonable for first attempts with the new tool.

Is it the "disconnection" feeling of having to look up here at the screen while your hand is down at the desktop level doing the drawing? (I've been drawing via digitizer tablets for over fifteen years now, so I'm not sure I remember what felt weird about it when I started.) That feeling passes with practice.

I think it gets tangled up with the traditional method of looking up at a subject, then looking down at the sketchpad to draw. With a tablet, you have to force yourself NOT to keep looking down at your hand, since all the visual feedback is on the screen-- there's nothing to see down at the tablet. (Which answers the question of whether I draw directly on-screen!) Eventually your brain will get used to the difference, and not give you that conflicted feeling.

For lower-stakes practice, you might try some tracing exercises, then try drawing alongside a reference. Also just sketch simple blocks and cylinders and such. The idea is to do drawings that don't matter, just for the sake of training the new hand-eye coordination skills. The old "two faces to a vase" exercise is another good frivolous game. (Draw one grotesque profile down one side of the page, then mirror it to make a "vase" silhouette.)

Another tip-like thought: I find that my tablet usually ends up rotated a little counter-clockwise (maybe five degrees) relative to the screen. More comfortable for a right-hander that way.

What sketch tools are you used to? For a simulated pencil, I use a skinny Photoshop paintbrush, with the stylus pressure set to vary opacity. Lets me build up light, pencil-like lines.

For a simulated porous-tip marker, I use a medium-sized pencil, with pressure set to vary size. Very Flair™-like.

A bonus is using the X shortcut key to switch between a black and a white pencil.

I've attached a small sample sketch demonstrating these tools, and the goofy vase exercise. (Any light-hearted drawing game will do for practice.)

BTW, I strongly disagree with characterizing this as "off-topic"! Artist-to-artist help is one of the most on-topic things we do here, in my arrogant opinion. Does wonders for my morale, anyway. 8^D*

Gnabbist
-- wondering about scanning in a sketch done in ball-point pen...

Bubblegum

In a thread a couple of weeks ago that touched on the advantages of not needing to achieve a portrait-level resemblance in some pictures, Bigboote offered a comment something along the lines of, "as long as they don't ask what that thing is attached to the shoulders, you're all right." This, along with my avatar's then-recent debut, reminded me of an old joke.

My thanks to Ryoko and her devoted factotum for graciously agreeing to make guest appearances...!

Gnabbist

Alter-Ego, Avatar, & Stand-In