Friday, February 22, 2013

This week, in Caricaturama Showdown 3000!!! Jack White

This was an insanely fun sketch to work on.  I really wanted to push bold values with this one along with shapes, and while I did have references to work from the picture itself is a result of 5 different ones.  Well, 6 if you include myself "getting into character" in front of a mirror to get the mouth and cigarette portion as good as can be.  I actually worked on this one while I was at the mall with my tablet.  I love that thing, man I'm gonna be so broken up if for some reason it dies on me.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Another piece of work with the tablet



So My Paint so far is pretty damn good with quick sketch style caricatures.  So what can it do with some other kinds of stuff?  I decided to make it flex its muscles again and this is what I got from it.

The only issue, is that the output file isn't that high of a resolution.  However, I do hear that there is a workaround for that, and if that's true that could change some things.  As long as it doesn't impact performance too much it shouldn't be a problem for when I'm on the go.

Aside from that, wow this thing actually does pretty damn decent pencils.  I still need to mess with more of its brushes though, as I've used it's most generic option.

DIGITAL CARICATURE TRIAL!!!

First of all a shout out to my friend Chris Moore of www.visualunlimited.com for making this all possible in the first place!

Long story short I've managed to acquire a tablet PC from him.  It's a Gateway M275 series tablet PC.  From what I understand, at the time of it's initial release this was a VERY expensive system.  Primary reason more than likely being the fact that it uses a touchscreen that is operated by a stylus.  But it's not just ANY old stylus.  It's Wacom technology, and boy it lives up to the name.  The kicker is that it supports pressure sensitivity, which is more than I can say for the iPad or many other tablets/devices not named the Samsung Galaxy Note (and even then it still doesn't work as well)  The biggest issue I've always had with other devices was the lack of it, and while I could probably have gotten around that and been able to do stuff with it I felt like I would've been jumping through hoops just trying to get thick and thin lines out of the thing.  So, what's the verdict of my tests?  Well, I'll let the results speak for themselves...

One of my first experiments with it.  She was drawn from an old park sketch.
These guys, and everyone else was done on request when I asked for guinea pigs for my experiments!



 I can almost draw her with my eyes closed.  LOL  Digital doesn't change that one bit.
 She was the first one to get color.  I was pleased enough with it to take it a bit further.

 Some refinements were made here.
 And even more here.

 This was the first one to be done for someone in a live setting!  It's a bit more simplistic for times sake, but you can get decent speed out of it if you set yourself up right.  Still working on ways to streamline it though.






 Can even work more than one in there!

I think what I'm liking about this approach is the comic book like results I'm getting from these.  The brush that I'm using in the My Paint program for this is Kagura for the black outline sketch and hair shading, Brush to block in the big color areas, Modelling 2 to work in highlights and shadow, and Charcoal to do stuff like 5 o'Clock shadows and such textures.  My Paint is a pretty lightweight program so it works very well on this system given the specs and all.

From what I've seen of it so far, I really like what I'm seeing from it.  It doesn't seem to operate with too many issues, and it's definitely got promise in terms of where things can go with it.  A few more trials will have to be done with it, but sooner or later I got a feeling that I'll have a new product to offer prospective clients.  This might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.