Master Bowman portrait

Post by **thespaceinvader** » October 22nd, 2007, 10:50 pm

One of the many missing ones. Created mainly by tracing the current Longbowman portrait with a few colour changes, and the addition of the chest plate, cloak and gold bow-nock. WIP because GIMP crashed halfway through the first attempt and i lost an hour's work, otherwise it would probably be finished by now.

EDIT: the shape of the cloak could probably do with some alteration, and obviously, there's a lot of shading to do.

Any comments and critiques welcome.

Post by **torangan** » October 23rd, 2007, 12:09 am

The face looks very angular to me. Especially the lower line to the front seems to straight to me. Complete the line from the start of the helmet to the right eye and the outline will form nearly a triangle with an edge rounded for the chin...

Shadow · Post by **Shadow** » October 23rd, 2007, 5:45 am

To fit the current style you must use a varied line strength.
The cloak on the right side doesn't wraps right around the shoulder. Godawful to get it right I know.

Post by **thespaceinvader** » October 23rd, 2007, 6:09 am

Th first issue is common to the two current bowman line portraits - i traced the face and helmet directly from the original image. The line weight does vary, but clearly not enough - again, it's about as variable as the current bowman line images.

I will make some edits, thoguh, particularly to the jawline. And the cloak. Will need to find some reference for that...

Shadow · Post by **Shadow** » October 23rd, 2007, 8:26 am

Ref

Still not sure about the lines though but I don't usual draw in this style.

Post by **thespaceinvader** » October 23rd, 2007, 12:31 pm

Thanks. I don't know what happened there - i've drawn cloaks right before... I might have it hanging right down from the clasp in the middle so it goes over his righthand side of the chest plate.

Post by **thespaceinvader** » October 23rd, 2007, 4:46 pm

Finished shading and linework tweaks.

Post by **Jetrel** » October 24th, 2007, 11:18 pm

thespaceinvader wrote:The line weight does vary, but clearly not enough - again, it's about as variable as the current bowman line images.

You might think it does, but it doesn't. Go back and compare - the average line in this puppy is about 0.8-1px width, the average line width in one of the official ones is about 1.5 or more.

The cloak needs to be completely rethought, in terms of how the fabric flows - in order to draw in this style, you are in fact excluding a large number of legitimate ways that fabric flows - that's right; even though some varieties of folding are seen in the real world, they're not appropriate for a drawing in this style.

Instead of tight, squiggly curves, you need much longer and gently sinuous curves - like what you'd get if you traced them from a ruler known as a "french curve". Study and rip off one of the current official portraits.

That said, good work on the shading on the helm additions.

Post by **thespaceinvader** » October 25th, 2007, 5:20 am

I'll see what i can do. Aiming to make the right side more like the left, i guess. And WRT line weight, i'll do what i can, but i'm somehting of a novice with the Paths tool, and that's about the only way i can get the long smooth lines smooth enough to work...

>.>

<.<

And the shading on the helm additions is good cos it's traced from the original
>.<

Also, could you cast your art-directorly eye over this thread if/when you get the time please =)

Post by **thespaceinvader** » October 26th, 2007, 7:51 pm

Hope this is a little better. Further edits to cloak, line weight increases.

Shadow · Post by **Shadow** » October 27th, 2007, 8:08 am

Better. The belt should leave folds in the cape. I like the right side a bit more the folds are better made.

Post by **thespaceinvader** » October 27th, 2007, 12:26 pm

Good point about the belt. And by the right side, do you mean his right or ours?

Shadow · Post by **Shadow** » October 28th, 2007, 12:06 pm

From the viewer right.

Post by **thespaceinvader** » October 28th, 2007, 6:16 pm

Cool cool. I'll try to make some edits tonight.

Post by **thespaceinvader** » October 30th, 2007, 12:09 pm

New version. Heavy edits to the cloak hopefully grounding it a little more in reality this time rather than in my imagined view of it after some experiments with a bath towel and my girlfriend's digital camera's self-timer (embarassing pictures of me in bath towel cloak deleted already =D). Also added shoulder plates for the armour after looking at the sprite again. I ought to change the bow-horn to steel rather than gold, too, but it looks better in gold so nuts to that.

Took long enough, too. There was lots of irritation with the new version of GIMP. User-friendliness is all very well, but when us established users have to spend ten minutes swearing before realising that in order to move a selection, you first have to float it (which you didn't previously), work out the keyboard shortcut, then work out that that shortcut will be a nightmare when using tablet (i balance mine over most of the keyboard, meaning Ctrl+Shift+L to float a layer was just not gonna happen) and change it to something better... it all seems a bit irksome. To say the least.

But enough about that. On to the image...