Hello boyos.  I haven’t been feeling well, and I’m don’t really feel sick or anything but I’ve been overly drained pretty much every day since last Friday.  Unfortunately my poor health has totally affected my inspiration to do much of anything else this week besides go to work, sit at my desk, and fumble with the occasional Playstation 3 game.  Excuses aside, I was working on a project that I was playing around with last week.  It was the model laying on the bed.

Originally I wanted to focus on finishing the piece solely in Illustrator.  That didn’t happen if you notice the screenshot above.  That’s the Photoshop CS4 UI.  ::  Sadface ::

So what I tried to do this time around, if I wasn’t sleeping or zoning out at work was to play around with simple color schemes and super duper basic cel-shading.  Which I don’t feel turned out well at all.

Here’s a quick look at one of the directions I was taking the colors at first:

I was sort of shooting for an elegant, yet sexy mood, but the black (Which was REALLY DARK on my CRT at home) I figured didn’t really convey that properly.  I sort of liked where it was going, but I was having a hard time finding decent colors to use for highlights and shadows that would compliment each other.  (Heh, I know my color wheel rules by the way, but the black felt too stifling.)

Afterwards I tried another set of colors, and it immediately reminded me Valentines day, so I quickly scrapped it:

Instead of shooting for warmer colors, I decided to go with cooler colors instead.  Night-time in a low-lit room with a hot chick on the bed.  This was another one of the schemes I came up with and pretty much settled on for now, which I’m sure I’ll work on later:

I was thinking about changing the color of the model to a darker color, maybe a blue and trying a different set of background colors altogether.  Either that or just simply swapping around some of the colors here instead.  I’ll see where it goes, but the motivation to continue working on this is fleeting by the minute.

Ugh…I gotta get some rest.  I’m wiped.  Hopefully I’ll feel better next week.

Next week:  “inFamously living slightly larger…”

Console General, out.

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.