a beautiful machine

[egypturnash]

a beautiful machine

---

This pretty machine-spider girl was done for the new front page of my site (still not up, just yet), to be displayed at about 473 pixels wide. I ended up lavishing more attention on her than she really needed for that scale!

Mostly, this is me using techniques picked up by looking and casually analyzing the work of people who specialize in shiny renderings of factory-fresh cars and motorcycles. I've been wanting to subvert that mode for a while, and this well-polished spider ended up being the time for that. I'm more interested in machines that don't exist than ones I'm merely too broke to have!

Most of the highlights are done with blends. Black to purple, or black to a very very very pale tint of the same purple (because I wanted to have some color variance), then set the whole blend to 'screen'. The specular highlights are solid shapes scribbled out quickly with the pencil tool. There's a few gradients here and there, and some raster effects for the shadow and ground.

When I had to play with the rasterization settings for a path that textures the handle of the device in her hand*, and discovered that Illustrator won't let you rasterize something at a higher DPI than 2400, I knew I was done detailing this image. Not bad for something that was probably about 4" square at best in the original sketch.

There are about 850 paths in this file. What you see is only about 550 paths; there's also a stylized background, and elements for other parts of the site. The original image was only a few inches wide.

I'll be posting this elsewhere when the new site goes live.

*a "framgoozler", according to the name of its layer. When asked, I explained that a framgoozler is a lower-power version of a gongoozler**; some spiders prefer the framgoozler for this despite its decreased reliability; others have both, because it's nice to have a backup.
** the spider warp drive. Very fast, but prone to leaving you somewhat insane after having your mind turned inside out and plastered across the cosmos for (a few seconds :: eternity); the spiders, already being quite insane, don't really find this to be a disadvantage like most people might.

Comments

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

What is—ah, I see the footnote now. Your link is broken with a spurious two in the URL, though.

Very lovely indeed. Cars are boring, but spiders are always cool.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Oops! I cut and paste the image url from the display on my local dev site, rather than the one out there on the net. Fixed.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

I do that all the time. So irritating.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Hey, cars aren't boring!

Oh, or did you mean the faceless kind?

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Ha, I never saw the movie. I'm not particularly interested in things with wheels unless they're also powered by steam. :)

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

Pretty damned impressive. She looks all polished and ready to go! You dowsed some great effects there. The only part that's not quite in line to me is her skin and hair. The highlights are keen, but there's a depth missing from the shadows that seems to be there for the rest of the piece.

So, a whole comic done in this style and level of detail? :"D

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Originally her head was going to be black, like most of the rest of her, but I couldn't make the beady black eyes work on that. The faint grey markings around her major eyes are a relic of attempts at that - there was a red swash across her face for a while, which set off the black eyes, but it all just turned into muck at the final size.

I'm not sure there really are any shadows in this piece to speak of. It's mostly about the white light from the left and the magenta light from the right; what with her primary color being pure black, shadows weren't really on my mind except as a tool to say 'here is where the face ends and the neck begins'.

The hair was early on; I kinda figured out the highlight methods while doing that, and the highlights on her rear. The rear highights were bad enough, by the time I finished, that I went back in and tweaked them up a lot; the hair was right on the border of okay.

A whole comic? Heh, no. Covers yes, maybe. It's hard to decide how long I worked on this, what with the file also including a bunch of other elements for the site, and a couple days of nothing but CSS abuse, but this one image probably took more than a day's solid work...

[silkspider.livejournal.com]

That's why I went with beady RED eyes!

Oh, and FINALLY, I have scans up:
http://stormdancer.net/charlotte/art/egypt/

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yep. Contrast!

And thanks - I grabbed the images, haven't had a chance to load them into Photoshop and stitch 'em together. The website redesign wants all my art bandwidth! Especially when it's only a few Firefox issues away from being done. (And a whole slew of IE bugs, but later for that.)

[spotweld.livejournal.com]

She'd make for a good Sl avatar...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I've got some very early attempts at spidergirls in SL, but I've never really felt crazy enough to figure out how to make everything animate semi-nicely. Building stuff like that is hard work!

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Oh that is way smooth! The leg designs give me Roger Dean tickles. ^_^

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Got it in one! The car/motorcycle illos I'm riffing off of always seem to appeal to the inner twelve-year-old boy... and when I was a twelve-year-old boy, I was grooving on Dean's covers for Psygnosis games, full of robot beasts and angular markings!

well, okay. when i was a fourteen-year-old boy. close enough.

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

Well done. ^_^ Yeah, I was thinking the Beast I cover. I never stopped loving all his clever and colorful creature/robot designs.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I've been thinkin' "Roger Dean" since you first started posting these spider ladies.

[zrath.livejournal.com]

I was gonna say that!
Oh well, Dean rules!

[momentrabbit.livejournal.com]

The new Apple iRachnid.

Drivers Wanted.

[merrycalliope.livejournal.com]

She's so cute!

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Very much seconded.

[mutleyjames.livejournal.com]

Dammit, this looks amazing! Well done! I love seeing how you've adopted technique and made it yours - the underlying flat colours you use so well, splashed with gradient shine!
Great see new things!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I've been trying to experiment with texture and shading lately, now that I can solve the puzzle of flat, limited colors consistently and reflexively. It all builds; I get that stuff right and then throwing on highlights is just easy. There were a grand total of two places I really had to wrestle with the highlights a little - and one of them was the face, when it was originally going to be black with black eyes.

how much I'll do this in the future, I dunno. It's there when I need a glossy machine. I'll have to see what happens when I mix in some texture, to grunge stuff like this up some - I like AI for perfect flat colors, but this kind of perfect glossy color kind of turns me off. Less so when it's on a whimsical form like this instead of a boringly real car or person, but I feel like if I'm not careful I'm going to go down the road of airbrush paintings on the side of a custom van in the seventies, and I don't think anyone wants that.

[dragonscholar.livejournal.com]

Wow.

Now, beyond that reaction, I find this interesting. The style you use definitely has a weird cyberpunk/art deco feel (which works, as you know I liked some of your previous deco/noir work). It does however change the "feel" of the art for me - not necessarily bad, but its just different, your art always had a certain "vibe" but this piece has a different one.

It "3D's" extremely well.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, all the highlighting makes this spider-girl much more a concrete thing than most of my work becomes. Especially compared to the other complex spider images I’ve done lately and over the years – the very comic-book look of the recent ones firmly says “these are fantasy creatures”, while this one looks more like a promotional shot of something real. Initially I was going to go with more drawn-looking highlights like the ones in another recent piece, but I ended up going the ultra-clean path.

I might try doing something like this with dramatic noir shadowing; having the glints come out of darkness to define a fantastic, strange form might be pretty cool.

[grimmalkin.livejournal.com]

Oh hello. O_O!

That is very, very pretty. There's something alluring about your Spideresses as it is, but the car sheen definitely becomes her.

[dustmeat.livejournal.com]

It's like a Bjork video.

[luoto.livejournal.com]

She is very beautiful! Wonderful colours.
I love the shine!

[jenkatb4u.livejournal.com]

Made with snap-on plastic. Wait a few moments and it'll feel warm and lively as the old part that you just keep around for a while before fashioning it into furniture.