but I’m trying to get in the habit of drawing/sketching/speedpainting something every day. Whether it’s digital or in my sketchbook. I’m also going to be trying to update here more regularly with more art–and stuff you won’t find in some of my galleries. Why I’m attempting this just as I’m getting ready to move is beyond me. But hey, at least I’m trying, right?

Here’s a little speedpaint I did this afternoon while taking a break from putting things in boxes. It’s based off a photo I took at Macworld SF this year, of Dave Hamilton rocking out at the Cirque Du Mac party. (Haha! Fixed it. Too many damned parties to keep track of which I was at.)

Anyway, here’s to you and your golden vocal chords, Dave. (not to mention that he’s kinda hunky, for a self-titled nerd).

I know I’ve been quiet lately. Things are waffley around here (I’m moving again!) and finding the time or the inspiration to put together new stuff has been kind of lacking. So I’m taking the easy way out today and updating with some links to some stuff that needs pimpin’:

Meet My Friend Ellen

Fantastic Portfolios is the brainchild of my friend Ellen Million. It’s a site dedicated to fantasy artists (digital or traditional media) and the focus of it is not just on providing artists with high quality, ad free portfolios, but also a way to get direct feedback on their work. Submissions to Fantastic Portfolios are juried, and each submission is reviewed by trained critics (most of them professional artists) who score each piece in nine different categories. The critics also provide feedback, pointers, and in some cases red-lines and paintovers to help artists improve their work. The group there is fun, friendly, and completely focused on making artists be the best they can be. Membership is free, although there are perks for paid members.

For those of you who are into RPG gaming, Ellen also runs a great service called Portrait Adoption. Artists create a gallery of original character portraits which are put up for “adoption.” Artists set their own prices for portraits, and the customer can purchase one of two different package options which include professionally printed versions of their adopted portrait, as well as files to use in online gaming. If you’d like a portrait of a character and can’t find something similar in the gallery, there’s a also a way to submit character descriptions or commission available artists.

Ellen Million Graphics Giftshop is seeking new work through the end of May. If you’re a science fiction or fantasy artist and you have items you’d like to sell, Ellen personally prints and creates a wide range of items (t-shirts, cards, stationary, purses, mousepads, magnets, stickers and bookmarks) and sells them through the EMG Giftshop. Artists are represented online as well as at fairs and cons, and always have complete control over their products (which are paid in royalties). Contracts are non-exclusive. From experience I can say that Ellen is incredibly hard working, fair and loyal to artists, with high standards of customer service and quality in her products. Her resume includes artists like Cristine Griffin, Ursula Vernon, Liiga Smilshkalne, Meredith Dillman, and Matt Stawicki. Details on how to submit work for the giftshop are here: http://www.ellenmilliongraphics.com/fantasyart/artists.php

Orphaned Works

On a slightly different note, if you, like me, have been following the whole Orphaned Works issue that’s currently before the House and Senate, or would like to know more about it, I recommend the following links over at PlagiarismToday.com

• Orphaned Works Bill introduced
• A Realistic Look at Orphaned Works
• Write your Representative

My only other bit of news at this point is: I am now the proud (and slightly intimidated) owner of a Cintiq tablet. A review will be forthcoming, perhaps. In the meantime, however, I’ll leave you with tasty man art created on it:

portrait based on a study of this image from the fantastic b-e-c-k-y-stock.

As always, prints are available through my Store

I dream of green and sultry summers, and the light that dapples the damp, still places of home.

I started this painting because I missed Florida. My husband and I talked about it one night, how some people only see Florida as a tourist trap, or a waiting room (waiting to get on a ride, waiting to get to another state, waiting to die). But some of us… some of us love it there, it’s in our blood, it’s home. That’s the way it is with my husband and I. He’s been gone from there much longer than I have. But after only a few months living in Missouri, where the winters are gray and brown and cold, I *really* miss Florida. Luckily, what started as a painting about longing is now a painting about happiness: we’re moving back in a few months. He found a great job there. Which is good because as you can see, I miss my swamplands.

Of all my paintings, this one feels the most personal, the closest to me. I can wax six kinds of poetical about Florida and the flora and fauna that you love to loathe to love.

Also, I’d like to point you here. If you’ve the cash or time to spare, Florida would appreciate it if you wanted to appreciate her a little bit longer.

• Audubon of Florida
• Florida Wildlife Commission 

He’s two or three rows behind me in the auditorium. I can’t see his face but I know just by the sound of his voice what to expect. Big guy, porcine complexion, little squinty eyes from staring too long down the barrel of his rifle, football t-shirt, maybe a ball cap. I’m stereotyping, but that’s the sound of his voice: Midwest Redneck.

His voice carries farther than my row, but that’s all the farther it needed to go, anyway.

“Naw,” he chuckles, “you jest raight-click on the pichure and it’ll save it.” (Yes, this is how he talks. No, I’m not exaggerating. Much.) “‘N’ even if’n they’s got it so’s you cain’t, you kin jest do a screenshot of it. That’s what I do. ‘S how I got my logo fer my team. Shit, I wa’n't gonna pay four damn bucks for a logo.”

In my palms four crescent red welts appear: the artist/graphic designer’s stigmata. We bleed every time an art thief gets away with it. I want to climb, Samara-style, backwards over the seat, disjointed as a spider, until I’m looming over him, my eyes pitch-black and demonic, and vomit up four dollars in his lap. Then scream in a banshee’s unholy wail “IS FOUR DOLLARS TOO EXPENSIVE FOR YOU, YOU TIGHT-FISTED REDNECK FUCKTARD?” Unfortunately, I’m not hinged that way.

The thing is, it got me thinking again about how the arts are regarded in this country. It got me thinking about what a misnomer the word “talent” is, and how every day I hate it a little more. “Talent” denigrates artists of all kinds.

Think about this: if a ten year old kid likes to tinker with his bike, fixing the chain when it busts, installing new accessories on it, and such, although most of his friends wouldn’t know a socket set from a screwdriver–do we call him talented? Or the computer whiz that figures out how write their own game, is he talented? Or the kid who can do all his math in his head without counting on his fingers, and who understands long division when everyone else is still on multiplication? What about the kid in science class who figures out what you can do with some sodium and a toilet?

Do we call those kids talented? No. Not usually. But they are.

The same as the kid who learns to play the piano early, or the little girl with the Christina Aguilera voice and ear for pitch, or the kid who draws star-spangled bunny rabbits on their preschool homework that actually look like bunny-rabbits.

The problem is that in ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years, our artists will still be “talented” and our mechanics and mathematicians, scientists and computer geeks will be “skilled.” Their jobs will garner them respect because people *know* how difficult it is to be a mathematician or a mechanic or a computer genius. People know that it takes years of hard work and study to reach the skill level that allows you to make a living in those fields. More importantly: they most often get that respect from people who wouldn’t want their job in a million years.

But artists, actors, musicians, writers, dancers… pfft. That’s talent. It’s easy, right? Easy to paint a picture, or sing a song, or act in a play, or write a book for that matter. Hell, deep down, everyone secretly suspects THEY could do it, too. If they just had the time, or a little more talent. They don’t see that we go through the same growing process. That for us to be truly good at what we do, we have to acquire a rather advanced skill set as well. That it takes more than a natural inclination and a little imagination to do what we do.

The assumption that art is easy is one of the reasons why Arts Education budgets have been so severely cut across this country. Why should they spend money teaching kids something it’s easy enough to learn on their own? Why should taxpayers pay to teach kids how to be artists or musicians or writers instead of how to get *real* jobs? Why teach them hobbies? We *need* more mechanics and doctors and computer experts and engineers… but we don’t really need artists or musicians or actors. To that I say: imagine if you will a world where there was no art, no music, no design, no fiction or poetry or song or dance. Who would do the technical drawings in your anatomy textbooks? Or draw road maps? or design your cars or websites or merchandise? Who would write music that makes you remember someone you lost, or proud of your country, or angry at politicians? Who would design your clothes, or sew them? Who would make you laugh? Still think we’re not necessary?

But I digress from my original point. Let’s clarify something:

“Talent” is, really, a natural inclination towards a subject. It’s what drives you to pick up that pencil or screwdriver in the first place. It’s what allows you to see the true colors in clouds or the way program code works. It’s what tells you that two notes will sound nice together or that you can divide that number by that one and get a whole number. It’s what makes a class clown funny.

“Skill” is Talent plus Training. It’s the years of study into human anatomy, whether you intend to apply it on paper in a drawing or in three dimensions on an operating table. It’s the years of practice that allow you to hear the individual notes in a chord, or the difference between an engine running smoothly or with a cracked mount. Skill is in the hands of a doctor, or a writer or an artist or a musician. It’s in the voice of the opera singer or the politician or the professional actor. In the timing of a professional athlete or a comedian or a marksman.

But until people start seeing that, we’re still going to have to deal with people like my grammatically-challenged art thief, who won’t shell out a few bucks for a logo. Because to him art doesn’t represent anything he understands. In his peanut sized brain that logo probably magically sprang into being, straight from the artist’s pen like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Someone didn’t have to come up with the idea, or figure out the best way to execute it, or try and find the right colors for it. It’s not even worth less than the price of a Whopper. You can bet that same four bucks, though, that he wouldn’t just walk in and steal a Whopper. Or a four dollar object from a store. He’d never ask a plumber to fix his busted toilet for free, or a mechanic to change his oil for nothing.

But his morals don’t apply to art because it’s just a hobby, a talent, something he doesn’t even think about.

And hey… it’s not like he’s ever going to get caught. Who cares about a little piece of art anyway?

New video time lapse:

I went about this one a little differently than I normally do. My usual technique involves a loose sketch and then painting on top of it in color. This time I started in black and white, rendering the image to about 90% finished that way, before adding the color on top at the end to finish it up. I’ve noticed that a lot of digital painters work this way, but I don’t usually like the results when I do it. For this, however, it worked, giving her a distinctly dark, creepy feel that offsets the brilliant red of her costume.

Her costume, by the way, is based loosely on a costume I designed for a play version of Alice in Wonderland back in high school.

(Click the image to purchase prints or to view larger)

In an effort to try to make this blog as useful for people as possible, I’d like to invite you to ask any questions you might have regarding digital art, Corel Painter, Photoshop, Illustrator, digital painting techniques, etc. I’ll try to answer as many as I possibly can, or add them to my list of “tutorials to-do” list.

I put together a new tutorial, but due to the size of it I’m hosting it on my Deviant Art account. Just follow the image link to the left and click on the tutorial to enlarge. You can also download it for a full size version.

Today is a good day. Not really productive, but I plugged my Labyrinth soundtrack in and have been cleaning up the home office a bit. I have so much crap. But I’ve got a pile of some stuff I got that I want to hang or frame: a print of Erin Kelso’s Midsummer Nights Dream, a beautiful ACEO version of Snowfall that I just got from Mizz D, and a Bleeding Hearts sticker from Meredith Dillman. I also found several of my buried art books and my crystal juggling ball.

Now if I can only get the futon cleared off and the floor in here vacuumed, I’ll call today a winner.

It’s an inescapable fact, if you want to be an artist you have to observe real things. Whether you’re painting fantasy figures, classical studies, still life, or architecture, you need to have a good solid understanding of how things actually look. Most people, when they first begin to draw, use symbols to represent the things they know, not the things they actually see: a curved line is a mouth, a pair of circles are eyes, a ball with five sticks of varying lengths attached is a hand. Now, we all know that these things are far more complicated than that—it’s how well you are able to perceive and then recreate that complexity that will measure your abilities as an artist.

Sadly, most of us cannot afford to have scantily clad models drop by every day so we can practice drawing humans; and for some, life drawing classes either don’t come soon enough, or aren’t affordable. There are dozens of textbooks out there that will teach you to draw the human figure, but nothing beats actual observation. Luckily we now have the internet, and access to thousands of photos of people doing all kinds of things.

Stock images

There are couple of problems inherit in using photos and the Internet as your reference morgue file. Not all images online are free for you to use. Googling “sword fighter” might get you some interesting photos, but if you copy them someone is eventually going to notice and probably get ticked off about it. Stick with stock photos. There are a ton of stock photo resources online. Some you have to pay for, like istockphoto.com, however by paying the small fee for a photo you’re guaranteed not only a good quality photo to work from, but also that you can use it for your work free from worry. Think of it like paying for peace of mind. There are some sites that are set up specifically to be used as figure drawing references like fantasystockphoto.com. Some of these even offer the ability to rotate the figure to find the best angle for you to draw from. Usually there’s also a fee associated with these, as well.

If you’re poor and would rather go the free route, there are some free stock photo sites out there as well. Morguefile is one of my favorites, but the database is somewhat limited, especially when it comes to figure references. By far the most extensive free figure stock is at deviantArt.com. There are literally hundreds of stock-photo artists who put their images up for artists to use for photo manipulating or for drawing reference. A word of warning: READ THE RULES. A vast majority of the stock images available are only for use ON deviantArt. If you want to use their images outside or for commercial work, you’ll need to contact the artist and figure out what their terms of use are.

Seeing Isn’t Always Believing

There is another, hidden problem with using photos as figure reference. Unless the photographer really knows how to make up for it, all cameras distort things to one degree or another. This is especially true when dealing with the human figure. Because you’re seeing a photograph, your eyes are convinced that what they are seeing must be true. If the same distortions are copied into a painting, however, things will seem very off.

Analyzing a Photo for Reference

For the purposes of this tutorial I picked this image from Linzstock on deviantArt. I love her stock photos, and most of them are usually very large and very clear and easy to use. I deliberately picked one that was not. The reason for this was two-fold. I want to show you how to use a photo as a reference only—not how to copy it precisely. I also wanted to show you how to hurdle some of the problems in photos.

With this photo the first thing I did was to run it through a Photoshop filter to brighten it up enough so that we can see the details. You can do this by either playing with the level adjustments (specifically the midtones), or by running it through the Shadow/Highlight filter, which will make some automatic adjustments for you.

Click to enlarge images

Before I show you what TO do, here’s what NOT to do:
Do not try to trace the image. In this image the picture is very dark, and edges that are normally very clear are hidden. Chances are what you’re tracing isn’t an actual edge, it’s the edge of a shadow, which can end up cutting off parts of the face that you need for volume.

No Tracing

Do not try to free hand draw the photo without some guidelines. Again, you’re likely to be drawing the wrong edges. Additionally here we also have the problem of clothing. Clothing folds will cover up and distort the figure, making it difficult to actually draw what lies beneath. In figure drawing, it’s very important to work from the skeleton up to the clothes.

Skeleton

That doesn’t mean, of course, that you have to draw his bones. To start, what you actually want to do is figure out where the major lines of the body fall in this pose. Start with the head and jaw, and then figure out where his spine is, his rib cage, the line of his shoulders, arms, elbows, legs, knees, and feet. These can be rough lines, but they should all fall within the mass of the figure. I’ve superimposed the two here to give you an idea of how this works, but it will train your eye better if you work in a separate image on a white background.

Skeleton sketch superimposed

Once you’ve got the framework down, work on the major shapes of the body and limbs. Use large solid shapes to represent his arms and legs, spheres for joints. Build these on top of your framework, referring to the photo as a guide. Draw even the parts that are “hidden” by other limbs (in this case, his far arm and elbow are hidden behind his raised leg. By drawing it in, however, we ensure that our lines all go to the right place). If you’re working traditionally try to keep your lines light and easy to erase later.

Basic Shapes

When you’re first starting out, it’s a good idea to use this stage to do a light study. Eventually you can skip this step, but it’s a good way of figuring out tricky lighting and double-checking your anatomy. Imagine that your figure now is a wooden mannequin. Pick a light source (you can use the one from the photo if you’re unsure), and shade each “shape” in the figure.

Light Study

You can see here that we’ve picked up some distortions due to the foreshortening in the photo and the photo lens. His lowered foot is disproportionately large, and his raised foot seems too small by comparison. Because our figure will be foreshortened, the far foot should remain a little smaller than the closer foot, but not very much. His head is also a little too small. Working digitally it’s easy to resize areas like this, either with the resize tools, or by simply drawing them a little larger.

Look for Problems

Now that you have the basic body shapes down, you can start drawing your character. Use the photo to reference things like how things fold, and to measure, but make sure to build on top of your figure. Photo referencing, in this sense, isn’t copying line for line. It’s taking only what you need from the photo to enhance the realism of the painting.

Sketching

In this case I’m keeping the things I really like about the photo figure: I like his pose, and I like the way his pants and jacket drape. He seems very masculine and confident and relaxed, which is something I want to translate to my painting. The background is nice, and it will help inspire the new setting I want to put him in, but I’m not going to keep any of it. I also want to change his face quite a bit, and give him something different to do with his hands.

Work in Progress

Because I’ve built the character from a skeleton, some of those changes are far easier to make than they would be if I’d traced the image. While I’m painting him, I may refer back to the original photo occasionally for things like folds in his pants, or jacket, or maybe the shape of his shoes. However, I’m totally free now to change the fabric, the facial features, hair, etc. based on my imagination OR I can use other photos to reference other elements.

Eventually you want to be able to borrow from a photo only what you need. When you first start out drawing the human figure, you’ll need to borrow a lot of it. The more you learn about how the human body is put together, the less you need to be married to your references. Breaking down reference photos in this way will help you become more confident about drawing people, be they real life models, photos, or your own imagination.

View Larger

______________________________________

Dark Moods Stock 10 is (c) 2007 Lindsay Archer (Linzstock.deviantart.com)

“Touch of Sin” painting, Tutorial and tutorial images are (c) 2008 Melissa Findley (WickedFae.com)

Please do not repost without permission.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past week then you probably don’t yet know about the Macbook Air. It’s beautiful, super light, strong, and there is much drool being drooled over it by large numbers of people. I got to see one up close at the Macworld Conference and Expo last week, and while I was impressed, I’m afraid that I’m not going to be drooling over it any time soon. Lovely or not, a stallion cannot pull as much weight alone as an elephant and I require my elephant (MacPro) to do circus tricks when it’s not hauling the tents.

Something else that was recently released that would probably be of more use to designers and artists is the Axiotron Modbook. Basically the Modbook is a rebuilt Macbook, converted into a tablet Mac computer. They had several of these out on the show floor for people to walk up and play with, and so I sat and doodled on one in Painter X for about an hour.

The size isn’t bad, slightly smaller than my 15″ Powerbook, but I couldn’t actually pick one up to tell if it was more comfortable to hold. At 5.2 lbs, it weighs somewhat less than my cat, but I’d probably still want to have it laying flat on something rather than using it to draw standing up. The screen is standard widescreen, although I think one of the booth guys mentioned that there’s a way to upgrade it and support screen rotation. It’s a sturdy little thing, too. The screen is pretty solid, and after a little experimenting I wasn’t too worried that I’d inadvertently break the glass on it.

Having never used a tablet PC before I couldn’t tell you how it compares, but according to the company literature it has twice the pressure sensitivity of regular tablet PCs, with 512 levels of pressure recognition. That’s about the same as a Wacom Graphire or a Bamboo. An Intuos or Cintiq tablet run around twice that. After playing with it for awhile, however, I noticed that the pressure is a little spotty. Sometimes it flowed nicely, sometimes it jumped around a bit. Admittedly that might have just been from overuse on the floor displays. The Modbook comes with 11 nibs, according to the literature available, including pencil, studio, and felt tips. I would be more impressed, however, if the pen had been a bit sturdier. It feels like it’s made from a much lower grade material than I’ve seen on any other Wacom pen, or even compared to the materials used in the Modbook. The plastic feels more light and fragile, and I would probably worry about it breaking if dropped too hard–and with a computer that’s designed for traveling and using on the fly that’s not a good thing. It does store nicely in the Modbook frame, though.

The one thing I miss from it, oddly, is the keyboard. I’m a shortcut key user. Every few minutes I’d catch myself reaching for the Ctrl-Z or the Alt button, and then get frustrated that they weren’t there. The buttons on the pen are programmable, but I’ve never much cared for that since I tend to use a wider range of shortcut keys than just the two available on the pen. The Axiotron people working the booth said it’s possible to use the onscreen keyboard for shortcuts, but pulling it up blocks half the screen and you still have to use the pen (as far as I can tell) to hit the keys. At that point you’re almost better off using the drop down menus.

The Modbook is running Mac OSX v10.5 Leopard, and seems to run pretty quickly. The RAM and storage specs on it are pretty good, comparable with a Macbook anyway. I’m not a hardware geek, though, so don’t quote me on that. Since it’s running on Intel, I believe it’s possible for it to also run Windows, but I’m not sure on that and the literature doesn’t clarify. It also has a built in iSight camera, GPS, and comparable ports to a Macbook (Ethernet, Firewire, USB, and built-in Bluetooth and Airport Extreme).

I can see this being a good machine for designers who would like the ability to do mockups or sketches during meetings or for artists who spend a lot of time traveling, and I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who purchases one and uses it frequently. My laptop has taken quite a beating over the last two or three years, and my traveling Graphire even more so.  For me, however, this would be a pretty useless purchase since I tend to do most of my work from home. If you’re interested in one, however, you can check out the full specs at Axiotron.com. Current price right now is around $2,290(US).

Well, I’m back from Macworld, and I need a little bit to decompress and find my notes from the show floor. I saw some neat things and got to play with some fun stuff, but I’ll get to that in my next post.

Right now I just want to give you all an update. If you’ve been following the Photobucket petition, thanks in (huge) part to the amazing support of the Deviant Art community, we’re now well over 3,500 signatures. Jonathan updated his blog following the first wave of signatures, but the ball has become a small avalanche. I just hope it manages to be effective.

A quick note for anyone who isn’t sure what this is about:

The petition is aimed fairly specifically at Photobucket’s print services and take down policies. We would like for the print services to be more restrictive, thus preventing Photobucket from underselling members who are unaware of the default print settings on their public accounts or infringing further the rights of those artist’s whose work has been posted illegally. We would also like to see some Photobucket utilize existing software that helps prevent repeat infringement of reported copyrighted materials–thus making policing our work a hell of a lot easier not just on us, but on Photobucket.

If you have searched Photobucket and found your work there, signing the petition is not going to get it removed. You still need to file a DMCA with Photobucket’s copyright agent. The information on how to do this is listed on their copyright page and while it may seem complicated or tedious, I do encourage artists who have found their work being used without permission to fill it out anyway. The response time has been fairly good, so far, even though I’m sure they’ve probably been inundated with DMCA’s in the last few weeks.

Thank you to everyone who is supporting this effort. If we can work together to change one companies policies, it might not be long before we can work together to help educate the internet and provide better copyright protection for everyone online.