skittery splodgy shapes

[egypturnash]

I was idly looking around on DeviantArt and I noticed that dark_aldebaran had favorited pretty much all the drawings I did of raccoons. Somehow this made me decide to fool around in Illustrator with no pencil sketch, and draw a raccoon.

I like drawing raccoons!



I did some experimenting with simulated colored paper, but I couldn't convince Illustrator to make my inks opaque. Just some late night fooling around, you know? The background probably has floating rocks with trees on it because I ended up on Roger Dean's website the other week.

(And, of course, DA is being a bitch - or maybe it's that my upstream connection is being a pain again - and I can't get the image up on there. Figures.)

Comments

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Yes... fooling around... that’s just what this looks like to me. ...


Which is a roundabout way of saying, no it doesn’t, it’s beautiful and everything you do is art.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Ha. You should see the piece of typing paper from earlier today, that contains (in the order they were drawn in)

• a penis with rabbit ears
• a Pikachu with a large cock, saying "pikaskru!"
• a penis flying through the air, spurting, screaming "Splortle!"
• ahairy, disembodied ass, shouting "ANIX!"
• a fragment of some sort of little tank
• a penis costumed as Elvis, saying "uh-uh huh!"

(Many of these things were illuminations of Bad Ideas paka was incautious enough to say out loud.)

It also feels like a failure because I wanted it to be two solid colors, and had to resort to several tints of those two colors instead, because of lack of planning!

[rubberskunk.livejournal.com]

Pizzachew. Pizza!

Charbroiling! Char!

Oh crap, now I'm anthropomorphizing fast food again...nuts! Cashews!

"Failure" is not really the word I'd associate with that particular image...

[mister-wolf.livejournal.com]

Sweet. Did I ever mention that I wish I was you? Well, not exactly. I just want your Illustrator skillz.

Hand them over.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Pshaw. This is barely using my Illustrator skillz. There's an art brush I made on the fly and used a few places, about six or eight layers, and two global color swatches, and a couple of clipping masks. And a bunch of shapes scrawled out with the pencil tool and not touched up at all, done under a sketch I scrawled out with the pencil tool.

Oh, and a big rectangle with a mezzotint, dropped down to 10% multiply, to put some texture on the bg.

This is straight out of Illustrator 101, in terms of technique. No blends, no Appearance palette madness, nothing really magical at all. Just me and the pencil tool and my Wacom tablet.

What you really want in this case is my cartooning skillz.

[mister-wolf.livejournal.com]

This is straight out of Illustrator 101, in terms of technique.

But you still have to deal with those fucking anchor points. Not impossible; I do it all the time for logos 'n' shit. But still a pain in the ass.

What you really want in this case is my cartooning skillz.

I've already got some. They're very nice.

[mister-wolf.livejournal.com]

Except wait, wait... pencil tool! Ah! I've been such a fool. Let's see how that works...

And also frankly you're probabally a better cartoonist than me, but don't rub it in, okay? =;)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the "cartooning skillz" bit came out kinda wrong. I should be in bed an hour ago. No insult was intended!

(Other drawings where I make heavy use of the pencil tool: ground foliage, entire image, layered fog shapes, layered art brushes everywhere, most of the figure. if you want to compare and contrast to ones that're mostly pen tool.)

[mister-wolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the "cartooning skillz" bit came out kinda wrong. I should be in bed an hour ago. No insult was intended!

S'okay. I took it in the spirit in which it was intended. I hope. =;) I do really admire your work. The composition, the line quality, the willingness to experiment, it's all really great.

Anyway, thanks for the tips.

[thaily.livejournal.com]

The cherubs one is awesome.
A comic in that style would be so great.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It was kinda related to some comics stuff prickvixen and I were fooling with, actually. Her script, my pencils and inks, her tones, but occasional changes to that division of labor... I flaked out on it when my life turned to crisis.

[thaily.livejournal.com]

That's a pity.
I selfishly hope you two will try again when things pick up.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

But you still have to deal with those fucking anchor points.

Nope. Not for this image. Not once you've configured the pencil and brush tools to not be stupid. Double-click on them in the toolbar and turn off "keep selected"; then you can draw really rapidly.

I think I actually touched a total of, oh, ten anchor points in the process of making this. "Touch" meaning "made with the pen tool" or "selected and tweaked".

Normally I'm all about careful creation of the anchor points; my "one true tool" icon has the pen tool active for a reason. I've learnt a few of the secrets of easy operation of it, and I constantly hot-swap tools with ctrl/alt/apple.

[dark-aldebaran.livejournal.com]

(logs to Illustrator to unckech bxoes)

[tania.livejournal.com]

Girl, you roxxors my soxxors. :O Love her hair! And her girly wrists and hands, hee! And yeah, your mad Illustrator (and cartooning) skillz. :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I should do more quickies like this, if this is the way people react! This thing falls apart so badly when you see it full-screen. Which is why most people won't. *grin*

[tania.livejournal.com]

That's the same reason people never see the full-size 300dpi Photoshop documents I work with. That linework ain't so pretty up close.

(And hey, why the surprise? Everyone loves a quicky.) ;)

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

Badump-chhhh! :D

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

New desktop. *ctrl-c ctrl-v*

I love those images of yours that seem to put the characters at the center of a vortex of graphical chaos (that I know takes a fair amount of work and fiddling to pull off). Am I right in thinking that a great many things seem to be on *fire* in this picture, or is that deliberately left to interpretation? It sure says "dancing in the flames" to me, but... :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yay! You just like it 'cause it's so blue. I know you, Mooncat. *grin*

Mostly I do the graphical chaos because I avoid backgrounds. And... the 'fire' wasn't at all something I intended, but I can definitely see it in a few places now that it's been suggested. I was going more for a chaotic, loose, too-full-of-energy feel. Which, I suppose, is metaphorically close to "on fire".

But what looks like pale blue fire on the planetoid she's standing on is just me taking the art brush I'd made for the right hand's trail, then switched out for an entirely different effect, and scribbling behind the planet to make it pop into the foreground more. I was mostly thinking "this is some kind of scribbly splattery glow" when I did it.

And, of course, as I said on the phone this evening ( <3< ) the original working colors were very firey...

Dancing in the flames, not caring that everything is falling apart around her. Falling apart herself, in some way, but still definitely female, and on top of things, and maybe responsible for the chaos. Maybe this is more about my current situation than I intended it to be...

[chirik.livejournal.com]

Very much like it. It may be a quick sketch, but that doesn't mean it's bad. ;-)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Well, no. I like it more now that it's a couple days later and I don't remember exactly what I was going for, and can see it on its own terms.

But the shapes are still raggedy enough that I don't want to blow it up to fill my desktop.

[yaochi.livejournal.com]

So it was quick.

It is kinetic in appearance

And fun

Ain't that enough ?

[ceruleanst.livejournal.com]

Awesome. I especially like the smear of motion from her right hand.

I realize she's probably supposed to be running or dancing, but my interpretation of this picture is that she has anchored herself to the earth by one foot, and then, with one sweeping gesture of power, turned all the gravity off.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

she's probably supposed to be running or dancing

Honestly, I have no clue what she's doing. I just drew this dynamic pose and went from there, finishing it off in a much looser, sloppy method than my usual hyper-anal pen tool shapes.

And in the back of my mind were the gravity-broken worlds of Roger Dean's covers for countless Yes albums, and the book The Shattered World.

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

For me, the wonderful tension is between those quicke strokes and the precision of AI as a renderer. Everything's CRISP! yet still organic, a bit of swirling chaos that resolves itself into texture and line. Energy often lost to Illustrator files is not so lost here. So you made a quickie brushstroke. So you didn't use a lot of tricks or even knowledge you have with the program. What you got was a terrificly kinetic piece. Hard to look at fondly as all artists have that issue. :"D Another piece, though, that would look dandy HYOOOOJ. Do what makes you happy, but we're loving this.

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

Nice.

[wolphyn.livejournal.com]

Ooh! This feels a little less controlled than your other works--not that your work was ever lacking in energy; this is just even more energetic.