Line art for New Kalenz Portrait
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Well, Jetryl implied what it was in his post:
Jetryl wrote:2] The weight at the end of his blade won't fit into the scabbard, and needs to be removed. Interesting to look at, but "bad and wrong".
For I am Turin Turambar - Master of Doom, by doom mastered. On permanent Wesbreak. Will not respond to private messages. Sorry!
And I hate stupid people.
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The portarait definitely looks great...
That being said, when I first downloaded Wesnoth, units and portraits (the few there were) were very anime-like. Over time, they have gotten more gritty/realistic and lost (especially the portraits) the anime style.
[personal_opinion] I don't like anime, I think Wesnoth is way better with the current style of portraits. This Kalenz looks great, for those who like the style, but I'd really rather we don't go back to the anime feel of yore. [/personal_opinion]
That being said, when I first downloaded Wesnoth, units and portraits (the few there were) were very anime-like. Over time, they have gotten more gritty/realistic and lost (especially the portraits) the anime style.
[personal_opinion] I don't like anime, I think Wesnoth is way better with the current style of portraits. This Kalenz looks great, for those who like the style, but I'd really rather we don't go back to the anime feel of yore. [/personal_opinion]
I don't think it looks all that anime. I think it would mesh nicely with Pickslide's portraits, which are definitely not anime.
For I am Turin Turambar - Master of Doom, by doom mastered. On permanent Wesbreak. Will not respond to private messages. Sorry!
And I hate stupid people.
The World of Orbivm
And I hate stupid people.
The World of Orbivm
This is definately very nice, much better than the one now. The eyes give him an exotic look, I think "elvish" maybe?
The only thing is that the proportions are a little inconsistant. Looking at the size of the head, I think the forward arm is a tiny bit...big, and it makes the hand look a bit smaller. (I think it might be a little small, but its so minor it doesn't really affect the pic) Everything else looks a little small, so that his front arm is as long as his front leg. So either his head an arm are a little big, or everything else is a little small. Some minor gimp work should be able to take care of that before inking, I think.
This is why I started sketching with the wacom a lot more, cause I can quick fix these issues in the sketch and draw right over it, and no one will know...er...till now ;)
I can't wait to see this one finished...
Keep 'em comin!
The only thing is that the proportions are a little inconsistant. Looking at the size of the head, I think the forward arm is a tiny bit...big, and it makes the hand look a bit smaller. (I think it might be a little small, but its so minor it doesn't really affect the pic) Everything else looks a little small, so that his front arm is as long as his front leg. So either his head an arm are a little big, or everything else is a little small. Some minor gimp work should be able to take care of that before inking, I think.
This is why I started sketching with the wacom a lot more, cause I can quick fix these issues in the sketch and draw right over it, and no one will know...er...till now ;)
I can't wait to see this one finished...
Keep 'em comin!
Check out my portraits HERE!
Since I'm bored, and have been meaning to do this for a while, I'm going to turn this image into a semi-tutorial, which I'll put on the wiki when I'm done. Let this be recompense to Francisco for my replacing his old pictures - hopefully he can learn something from this. And pickslide - please make a tutorial of your own, if you will, next project you do.
I've started in on the inking. Inking is the process of tracing over the image you've drawn in pencil with something else (traditionally ... ink), in order to give the lines smoother curves, and make them more solid. Pencil graphite, if you've ever seen it magnified up close, is not a solid line. Paper is not perfectly flat; it is in fact pitted regularly by it's component fibers, and the graphite from a pencil will only sit on the higher parts of this. This means that a graphite image can't really be enlarged much at all, or this will show, and will look somewhat dirty even at its normal size. In was often used for this, because instead of being rubbed onto the paper fibers, it soaks into them and completely colors the points it touches.
The traditional ink we speak of is not that goopy stuff that comes out of a Bicâ„¢ ball-point pen; it must be non-viscous, and must soak into the page, or it has the same problems as pencil. This is one of the few "art supplies" that is legitimately useful, and needs to be bought if you're going to ink. From lack of experience, I'm not aware of the performance differences between different types of "art ink", but what has served me well is Sakura Micron pigment-based pens, which I snagged at a local art store.
I now do my inking digitally. There are several reasons for this. I do my drawings on good inkjet/copier paper, which I quite prefer to those silly "art sketchpads" - inkjet paper has a very flat surface and allows me to be very precise. This is, of course, slightly limiting in terms of size - my drawings are the same size as the image you see onscreen (give or take some*). I could of course steal some larger paper from school, but that also becomes unwieldy for several other reasons - for example, I draw on a clipboard, but the biggest I've seen is legal size. Not to mention, it's much harder to keep things in proportion on a bigger drawing.
I'm not unusual in having a slight quiver (likely from my pulse) in my fingers. It's enough to soil the "smoothness" of an inked line, though, which meant I'd have to somehow enlarge the inked version relative to the on-screen version, or else there was little point in inking. There are a lot of interesting ways to do this, many of which involve professional equipment - some are a form of projector. The best on I had was in printing out an image in one color channel (cyan), and then inking over that.
I needed to achieve 2 things: to have something to accurately trace the image from (the pencil linework, in some form), and to be able to separate the inked version from the linework. Projection achieves this in obvious ways; one can also use a lightboard, something I managed to fashion for myself, but which I did not like using because it was hard to keep the base image from sliding on the image below, and because I could not magnify the image that way, which was part of the point (it also hurt my eyes, but real, professional lightboards won't). By printing out a version in faded cyan, I could double the size, and then separate it from the black ink by removing its color channel in photoshop.
I was afraid to try inking things digitally, because it's very time consuming to do, compared to having the pen in your hand. Even with a tablet, digital images are much more difficult to manipulate directly - with a mouse, vector tools are really your only recourse, unless you're really, really good. Despite taking a long time to do, digital ink looks far superior to anything else, for the simple reason that you can erase your lines! You can chisel away lines to a point using vector tools and variable line widths, and can zoom in to do some really precise work.
I myself do them in photoshop, though I've tried doing them in flash (which works well). Illustrator does not work well - Flash actually has an ingenious core feature, in that you can erase vector lines as though you are working in photoshop, on a raster image. This allows you to do real work with vectors, instead of the awkward crap that comes out of Illustrator - with a tablet, you can nearly pretend you are working in photoshop. In photoshop, I do not use a drawing tablet for my lines, I actually use the bezier pen tool. It's not faster in macroscopic terms, but ends up being so because it is so much more precise - a tablet can get within a mm of where you want to be, which is good for coloring, but not for this - inking needs absolute precision.
I render these vector lines onto a transparent layer in photoshop by "stroking" the vector paths with a brush (a command you can do in that program). By having this layer transparent, I can fill solid color underneath for a "cell-shaded" drawing. Note that some of my lines in the following picture ignore what is below - I'm correcting the pencil lines, which can be difficult to erase in tight spots.
Here is the first part of the inking - I'll upload more WIPs as I get them done (this was an hour or so of work).
----
*Actually, this is something that really frustrates me, and is one of the many reasons that I'm a kool-aid drinking apple fanatic. Most digital image formats store a resolution value. Macs are set to assume their screens show a 72dpi image, PCs, 96dpi. This is bull - it has nothing to do with the actual properties of the screen, but it wasn't always that way. The original macs really did have fixed, 72 dpi screens. They were CRTs, but the image size was not modifiable. When apple first released their color macs later, they gave up on keeping the resolution paired with the screen image size, based on the large number of displays they did not control, and the fact that people could stretch the image on their CRT screen. This made the resolution setting vestigial, and PCs actually ignore it (as did macs - they never adapted to having a setting other than 72dpi, though they considerable support for using one).
WYSIWYG resolution is useful because it ties the digital world to the physical world. You can judge the size of something that will be printed by just looking at it onscreen. Print it off and the printout will be the exact same size. When you don't have this, and have to redesign an entire project because the text ended up being too small to read, it's really, really irritating. I could also print out an image, draw on it, scan it in, and resize according to the DPI to get something that perfectly matched the other stuff on-screen, instead of having to resize by "eyeballing it", which never comes out right. Etc. All of the above was possible on the original macs, albeit that no one had scanners.
These days, apple has actually been quietly including a number of different things to support resolution-correct display of things - OS X uses an amazing image filter to do all resizing (I actually think it's something more advanced than a bicubic filter - it looks better than resizing an image in photoshop, and is much faster). There is also the beginnings of support for vector-based UI controls in tiger, and there are hidden settings to resize the UI elements (like in windows, but without the resulting graphical problems). This combined with the reliable nature of resolution on LCDs, and it's reasonable to think that in the future, Apple computers paired with Apple displays (such as ... all apple laptops) will display everything at its true WYSIWYG size. Scanners offer a reliable input of DPI information, and are nearly the only way that physical pages are mapped into the digital world.
I'm ticked though, because - just like Colorsync, this is another esoteric but very useful technology that makes little "market sense" (just like zeroconf networking, or a decent UI), but which makes everyone's lives easier. And if apple controlled the industry, we'd all have it, and computers would suck less in general. This is a holistic design aspect which open source would have a hard time imitating, and I think is one of the many reasons why linux might kill windows, but won't kill apple. I really like the way apple forces better/future-proof technologies down its user base's throat. ex: No one needs IPv6 now, but we may be very happy to have it on our then-old computers in a decade. No one cared about USB, but look what happened after the iMac came out (the iMac was revolutionary in that it was bereft of all legacy ports). I don't want to be using IPv4 10 years from now, nor IA-32, nor many other things.
I just want "future time" now - I want windows to die, cars to fly, and I want my friken jetpack.
I've started in on the inking. Inking is the process of tracing over the image you've drawn in pencil with something else (traditionally ... ink), in order to give the lines smoother curves, and make them more solid. Pencil graphite, if you've ever seen it magnified up close, is not a solid line. Paper is not perfectly flat; it is in fact pitted regularly by it's component fibers, and the graphite from a pencil will only sit on the higher parts of this. This means that a graphite image can't really be enlarged much at all, or this will show, and will look somewhat dirty even at its normal size. In was often used for this, because instead of being rubbed onto the paper fibers, it soaks into them and completely colors the points it touches.
The traditional ink we speak of is not that goopy stuff that comes out of a Bicâ„¢ ball-point pen; it must be non-viscous, and must soak into the page, or it has the same problems as pencil. This is one of the few "art supplies" that is legitimately useful, and needs to be bought if you're going to ink. From lack of experience, I'm not aware of the performance differences between different types of "art ink", but what has served me well is Sakura Micron pigment-based pens, which I snagged at a local art store.
I now do my inking digitally. There are several reasons for this. I do my drawings on good inkjet/copier paper, which I quite prefer to those silly "art sketchpads" - inkjet paper has a very flat surface and allows me to be very precise. This is, of course, slightly limiting in terms of size - my drawings are the same size as the image you see onscreen (give or take some*). I could of course steal some larger paper from school, but that also becomes unwieldy for several other reasons - for example, I draw on a clipboard, but the biggest I've seen is legal size. Not to mention, it's much harder to keep things in proportion on a bigger drawing.
I'm not unusual in having a slight quiver (likely from my pulse) in my fingers. It's enough to soil the "smoothness" of an inked line, though, which meant I'd have to somehow enlarge the inked version relative to the on-screen version, or else there was little point in inking. There are a lot of interesting ways to do this, many of which involve professional equipment - some are a form of projector. The best on I had was in printing out an image in one color channel (cyan), and then inking over that.
I needed to achieve 2 things: to have something to accurately trace the image from (the pencil linework, in some form), and to be able to separate the inked version from the linework. Projection achieves this in obvious ways; one can also use a lightboard, something I managed to fashion for myself, but which I did not like using because it was hard to keep the base image from sliding on the image below, and because I could not magnify the image that way, which was part of the point (it also hurt my eyes, but real, professional lightboards won't). By printing out a version in faded cyan, I could double the size, and then separate it from the black ink by removing its color channel in photoshop.
I was afraid to try inking things digitally, because it's very time consuming to do, compared to having the pen in your hand. Even with a tablet, digital images are much more difficult to manipulate directly - with a mouse, vector tools are really your only recourse, unless you're really, really good. Despite taking a long time to do, digital ink looks far superior to anything else, for the simple reason that you can erase your lines! You can chisel away lines to a point using vector tools and variable line widths, and can zoom in to do some really precise work.
I myself do them in photoshop, though I've tried doing them in flash (which works well). Illustrator does not work well - Flash actually has an ingenious core feature, in that you can erase vector lines as though you are working in photoshop, on a raster image. This allows you to do real work with vectors, instead of the awkward crap that comes out of Illustrator - with a tablet, you can nearly pretend you are working in photoshop. In photoshop, I do not use a drawing tablet for my lines, I actually use the bezier pen tool. It's not faster in macroscopic terms, but ends up being so because it is so much more precise - a tablet can get within a mm of where you want to be, which is good for coloring, but not for this - inking needs absolute precision.
I render these vector lines onto a transparent layer in photoshop by "stroking" the vector paths with a brush (a command you can do in that program). By having this layer transparent, I can fill solid color underneath for a "cell-shaded" drawing. Note that some of my lines in the following picture ignore what is below - I'm correcting the pencil lines, which can be difficult to erase in tight spots.
Here is the first part of the inking - I'll upload more WIPs as I get them done (this was an hour or so of work).
----
*Actually, this is something that really frustrates me, and is one of the many reasons that I'm a kool-aid drinking apple fanatic. Most digital image formats store a resolution value. Macs are set to assume their screens show a 72dpi image, PCs, 96dpi. This is bull - it has nothing to do with the actual properties of the screen, but it wasn't always that way. The original macs really did have fixed, 72 dpi screens. They were CRTs, but the image size was not modifiable. When apple first released their color macs later, they gave up on keeping the resolution paired with the screen image size, based on the large number of displays they did not control, and the fact that people could stretch the image on their CRT screen. This made the resolution setting vestigial, and PCs actually ignore it (as did macs - they never adapted to having a setting other than 72dpi, though they considerable support for using one).
WYSIWYG resolution is useful because it ties the digital world to the physical world. You can judge the size of something that will be printed by just looking at it onscreen. Print it off and the printout will be the exact same size. When you don't have this, and have to redesign an entire project because the text ended up being too small to read, it's really, really irritating. I could also print out an image, draw on it, scan it in, and resize according to the DPI to get something that perfectly matched the other stuff on-screen, instead of having to resize by "eyeballing it", which never comes out right. Etc. All of the above was possible on the original macs, albeit that no one had scanners.
These days, apple has actually been quietly including a number of different things to support resolution-correct display of things - OS X uses an amazing image filter to do all resizing (I actually think it's something more advanced than a bicubic filter - it looks better than resizing an image in photoshop, and is much faster). There is also the beginnings of support for vector-based UI controls in tiger, and there are hidden settings to resize the UI elements (like in windows, but without the resulting graphical problems). This combined with the reliable nature of resolution on LCDs, and it's reasonable to think that in the future, Apple computers paired with Apple displays (such as ... all apple laptops) will display everything at its true WYSIWYG size. Scanners offer a reliable input of DPI information, and are nearly the only way that physical pages are mapped into the digital world.
I'm ticked though, because - just like Colorsync, this is another esoteric but very useful technology that makes little "market sense" (just like zeroconf networking, or a decent UI), but which makes everyone's lives easier. And if apple controlled the industry, we'd all have it, and computers would suck less in general. This is a holistic design aspect which open source would have a hard time imitating, and I think is one of the many reasons why linux might kill windows, but won't kill apple. I really like the way apple forces better/future-proof technologies down its user base's throat. ex: No one needs IPv6 now, but we may be very happy to have it on our then-old computers in a decade. No one cared about USB, but look what happened after the iMac came out (the iMac was revolutionary in that it was bereft of all legacy ports). I don't want to be using IPv4 10 years from now, nor IA-32, nor many other things.
I just want "future time" now - I want windows to die, cars to fly, and I want my friken jetpack.
Turin: Correct analysis on the sword - one of the things about such a design is that the wielder can put a LOT of leverage on a sword like this, by having one hand at the top of the handle, and one all the way at the bottom. This leverage allows for very swift and powerful movement - in fact, if I had to use a 2-handed sword, I'd much prefer this to either a katana or a claymore.
The design also doubles very well as a single handed sword, and someone could easily use two such swords.
The idea was ripped from the LOTR movies, for which the design work was ... "quite good," to lie by understatement.
The design also doubles very well as a single handed sword, and someone could easily use two such swords.
The idea was ripped from the LOTR movies, for which the design work was ... "quite good," to lie by understatement.
Precisely the intent. Exotic, but (hopefully) not like any ethnicity on earth.Pickslide wrote:The eyes give him an exotic look, I think "elvish" maybe?
Just nitpicking - you shouldn't compare such a sword with a katana. What you're describing is a sword designed for hitting with power while a katana is used in a cutting movement without much force. If you'd put lots of leverage on a katana, it'd simply break as it is not designed to be used in this way.Jetryl wrote:Turin: Correct analysis on the sword - one of the things about such a design is that the wielder can put a LOT of leverage on a sword like this, by having one hand at the top of the handle, and one all the way at the bottom. This leverage allows for very swift and powerful movement - in fact, if I had to use a 2-handed sword, I'd much prefer this to either a katana or a claymore.
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http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/WesCamp
Translators for all languages required: contact me. No geek skills required!
This may be too late to matter, but why on earth is he holding the sharp edge of his sword in his right hand? It looks like he's about to cut his own fingers off!
"When a man is tired of Ankh-Morpork, he is tired of ankle-deep slurry" -- Catroaster
Legal, free live music: Surf Coasters at Double Down Saloon, Las Vegas on 2005-03-06. Tight, high-energy Japanese Surf-Rock.
Legal, free live music: Surf Coasters at Double Down Saloon, Las Vegas on 2005-03-06. Tight, high-energy Japanese Surf-Rock.
Oh, ok, I see it now. But it's not obvious from the picture, which is, IMO, a little unfortunate. I just have this feeling that pictures should be more self-explanatory; I shouldn't have to go back and (re)read some thread to figure out why it isn't really wrong. On the other hand, it's a fairly minor point, so maybe I'll just shut up now. 
It is an outstanding picture overall, and certainly much better than the current rather-cartoony portrait. (Anime-shmanime, I know a cartoon when I see one!)
It is an outstanding picture overall, and certainly much better than the current rather-cartoony portrait. (Anime-shmanime, I know a cartoon when I see one!)
"When a man is tired of Ankh-Morpork, he is tired of ankle-deep slurry" -- Catroaster
Legal, free live music: Surf Coasters at Double Down Saloon, Las Vegas on 2005-03-06. Tight, high-energy Japanese Surf-Rock.
Legal, free live music: Surf Coasters at Double Down Saloon, Las Vegas on 2005-03-06. Tight, high-energy Japanese Surf-Rock.
Yeah - part of the problem is any one of these pictures takes a darned long time to do, and there's a certain point after which I can only "choose to like what I've been given", in terms of artistic performance.xtifr wrote:Oh, ok, I see it now. But it's not obvious from the picture, which is, IMO, a little unfortunate. I just have this feeling that pictures should be more self-explanatory; I shouldn't have to go back and (re)read some thread to figure out why it isn't really wrong. On the other hand, it's a fairly minor point, so maybe I'll just shut up now.
I do agree with what you've said, but I simply can't afford the time to redraw that, especially when it's not a technical error, like bad foreshortening.
I keep trying...xtifr wrote:It is an outstanding picture overall, and certainly much better than the current rather-cartoony portrait. (Anime-shmanime, I know a cartoon when I see one!)
another 3 hours of inking gives the following:
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Woodwizzle
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I think the sword doesn't look elvish enough. It should be straight, and long.
Even for humans, I'd think this sword would be really difficult to use...
Even for humans, I'd think this sword would be really difficult to use...
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