An Evolving HOW TO Story of Drawing Manual to Digital & More.
I finished this piece above a few days ago. It is one of the first new works of art that I have created in 2013. What I like most about the piece is the many new ideas it continues to induce. I love the idea of making multiple works of art out of one single idea or concept. This piece is a good example to share the process as it continues to unfold. That means I will update this post and share the step by step process as it is developing (check back from time to time.) As both an artist and an art educator I feel it is important to be transparent about my working habits (hence this blog) as I like to help raise awareness about the artistic process and the over all potential of human creativity. You see, we learn about ourselves when we become aware of “how and why” we do the things that we do. It takes a bit of regular practice, and in the process you will discover the patterns that becomes the formula that you use to retain and apply your knowledge.
Here we see the original drawing. The drawing took about 10 minutes to complete and I used a sharpie marker on white drawing paper. I did not have a specific idea, I simply wanted to draw for the sake of drawing. I did not judge what I was doing, I was not seeking to make anything really representational, but on an unconscious level, now that I read into it a bit, I was looking to express a fictional narrative that communicated a metaphor for the overwhelming infinite number of options one may find themselves discovering while making drawings. I scanned the drawing at 600 dpi and brought the file into adobe illustrator (cs5) and selected the “live trace” feature. This generates a vector rendering at a high-resolution. It smooths out the lines, while also darkening and flattening them. The image below is the black and white illustrator tracing.
I then brought the image into photoshop to colorize it. Notice, I kept a black and white duplicate rendering as well. This image I have printed out and will color in by hand using colored pencils. I’ll post that image here once it is complete. The nature of that completed piece will be on the illustrative qualities it embodies based on the medium. It helps me create a visual contrast as well as retain the manual skills that I have developed with the application of the colored pencils. Back in the early 1990’s I was working with colored pencil quite a bit, mostly by overlapping it onto light washes made with water-color. Yup, believe it.
I liked this character on the end of the drawing so much that I isolated him to see how he would hold up. He does. I’m also going to paint him in acrylic on a large narrow verticle canvas. He is happy, and has this anticipation kind of demeanor. Here, I changed the back round and then decided it was time to animate him. Animated GIFs are a fun way to make simple motion graphics. You can do this using photoshop, and there are tons of tutorials on HOW online, but most people use GIF generators to do so. I am in the process of finding the most efficient generators as they are fairly immediate and easy to use.
Here we see, as I titled him: “the little king.” He is doing his thing here. A simple GIF. This is version #1 out of the many of ways that one may choose to create the animation. I am in the process of working with the entire finished drawing above as well. I would also like to create a three-dimensional rendering of this image as well. Back more with progress soon.
———————————————————————-
short-link to this post – http://wp.me/p2SFO-10D
