Experimenting with "anime"

Today, I decided to fire up Inkscape [kinda like to Illustrator as GIMP is to Photoshop] and try an "anime" style for a change. I've never been too much of an anime fan, but I'll let you in on saying that there are a few anime shows that actually appeal to me, and no they don't include Naruto and Bleach. When I was younger I had tried to copy its attributes, but it often led to some disastrous results.



I'll have to be honest, I'm surprised with the results here - it amazes me how simple things like shading and highlights really bring such a picture to life. I've studied a few anime shows, and most of the time the lineart is done with think lines, so I tried that.

Inkscape is a nice alternative to Illustrator once you get the hang of the most important too of all - the bezier. It works completely differently to Flash, Paint Shop Pro, PaintBBS and Photoshop, but it doesn't take long to get used to. I've used it to make my hand drawn lineart smoother and more crisp with a feature called POTrace, before importing it back to Photoshop, and what's nice is how it can export a lovely PNG file that's ready for colouring elsewhere. You can colour in this as well, which I've done apart from the blush, but if you want to go beyond cell shading, then plonk it into Painter or something.

I suppose turning a non-Japanese product into this is just pot luck - some top-end American, British etc cartoons might work, others won't, and vice versa.

A new [scanner] light

Last week, I was at a jumble sale, in fact, the very one I picked up a Nintendo 64 from, and found a scanner there for £3. It looked quite a nice one - an Epson Perfection 2400 Photo. So I bought it, but for a while I thought I had some bad fortune. When I set it up, while I found that the software was indeed XP compatible, it was making a sound like a hammer hitting nails, and I thought it was broken. The next day, my grandparents came round for dinner, and I asked my grandad to see if he could fix it. It turned out that all it took was to flick some kind of switch at the back that somehow locks the pulley inside, and now I'm free - to scan!

Despite being a clunky thing, it works wonderfully, perhaps more so than the old HP I had, so now I've had the chance to scan and upload some paintings and sketches that I had left unscanned for well over a month.


Recently I've come back to one of my old fandoms, the Worms series; since I found my copy of Worms Open Warfare 2 on the DS. I ran out of games that I haven't beaten at least once, so I thought, why not? As a result, I've finally finished my crappy old comic The Shovel, and I'll probably end up making another anytime soon.


This painting was inspired by a time last month when my mum and I were baking a cake for my older sister, who turned 23 then. The first time we made one, it became nothing more than a pile of crumbs, and we were quite baffled by it because we were sure we got the proportions of butter, sugar, eggs, flour etc just right. We must have missed, or used too much of another ingredient. The second time, it had little black dots in it, which I think might have been just burnt sugar. I also put too much food colouring in the ready made icing, which wasn't even that nice anyway, so it ended up being a red blob of gooey, sugary mess. But it had to do. My sister recently started to take interest in cake decorating, so hopefully we'll make better, prettier cakes in the near future.


Finally, good old James Pond and his amphibian sidekick, and I imagine they'd be about five years after the last game of the franchise, Operation StarFI5H. While I was doing this, it had finally come to my realisation that using strong colour isn't really the best idea if you are going to shade something, as you can see with their jackets. Never mind.

An ancient muse

Glad to finally have some motivation again. In the space of 24 hours I managed to finish two pages of a Worms comic that I left unattended for a whopping four years, and I'm now on a bid to complete the last two pages of that, and to complete a stitching to give to my grandmother. I never felt so busy in all my life yesterday.

Now for a story.

Three months ago, I was assigned to visit the University of East London, for the sole purpose of learning how to cope with the journey there, and to meet with a man named Martin, that was one of a few people that had come round my house to talk to me about my future. From where I live , it takes about three trains and a bus to get to the campus. The first time I came, it wasn't so bad, and I met a lady named Bee who, with Martin, talked to me about getting into University and the help I would get if I enrolled.

Two weeks later, I had to come again to meet them, as well as a lad with Asperger's, and two ladies that discussed their learning and financial support they offer. That went quite smoothly, until I went home. There were some severe problems with the Docklands Light Railway, which turned what was normally an hour long journey to one of three hours. The second me and my mother walked through the door, I was sobbing, because I know that going to Uni would become a complete disaster. I felt at my most broken that night, like my future has been shattered. All because I'm too socially inept to take this journey.

I felt like I let down and wasted the time of those I met on those days. But I had to think. Why did they even suggest that I should go to Uni anyway? Apparently, I already had the qualifications I needed for Illustration, so I didn't need to go to college again, but now this is what they're suggesting to me. I'm not going to that college I went to again, even if they relocated. It was such a disorganised waste of time, and it wasn't any wonder that I wasn't the only one that dropped out.

I haven't really a clue on what to do next now. I mean, I want to have a good professional reputation, but I know it's going to take a lot of work.

Bbbbrrrrr

I'm really surprised that the snow we had on Monday hasn't completely melted yet. It's been so bitterly cold, thank god I have this heater to take place of the crappy radiator in here. Even more so, I'm surprised I'm still actually drawing, despite freezing my socks off and virtually living on toast at the moment.

Just to be safe, I have officially discontinued use of my old scanner. Thankfully my new digital camera that I got for Christmas can spill the beans on what I've been working on.


Fanart based on a very good Wii game going by Wario Land: The Shake Dimension. I actually started this last week, and have been doing it little by little, because colours that accidentally run into each other while wet don't really make a happy painting. Bigger brushes don't half make a difference when doing such large areas though. More WIP shots are on the way.

Stripey scans

With Christmas dawning near at the speed of light, I've decided to take a break from stitching so I can concentrate on drawing again. Unfortunately, in recent days I've noticed something really peculiar with my 6 year old scanner. At first it started scanning things as if someone put coloured cellophane over it, then it started scanning with like, horizontal bars. Like when a printer gets all dry and makes lines in what it prints. I take it that it's a warning that maybe after Christmas I ought to buy a new scanner. Bit late to ask for one for then, gawd knows what mum and dad bought me apart from a Wii game I've been waiting to play for 3 months. In the meantime, I aim to draw more with the tablet.

I've got one more day of work tomorrow, and then I've got a 5 day weekend until next Monday. This will be such a blast, what with movies on the telly, games, family etc... wish I could have 2 weeks off though, just like the old days when I was at school age. Pros and cons of having to grow up, gotta love them.

Coming soon from StaceyW Arts

Good evening. I finally started work on my portfolio site. Very early stuff so far, and for some reason CSS has become easy again. I've not come up with a name for this site yet, but one thing's for sure, a dog looking very much like my own will be its official mascot.



Blimey, the difference setting things to higher resolutions makes! And studying photos, Jessie doesn't really sit still for long enough when I'm drawing her. I'm currently painting this sketch up in Painter and it'll be used somewhere on the site for decoration. Thing is though I'm still trying to get my head around how blending and painting works in Painter, I still haven't found a brush I'm most comfortable with.

The site will showcase only the very best of my art. How much of that I haven't figured out yet, but either way this won't be launched until 2009.

Now if only everything I do these day doesn't hurt my back.

Photoshop drawing video

Finally it's up.



I've been meaning to do a video like this for a really long time, and I realise now that it's much harder to work on something while the capture app is on because of the slight lag. It's basically to show what happens to the picture when I'm CGing stuff in Photoshop.

Yeah yea yeah I know my choice of music is shit bla bla volume slider.

From the murky depths of our loft...

LOL Lion King.

So last week, my dad took me and my sister up into the loft so we could get some old junk down and clear it up a bit. Some of the things we found included our old toys, books, a NES, and these horrid things. Or to put it lightly, drawings I made when I was in primary school.



When I was in year 3, before I was moved into the special unit where I spent year 4, we crapped on several sheets of paper and bound them together with treasury tags to form books. I found 3 of those, Religious Education, Science and History.





Seriously, what the hell?





Now these I definitely remember drawing when I was in the unit. They had like this Acorn or Amiga computer or something that had an MSPaint like thing and I mostly drew canids. I can even remember wondering why certain bits wouldn't fill in because of one pixel. First one is just some dog, while the other is supposed to be Vixen from Animals of Farthing Wood or something. I dunno.

But damn, do they take me way back! I feel so damn old.

Me ol' Bamboo [or new, rather]

Earlier this week, I ordered a new Wacom tablet. It's come to my reality that I simply cannot afford the big Wacom daddies [Intuos or a Cintiq even...oh a girl can only dream], so I opted for a Bamboo one which costed me £30 from Amazon UK. I wasn't expecting the greatest quality from it, in fact it wasn't the same one pictured, but when it came yesterday and I started fiddling about with it...gawd, it's a LOT smoother than the old Aiptek I used for the past 5 years!

So I spent most of the day drawing little fan sketches as seen below.

As much as I'd love to have an Intuos or a Cintiq, they're really pricey and it would have taken me years to save up for one. At least I won't have to worry about it now and I can spend money on Christmas gifts. The Aiptek I believe, costed a little more than this, and here is why any Wacom tablet is better than that:

• The only one used a serial port. How behind the times can you get? Even if I got it fixed up, I would have had to get a USB adapter to plug it in. All this thing has is a USB to slip in, easy as pie.
  
• I can't get over how smooth it is. Any lines the Aiptek made were really bumpy. The Bamboo doesn't do it 100% perfect, but it's still looks neater.
  
• Easier to set up, in fact, it worked straight away when I plugged it in. You do have to install the driver software to get the pressure levels, as with the Aiptek, but when I first used that it took a long time for it to start getting detected.
  
• NO BATTERY for the pen! That's right, the old one had to have a AAA battery in, and it was poorly built. The Bamboo pen doesn't need any of that that nonsense.
  

The only thing I don't like about the Bamboo so far is that it takes a lot of work to handle. Perhaps being loose with it might make my arm feel a bit more comfortable.

It also comes with Art Rage 2.5, which I've tried before, didn't really like, but if this CD has the full version I may try it again. But I installed Corel Painter 9 and have Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and Flash anyway so it's no big deal really.

I urge anyone who's looking into getting a tablet to get a Wacom one. They're the best. No other tablet label does it better. Here it is in action.

How I typically paint a painting

Hi again. I'm feeling generous today, so if you ever wondered how I make certain types of my art, now's the time to see. In this tutorial I'll be going through my latest painting, "Fuchsia Air", step by step. This painting used watercolour, gouache, graphite pencil, white acrylic ink and colour pencils.


First, I taped up a piece of Waterford 300lb paper onto my card board with masking tape. That helps it to keep the painting taut while being worked on, and gives it a somewhat neat border around it [sometimes paint can leak underneath it but it's going to be digitally trimmed anyway]. Then I start my sketch, trying to be as neat as possible, which is important because erasing isn't a nice thing to do.


The next step is to apply masking fluid, which is a mixture of ammonia and latex and is used to protect certain parts of the paper from being painted on. You don't have to cover the whole character here, just around the edges, and I've flicked some about to make sparkles. A word of warning though: always use an old trashy brush to apply this stuff. It dries quickly to a sticky state on the brush and will not come off. It's also important to use a bottle within a year, otherwise it stains your paper with ugly yellow bits.


Now that the fluid is dry, I'll paint in the background with one colour. I painted it dry with a half-inch brush and then blended in some water. A few specks of salt were added, though I got impatient and used a hairdryer to dry it off. The masking fluid is then rubbed or peeled off, whichever is safest for your paper [it can tear sometimes], and now I'm ready to paint the character.


Here I started painting her skin and the fuchsia with a lot of colour. Most other artists use light washes and build it up, but I usually paint with thick colour depending on what colour a part is. The trick here is to work with that quickly but as neatly as possible, and to use an appropriate sized brush [here I used a size 2] to apply colour that's still wet. Texture can be added by lifting colour off with a wet tissue, the type you wipe your nose with as opposed to toilet paper.


More parts of the drawing are filled in, and now I've started shading and highlighting. For the shading, I used violet paint, which works well with warmer colours. In fact, it works so well with wamer colours I added some around the edges of the background. For the initial highlights, I switch to a size 000 brush and paint in some white acrylic paint as lightly and carefully as possible. The masking tape is removed early as no more work is needed for the background.


Time to bring in another medium, gouache. This is like watercolour, but with white paint mixed in, making a much thicker paint. Recently I found it very effective to produce coloured lineart in a traditional piece, as opposed to colouring pencils and re-inking which I used to do and didn't make good enough results. The gouache I use it a bit too thick straight from the tube, so I mix it with water on a non-absorbant material [like this Fererro Rocher box I re-used] to make it flow better.


White watercolour paint is added instead of the acrylic ink to give more subtle highlighting, such as in the flower. If it's too light, it can be painted over. The lineart is applied as carefully as possible with the 000 brush.


The lineart is done now, but I found that the yellow ochre I used for the nightie didn't look so good so I went over it with a 2H pencil, a HB is too dark for that. More shading is applied as well, but again this has to be done with care to avoid the gouache from running - dry gouache paint can be reused when water is used on it. I also started applying details, like the stigma of the fuchsia.


Final touches are added, like the design on the nightie which is painted in blue to add a little cool colour to a warm painting, and white speckles painted on with the acrylic ink. Since this is textured paper I'm using, I picked up a couple of colouring pencils and drew on certain parts to indicate scales, mainly on her face, chest and arms.

And here is the final result. I hope that this tutorial is helpful and informative, and until I show up with another tutorial, happy painting!