Vermin makes Jetryl cry......

[Rev. V!]

So, I've been swamped in real life with music/band stuff, but I had to do some illustrations for my band.
Once I got done with them, I though..."Hey, this technique might be useful for folks doing portraits on the Wesnoth board!!!!"
I hang around tattoo shops quite a bit and actually got the idea for doing this while watching a friend of mine do a portrait on someones leg.
In a nut shell, how they do this is-
They take the pic provided, photocopy it, then trace over all of the "bold" lines (edge of nose, chin, eyes, etc.) onto stencil paper, then when doing the tattoo they use "bloodlines" (No ink, they just do the line with the machine and your blood lets them know where the edges of shading go, which is important because you don't want many solid lines or it looks cartoony.) to map stuff out.

So, I thought "Hmmm... I can do that with photos in photoshop...."

So, anyway, here's how I did what I did.

Attachment #1 is the photo I used.
I put a tranparent layer over this and drew over (most of) the bold lines.
I used magenta, because it stands out from the photo and you can easily see what you've already done. Don't use black, it leads to swearing, trust me on this! After I got the lines I wanted, I took that transparent layer and put it in a new file, saved it, ten put it into greyscale mode, and played with brightness and contrast until I got a black and white line drawing.
Then I saved that, as a separate file.

Attachment #2 is what I got at the end of that.
You can see I didn't do all of the lines, some of them are there partially, for reference, like the tattoo on the back of his left hand.
After this, it was just a matter of cleaning up the lines, and filling in the areas with the paint bucket, then using the airbrush feature to hi-light and shade.
Then I freehanded in the tattoos and such.
Spriting skills come in VERY handy here, because it gets you used to working on a pixel level.
You can freehand anything you want in really...armour, weapons, etc. IF you have the drawing skills already, just putting armour on that's drawn off of the top of your head, for example, will probably look like ass if you haven't studied how it moves, how light reflects off of it, etc.

Attachment #3 is the final product.
I was going for the "Jem and the Holograms spend a lot of time on their knees in the back of our tour bus" look, and think I captured that.
But as you can see, the techniques I used could very well be used to do Wesnoth styled portraits.
Best part?
All digital, no pen or paper was used, no scanning....all digital.
(EDIT- With a mouse....)

How does this make Jetryl cry?
Because it's...well...cheating, I didn't really learn anything new skillwise, except for how to further mess with Photoshop.
(Tattooing however, is another matter ENTIRELY, there's NO "undo" on a tattoo machine, those artists GOTTA know their stuff and get it right the first time, in a rather odd medium!!!!)
You can go this route and do neat portriats, but if you do, it's NOT going to help you much when it comes time to actually pick up a pencil and paper and sketch something out from scratch and get it to look right.
Sure, you have to freehand some stuff in, but the hard stuff, facial features, perspective, hands, etc....is pretty much done for you, you're just tracing.

Which is why you should listen to Jetryl, because sooner or later, you WILL need those skills.

Rev. V!

[Tux2B]

reminds me of : http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6226

[Jetrel]

However, if you got some people to SCA-pose for story images, you could create campaign story pictures that don't suckâ„¢. Being able to draw them freehand is preferable, but that's not exactly do-able for most people.


I have to say, that's one of the most tasteful uses of a lens flare that I've seen, to date (not that that says a lot ).

[Rev. V!]

"I have to say, that's one of the most tasteful uses of a......"

That's what the giggly blonde from Josie and the Pussycats said too!!!!!


Oh, if you guys think it would be helpful for folks, feel free to wikki this somewhere in your art "How To" section.



Also, in case anyone wonders how the whole project turned out, I attached it.....it's for the inside cover of our latest CD.
I really hate CDs.
I miss vinyl album covers, where you had SPACE for art......
Trust me, the artwork for "No Mean City" by Nazareth doesn't look NEAR as badass shrunk down to CD size......plus, no printed sleeves in CD cases.
Technology really killed album art.

All right, I'll quit whining about being "old" now...

And, yes, my guitar is covered in cow fur in real life too.

Rev. V!

[inflow]

"I have to say, that's one of the most tasteful uses of a......"

That's what the giggly blonde from Josie and the Pussycats said too!!!!!

Hello
As far as I am concerned that's my opinion too !

Oh, if you guys think it would be helpful for folks, feel free to wikki this somewhere in your art "How To" section.

Let me see…
How will you create a troll, a griffin or a saurian with that technique ? You may just be able to work on human style pictures, or ?

I'll quit whining about being "old" now...

And no ! You're right about albums, but now we have an other huge space to express our artistic "talents" !

An other "old" tahitian sunny smile… (with panther fur on my Mac )