art

[egypturnash]

Last night I wanted to work on some art, but didn't feel like tackling any of my hanging projects. So, instead, I found a photo of Josephine Baker and abused it in Illustrator. Woke up at 4 AM for some inexplicable reason, tried for a couple hours to get back to sleep, then gave up and sat in front of the computer to finish it.

I tried to make it interesting, tried to work that Special Peggy Magic upon one of the sexiest women ever to walk the planet. I didn't want it to look like the photo-tracing that any jerk with a copy of AI and a basic knowledge of the program can crank out. I'm not really sure if I succeeded or not.



Probably no more than four or five hours. I feel like this image was entirely too easy. It looks okay, but it only has the vaguest hint of my unique style. It really looks like a generic Peter Max wannabe thing to me.

Much of the boa is done with the pencil rather than the pen. Too many curves to agonize over every little one. I probably could've used a scatter brush or something, but I wanted to be able to work in and out of it to add shadows. I added an extra strand of pearls to help delineate the overlap of the legs.

I'm trying to decide if I should put this up on non-genre galleries (DA/GFX/IW). It feels like a total cheat, to be honest.

Comments

[vivadawolf.livejournal.com]

We need some bananas and bananaleave skirts in there. Or not.

I dig it. The shadow of her back seems confusing because it blends with the background.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

*nod* I was being overfaithful to the original photo there.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Your stuff is just so rooted in caricature and action, that I don't think coloring a (fairly still) photograph can really read as specifically yours.

[zrath.livejournal.com]

Wow...

La Baker! (wolf-whistle!)

Café ou chocolat?

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

I can't quite tell from your description if you traced this at all or not, but I'm assuming not. I think that the hands, especially her right look really odd. Faithful, perhaps, but without the delineation, things look lumpy and somewhat broken. While the minimism of the face makes sense, her mouth looks off center because we see nothing more of the nose than its shadow. I don't understand the line at the top. It looks added on and doesn't match the flowing lines of the rest of the work to me.

On the plus side, I love the palette. It doesn't make me think of Max at all, and really, the figure is far too convention to be assumed his work in general. I like the way you made the breast more subtle, though it's still bare and right there. Nudity with taste. The pearls make for a wonderful train of thought, leading the viewer through the piece. It's very solid and sure.

As for succeeding, I think you did. It does not look traced, cold, or lacking in artistic impression. Since it is SO taken from someone else's photograph, if I were posting it, I'd note the photographer as referance, and link to the picture, making sure folks knew that you did this as an exercise and that it wasn't in any way traced. Many fine artists copied works of others into their own idiom. As long as there's credit given, I don't see why you shouldn't post it.

Thanks for giving us a show. :"D

-T'

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Nah, it's completely traced from this photo. If I'd drawn it it'd be a lot more flowing, and little weirdnesses of silhouette would be clearer.

Mostly it's the shapes in the face that make me think of his stuff - he'd have very similar soft-cornered abstractions of the planes of shadow.

So many people I see out there on the net using Illustrator do nothing but photo-tracing, and I was moderately curious to see what they get out of it. I can't see that they get much from it; when I was done, I looked at it and said 'Nice picture, but it ain't mine.' There wasn't that moment of happiness that I've created something out nothing more than my skills and imagination; it was just an exercise of my skill. The small, muzzy photo provided enough challenge to keep me interested, but there was no real invention involved.

It didn't take that much less time than my normal procedure, either. At best, half the time I'd spend on an original piece, and that's probably an exaggeration.