Manga Fairy and Picassa Problems

Here's the latest sketch of the seedling fairy from the one drawing I've been playing with. I've cleaned up the detail a bit and shrunk the head -- it was originally far too large. I still need to work on the hands and feet, but that will come later this week.



Picassa has been giving me trouble with uploading the images for this blog. I was using the "Blog This!" button, but it never works right. I could only upload the images so long as I didn't actually try to add any text to the blog entry for the post. That meant I had to come back and edit the post once it was created so I could write up my explanations with the images. And then usually the links to the images would fail to work the day after I posted the blog entry. The whole thing is really too annoying to deal with, so I've just switched to uploading the images to the Picassa web albums and then creating the link from there to put in a new blog entry. Saves time, though still not as convenient as using a single "Blog This" button to handle the whole process. Oh well.

I just got Adobe Photoshop on my laptop. I know I said I'd probably use Corel Photopaint until the day I died but then two things happened. The first is that my husband is building me a new computer with Vista on it (please don't tell me how crappy Vista is -- we did our research and are prepared to live with our decision). Some of my older programs -- Dreamweaver 4 and Flash 5 -- won't work on Vista, so I had to upgrade those, and of course, they're both owned by Adobe now. Then Corel released the latest version of Corel Draw the very same day I bought the upgrade to the previous version. I got no e-mail telling me this product was coming out, no warning. I just bought version 12 and then when I started up Corel Draw on my laptop that day I got an alert informing me that I was still behind the power curve, and no, there are still no decent tutorials online for people who actually want to use the program for illustration and artwork. Oh, and the version I just bought comes with this so-called tutorial book from "the Masters of Corel Draw" that pretty much is useless as a tutorial book. No step-by-step explanations, just vague (very vague) overviews of how the projects were completed and none of those projects is really impressive. In fact, I thought they were all pretty lame.

So I'm parting ways with Corel. As I play with Adobe and become more and more familiar with it, I will be phasing out my Corel usage until finally I no longer need to keep it on my computer. I have no idea what I'll do with that upgraded version I just bought. I didn't even have the time to load it onto my computer before I bought Adobe (which I was able to get for over 60% off the retail price so it only cost me an arm, not an arm and a leg). But I'm changing my allegiance. We'll see how it goes.

Elf and Seedling Fairy roughs

I'm still working on the Cupid image, right now doing some backgroundwork. I'm setting up a 3D model in DAZ Studio to use as a reference for the figure and lighting. It's slow going though, so when I get bored with that I doodle some more in Art Rage. Here's the latest doodle, which has also turned into a slightly larger project (Ha! Only slightly larger, she says...) This is a picture of a woodland elf with a seedling fairy. I call it a seedling fairy because when it's finished, its wings will look like the little maple tree seeds I keep finding in my yard.

Here's the elf...



And here's a detail of the fairy. I'm working on it in its own image; then I'll import it back into the original sketch before I do the inking.

Thumbnail Sketch For The First Big Image

 

I know, it doesn't look like much, but I worked all morning on this.

So what is it? It's a thumbnail (very large thumbnail) sketch of what I'd like to draw next. If you look very carefully, you can see a stick figure crouching to one side and sort of a background roughed in behind it. And you can see my notes. This is going to be another manga illustration, but maybe this time with a more painterly approach.

I'm still working from "Girl to Grrrl Manga" for the details, like hair, face, clothing, but now I'm also trying to incorporate the stuff I learn from Imagine FX magazine. I read this magazine all the time, and I'd actually like to do some digital painting (thus the purpose of this blog). So rather than just follow along doing a bunch of little exercises, I thought maybe I'd just jump right in this time and get to work on a full blown image. I like the idea - a feral Cupid or Eros hunting for his next victim in a ruins or abandoned building. I'm thinking of calling it "Love On The Prowl." Honestly, the hardest part so far was to come up with a decent idea, but now that I have one, and I have a rough guide of how I want it to look, I'm ready to get to work.

Finished finally!

 

Well, here it is! The manga portrait I've been working on. I did the sketch in Art Rage, took it into Manga Studio Debut to do the inking, and then took it back into Art Rage to do the coloring. I used the marker tool in Art Rage for the coloring. The blending worked pretty well for the skin tones, but I couldn't get the streaking I wanted for the hair and eyes. I did some experimenting with the palette knife tool, and discovered if I set it to a very small size, I could get the streaks exactly how I wanted. So anyway, this project is done, from sketch to inking to color.

I think it's time I moved on to something else. I feel pretty confident about drawing faces (at least when I'm copyin- er, refering to someone else's drawing). Maybe now I should see if I can do something original from scratch (or at least by refering to a photo instead of another drawing).

So I've Been Out (Part 3)

Here's the culmination of my work for the past few weeks. The original sketch was done in Art Rage 2.5 using the pencil tool. Then I exported it and inked it in Manga Studio 3.0 Debut (that's the less expensive version; runs about $70). Manga Studio Debut probably only has half the the features of the full version, but I still think it's a very nice little program. For starters, I can rotate my drawing on the fly, allowing me to ink from any angle with ease. Second, the pen tool has options that help control the flow of the ink. If you've got a shaky hand with the graphics tablet (like me), you can correct that with these options AND you can determine how much correction you want on your inking. There are other tools in the program that I really like, but I haven't had time to fully explore them yet, so I won't get into them here.

Finally, after the inking, I exported the image from Manga Studio and brought it back into Art Rage to color. I haven't finished that part yet, but I do think I've got a nice start on it. I'm working with the marker tool. It's a bit tricky getting the settings just right. I want my markers to blend together without streaking, so I keep having to tweak the hardness and the wetness of the marker tool. Sounds a little obscene, don't it?

Anyway, here's all three stages of the drawing so far: pencil sketch, inked drawing, and partially colored drawing.

 

 

 

So I've Been Out (Part 2)

More of the drawings I've done over the last month. Really just a series of heads as I work my way through the first chapters of "Girl to Grrrl Manga."

 

You'll notice this head drawing looks a bit better than the one below. I figured out that I do a lot better if I can more clearly see the example I'm working from, so for this drawing I decided to prop up the book I was working from in a cook book holder. Now I could see what I was working from without having to constantly close and re-open the book (it doesn't lie flat, so that was a problem). The other drawings below don't look quite as nice as this one, so I'm definitely using the cook book holder for my practice drawings from now on.

 

 

 

So I've Been Out (Part 1)

I didn't mean to be out so long. I got caught up in my work, and while I kept drawing in the mornings, I couldn't find time to post blog entries. Part of this was because I switched to drawing in a drawing pad with a mechanical pencil, which added the extra step of having to scan in the drawing before I could post, and for some reason I could never find the time to get all that done. But now I've caught up and I've got some time to show what I've been doing.

 

This first bit is a doodle I did while drawing with my kids. We decided to call him Squarby. He's sort of a squarish monster with parsnips for ears and tail. I don't know where it came from. I was just drawing with the Sharpie marker and this is what I came up with. No pencil sketch with this one. It all came straight out of the pen.

 

This is another straight pen drawing I did, starting with just the curve that made up her tail. I love mermaids, and love to draw them. All those beautiful long flowing lines. This one really isn't finished, but it is what it is.

 

This one was sketched in pencil first before I inked it with Micron markers. I refered to the chapter on manga eyes in Colleen Doran's "Girl to Grrrl Manga." I love how she does eyes. They're always so expressive. I have to really study the examples in her book to come up with something I like, though. I'm going to need a lot of practice before I can draw manga the way I want.

 

This is just a doodle I did in Art Rage. I started with random scribbling that sort of formed a head shape with horns, so I roughed in some paint. I didn't spend a lot of time on this one. I'm still trying to figure out how to blend the paint in Art Rage. I found a tutorial that showed how to lay down paint and the blend it with the palette knife, but honestly, I'd like to blend it as I paint with the paint brush tool, rather than just smudge stuff around after I've laid it down.

These are only a few of the drawings I've done lately. I've got some more to post, so we'll see if I can get them up tonight.