Thursday, February 07, 2008

Piratical...

"Wow Todd, that's totally a face. Do you not charge money for dazzling us with such excitment?" Yeah, it's boring, but it took me literally six fucking hours, so go to hell. I wish I'd made him more grizzly, and gnarled, with more exaggerated style and, like, barnacles and scurvy on his face and shit, but working, as I do, with a mouse (as I'm so fond of mentioning) I tend to fall back on the safety of straight forward structure. Maybe next time. Next time I have, again, six fucking hours of free time. Also, I totally cheated and basically drew half a face. If you look not so closely, you can probably see that I mirrored the ears, hair, and beard. I did that because real faces are 100% symmetrical in real life.



Yeah, weird placement of the image. I was feeling frisky.


If I may detour into (further?) arrogance, I have to say that looking back on what I used to do with Illustrator, I've made huge strides. Check out this piece of shit I found in my Photobucket account:


Seriously? I don't like to toot my own horn, but toot toot mother fucker!

Lastly, 2 posts in 2 days= I win!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You have some serious Illustrator skills. I'm amazed you're able to get that kind of quality and control (on this one and on the previous post) with a mouse. You have certainly improved a great deal from Big Boss there.

Todd said...

Thanks!

You're giving me far too much credit for using a mouse. I don't know how familiar you are with Illustrator (so forgive me if I'm over explaining), but I'm not freehand drawing or anything. Basically, every ink line is a "shape" that I made with the pen tool. It's kind of like making every line with the polygonal lasso tool in Photoshop and then filling the selected area with black. Over and over and over and over and over again. The pen tool makes super smooth selections, so I (hopefully) have really fluid fill areas that are meant to mimic an ink brush. It takes a long time, but it's not difficult by any means. There's no l33t art skills required.

Though, I also have to make all of the under structure using the same tool straight into the computer first. I don't use a sketch or reference photo to trace over or anything. That part does require rudimentary artistic talent I guess, as otherwise I wouldn't be able to figure out my anatomy or what shapes I'm placing where.

Anyway, thanks for the kind words, I'm just trying to keep my work in perspective.

Anonymous said...

I give props on your mouse work as someone who initially used a mouse in illustrator. I never accomplished anything with it, which is why I picked up a tablet.