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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

Artist Evil's Art Studio - Updated: 28-7-13 (Doctor Horrible - Ps/Ink/Pencils)

Discussion in 'Fan Art' started by Evil Incarnate, Jun 30, 2009.

  1. Evil Incarnate

    Evil Incarnate Jedi Grand Master star 6

    Registered:
    Aug 18, 2003
    Doctor Horrible's Sing Along Portrait. This is the first of several pictures that I've been working since the beginning of the year, and now it looks like I may have the time to finish a few before my job throws me back into the mix.

    [​IMG]

    Evil.
     
  2. Corellian_Outrider

    Corellian_Outrider Former FanForce Admin star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Mar 9, 2002
    It's good to see you about Evil_King_Wiggins, time has a way of escaping us when we least want it too. While I am not familiar with Doctor Horrible, I know a few who love it.

    You have a distinct style happening there. I was wondering if you would be kind enough to share how you do your artistic processes, please?
     
  3. Goodwood

    Goodwood Jedi Master star 5

    Registered:
    May 11, 2011
    I think I may be able to cast some light on this lingering mystery:

    [​IMG]
     
  4. Evil Incarnate

    Evil Incarnate Jedi Grand Master star 6

    Registered:
    Aug 18, 2003
    I don't like that, it doesn't even line up correctly with how I drew it. Yes, I used a photo as reference. Is that not allowed?

    I'll show you my process with my next piece.

    Evil.
     
  5. Corellian_Outrider

    Corellian_Outrider Former FanForce Admin star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Mar 9, 2002
    We can still discuss the progress without the need to showcase the steps of your upcoming piece if they aren't readily available. As a side note and maybe a good habit to get into but I always keep the WIP versions/snapshots throughout development just as a habit and it is always good to look back and see the evolution of the piece and see the development with fresh eyes.

    Yes, there are some minor inconsistencies with the line work in relation to the original but that is by how it was reproduced, the texture and tonal elements on the other hand does sync up. The fact of the matter is that the source is featured prominently, almost exclusively in the piece and several of your other previous pieces.
     
  6. Goodwood

    Goodwood Jedi Master star 5

    Registered:
    May 11, 2011
    Wiggins,

    I don't think it should have taken this long for you to illustrate your creative process, if indeed that is what you are intending to do with your supposed next piece. I and others have been watching you as you post and promote your "art," and we are getting a little impatient. Just tell us what your process is, describe it in the simplest terms possible, you don't even have to make a new "piece" to do so. What we've seen, combined with your denials, things for you are not looking good.

    You have twenty-four hours to post your process. If you do not, then we will post our evidence.
     
  7. Evil Incarnate

    Evil Incarnate Jedi Grand Master star 6

    Registered:
    Aug 18, 2003
    Dude, chill. DRL has been hitting me hard lately. I barely have time for anything normal at the moment. I do however have a little bit of time today in which I will try to summarize in words my process since I was asked nicely by CO. Giving ultimatums like this is just a ***** move and completely uncalled for. Aside from this brief summary, I still plan to do a WIP piece and update it step by step whenever I may have time.

    Phase 1: Scene Selection
    This can go one of two ways. I either take a picture of someone I know in the pose I want, or I just be lazy and find a picture of something I want to draw online. This is what I use as the reference for whatever I'm drawing. Sometimes I try to be as true to the original picture as possible, sometimes I change it up because I don't like the way something looks. The lighting is probably the most important thing about the picture I choose, I don't like to change it up from what I'm looking at. Using pictures is essentially the same as using a live model, except it's normally free and you don't have to worry about having someone stand there forever.

    Phase 2: Sketching
    In this phase I blow up whatever my reference is and display it on my 52" TV in the living room. Next I grab a pencil and my sketch pad and get to work shaping the face. I always like to start with the nose, you don't get that right and it throws off the entire face. Then I move on to the eyes and work out from there with the eyes and nose as an anchor. I'm never very good with lips at this stage, just can't get them to look quite natural yet. After I have the outline looking pretty much how it is on the screen I start to fill in the details and some minor shading. I don't really like shading with pencils too much as the copic markers I use end up smearing it away anyhow. I mostly just outline the areas I want to shade and leave it for the markers and digital phases.

    Phase 3: Inks
    Here is where I go over every pencil line I made with my line markers(.005 to .08mm). Once I'm done with that, I use my collection of copic markers to match the colors I have on screen as best I can... unless I don't like the colors. My color variety isn't that expansive since copic markers are a bit pricy. I have 68 markers at the moment, but I hope to keep getting more as I go. I probably spend the most time on the hair and the skin tone at this point, and I use a lot of grays for my shading. Once I'm satisfied with what I have on paper I use my camera to capture it and upload it to my computer.

    Phase 4: Photoshop
    Adobe Photoshop is my final tool. I've been using it for about 13 years now, so I am extremely comfortable with the layout and all of the tools. First I crop out anything unnecessary from the photo I took of my picture, and then I adjust the contrast and lighting until it looks like the hard copy I have in my hand. Next I steal colors from either the source, or some other place that has colors I like. I like to zoom in really close to get the shading/texture from the source to match up right with the shading/texture I'm giving to the sketch. If my eyes were off on some of the lines, I try to meet at a happy medium between what I drew and what I sourced. The hair is the biggest pain, it normally takes several layers with varying opacity for me to be happy with how it looks, and most of the time I just make it dark because I can't get the lighter colors to look natural enough. My favorite Ps tools for this are the dodge, burn, and smudge tools. I use them religiously throughout the entire piece. After I get the new textures looking as much like the source as I can, I again adjust the contrast, shadows, and brightness to levels that I find more appeasing. Finally, to hide any mistakes I made and got too frustrated with to even consider fixing, I use the poster edges filter. I really like the way this filter looks because it's an easy way to define any lines you have, and I can safely cover things that just look too out of place or unnatural.

    If you don't like this explanation, I don't care. This is how I do it. It's my art, not yours. I can do with it what I want. :)

    Evil.
     
  8. earlybird-obi-wan

    earlybird-obi-wan Chosen One star 6

    Registered:
    Aug 21, 2006
    Great insight in how you create your beautiful works.
    I begin with the nose and eyes too when I start to draw or do my acrylics and oils.


    [​IMG]
     
    Evil_King_Wiggins likes this.
  9. Corellian_Outrider

    Corellian_Outrider Former FanForce Admin star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Mar 9, 2002
    Thank you for going to the trouble to describe your artistic processes Evil_King_Wiggins , I apologise for not getting back to you sooner as I had a few deadlines to look after.

    As you are probably aware, there has been some questions about how you produce these works and while your descriptions has answered a few questions, it also has raised several more questions because of the discrepancies between your written method and the actual results that we can see in the works.

    The main concern is your use of the sources and how they are featured prominently within the works you produce. It is one thing to have references to inspire or to guide however it is dishonest and unprofessional to incorporate the source into the work without giving credit or acknowledgement to the source or permission from the original artist (if possible), especially how it makes up a high percentage of your piece. There is a growing number of evidence that is hard to overlook and it is a habit you have seemed to gotten yourself locked into and you need to move beyond that and your heavy reliance on using your sources in such a way.

    I will try to address this with my observations and also provide some artistic tips which you might benefit from:

    Pictures are useful for getting the finer detail without the need for the model to be there but picture are more ridged and restricting than using a live subject. Not only you have more freedom with a live subject with the pose, with the model you can properly see how the light interacts with the form and also the way the muscles behave under certain conditions. With props and built models from scratch/kits, you have the benefit to hold them and inspect the detailing up close and pose them to how you desire them.

    Another benefit of a live model is that the quick 5-15 minute poses trains you into capturing those dynamic poses (the gesture lines and sculptural forms) faster and gives a more natural result rather than slavishly trying to match the contours from a picture of a pose. By doing the construction work, it gives you a stronger foundation to develop upon and less reliance on the source.

    Which format do you use for your photography? Jpeg is a compressed format and when you enlarge a digital image beyond their original resolution, you get pixelation. It depends on the resolution/DPI of the source used… obviously the higher the resolution... the higher the threshold you can go before it is a mess of pixels.

    With sketching, it would be a good idea to get into the habit of using gesture lines and sculptural form from basic shapes to construct the pose/block in the subject. I can see that you are focusing on only the contour lines which gives a flat look. With your line work, while it may appears to be clean, upon closer inspection it is hasty and there is no refinement and shows signs of tracing from the source.

    You said you had trouble with shading with pencils/graphite so I can give you a few pointers. To better understand shading and tonal work, it is a good habit to work with more than one pencil type/grade… working with the side of the graphite. The B range are good for that. A good exercise to familiarise yourself is to do a gradient bar, blank/white on one end and 8B for the other and use the other grades in between to make a natural progression of tone. Using different pressures will give you different results. You can see evidence of this in my Yoshi & Daisy and Belle graphite works as an example if you need it.

    With taking a photo of the drawing.. it is not as clean as scanning (even scanning is not perfect as certain details are omitted which is heartbreaking too) as you get artefacts on the image from the diffused tungsten lighting (depends on the room and light source), grain, angle of photo taken and focus issues. Desaturating the image, use the curves to bring out the whites and blacks does help but you cannot get the perfect match from a photographed source.

    Do you have access to a wacom tablet? If not, then I recommend it if you are pursuing more digital works and it is more ergonomic than using a mouse. It will take a moment to get the hang of it but the stills you develop with the traditional medium can be applied. The dodge, burn and smudge tools are 'destructive' tools and I do not see any indication that those tools had been used. If they had, then it was used sparingly.

    Stealing colours…? Can you please elaborate on this as this is hazy as there are several methods in which that can be done. Since you never said about painting and it is all in the digital realm, I have to make make my own conclusions on how you treat these works based upon the facts available:
    There is a way which produces the same results in which I can see in your final pieces which is by placing the actual source as a layer within your work, applying a filter and overlaying it to blend with your pencil/marker piece. The textures, colours and tone are aligned and are consistent with the source which is why your works matches the sources even if some of your line work is slightly off.

    This is why there has been some concern about your works. Because the source is featured heavily with no acknowledgements to the source and your statements that is all your own work when it is clear that not all of it is your own work. It is dishonest if credit is not given where credit is due and if it continues it can cause some harm to not just others, especially those that are directly affected by this, but also to your development as an artist.

    You have potential and it would be best for the ongoing development your skills and creativity to be less reliant on sources as you have currently been and to challenge yourself in order to develop your skills further.
     
    TrakNar and Goodwood like this.
  10. TrakNar

    TrakNar Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Apr 4, 2011
    I'm sorry if this post seems overwhelming, but I want to add to what C_O said about using another's image and not giving them the proper credit. Granted, most of the images we've been able to track down were promotional head shots, but there was one image in particular that bothered me, and I would like to bring this to your attention.

    Particularly your Faye Valentine image.

    After a quick search, I found the source, a wallpaper design by someone on deviantArt.

    Quoting your dA comment on the image...
    Here is where I have issue. For one, as C_O has mentioned, the "stealing colors/setting" portion of your process is fishy. There's something that doesn't quite line up, and regardless, you should give proper credit to the source material, since you use the bulk of it in your work. Where I also have issue is that your image was taken from fanart that someone else had created, and you did not credit them. The lens flare, the stocking texture, the grass... those were taken directly from the aforementioned wallpaper image without proper credit. The only thing that differs is the lack of a background and a different face.

    I had overlayed the original image on top of your image and dropped the opacity to about 50%.

    [​IMG]

    There are some slight differences in size, which could be attributed to distortion when you had enlarged the image, but the linework, texture, shading, coloring, the lens flare, and the grassy foreground line up far too perfectly. In this instance, after you had done a flat-shaded color with markers, as shown here, the original source image was then added to the final image. I'm sorry, but "stealing settings" doesn't explain this. The fact that it was fan art makes it worse, in my eyes.

    As C_O said, you seemed to have fallen into a habit in which you are comfortable and hesitant to change. If you wish to grow as an artist, you will need to learn new methods. Also, using reference material isn't a bad thing, I often use references. The difference is that I draw freehand. I don't enlarge the reference to gigantic proportions because I don't need to. I can work from a tiny image. Also, when using a reference, what I generally use is the pose and perhaps the layout, which I sketch out very quickly in a mess of blue contours that only I can decipher at a glance. I also use live models when I can. So, references are not a bad thing. Even palette references are not a bad thing. I use those all the time! I will use the eyedropper tool to suck whatever colors I like from an image.

    I'd like to emphasize that we're not trying to pick on you. We're not trying to scare you or attack you in any way. We just want to make you aware that this method will not fly in a professional setting and you need to explore alternatives. If you continue to use this method, you need to credit your source, as you are using the bulk of it in your work. Either way, I suggest taking some time to learn from this and use what has been presented to improve your work.

    In the future, try to avoid using another's work as your source image. I can assure you that if we artists feel that we've been ripped off... we can get nasty. I don't want you finding this out the hard way. :)
     
    Goodwood likes this.