A shot at someone else’s self-portrait.

Console General here,

Finally, my week of hearing my co-worker berating his raid group for failing time and time again on specific bosses in the recently added Secrets of Ulduar for World of Warcraft is OVER. Listening to him shout into his headset to people on his Ventrillo server has been really getting to me lately. Almost to the point that I didn’t even desire to work on anything art related in the office. Weird, huh?

World of Warcraft, oh how I loathe thee...

I was originally going to post my character turnarounds for the character that I was assigned to concept for my friends Wing Commander storyline, however I decided against it. I really wanted to try something else this week. After seeing Dr. Conspicuous’ and Dr. Salvatron’s posts, I wanted to stray away from my usual video game art-world and dip into the waters of rendering real-life portraits in simple vectors. Seeing Dr. Salvatron work those pimp lines in his pattern imspired me to try something out. I hadn’t really tried it before, but I figured it can’t be too hard if I try to keep it simple rather than simply murder myself. Secondly, I really wanted to see how quickly this could be done.

First I decided to tryout one of the photos that he’d taken of himself. Namely this one:

The man.

I really liked the way this picture sort of made me feel. No, not the tingly feeling in my man goods in some sort man-love way or anything. It’s got style. What I wanted to do was create an image with a minimal amount of detail, but with some pizzazz. Pizzazz…did I spell that right? Eh, who cares, its a stupid word anyway. How about, “Flavor?” Yeah. I like that better.

Anyway, I started off simply getting the basic shapes of the photo down in Illustrator. I’m not going to show the steps for all of the lines, but its enough so you get the point.

At this point, I was pretty proud of myself. It only took me about an half-hour to do this from a photo. When I’m digitally inking, I’m usually retardedly meticulous and relining forever. I had to keep from trying to add facial hair, but in the end I forced myself to keep it simple.

Once I finished laying down all of the lines. It was time to mess around with various line weights. Since my project was in sections, I was able to fiddle around with a bunch of different line weights and styles for the hair, the facial detail, and the suit. I ended up settling for this rather modest style with some extra vector brushes thrown in for flavor.

THE JUSTINIAN.

The little brush effects were some “Grunge” style hand-brushes that I found in illustrator tonight. I didn’t even know they were in there, but they looked pretty cool so I gave them a shot and they seemed to work. Basically the squiggly lines on the outside that were supposed to represent a bit of the shadow that was in the photo were one stroke a piece on each side of the image. The brushes did all of the line work for me. Aww those sweet little brushes. Then I added a few subtle brush strokes over the shoulder and one of the collars of the shirt. The hair was one simple swoosh-type line that I did have to redraw a few times in order to get the flow of strokes right. After I finished up in Illustrator, I cleaned up the lines and edges once again in Photoshop. Surprisingly, I didn’t have to clean up too much in PS this time around.

It sort of reminds me of an old Kubert or Buscema comic panel from way back in the day minus the insane cross-hatching. I was really pleased with out this turned out for such a spur of the moment piece. I’m definitely going to get a bit more detailed when I’ve got time. In the end I’ve learned a bit more about Illustrator and improved my speeds with the program overall, so I figure it was a productive time for me. I was totally thinking about making something like this into a shirt. Eh? Maybe? Probably a bit much. I hope I made ya proud Dr. Conspicuous. I even shaved your face. It isn’t as nearly as epic as your Dr. Chuckles piece, though.

Keep it fresh, people.

Console General, out.