JSVB Post #1466 was a contour drawing of my friend Sylvia. In today's JSVB post, I want to revisit that picture to bread it down a little.
First of all, here is the source photo of lovely Sylvia as shot by her husband Earl:
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| Photo used with permission. |
If I had taken the photo, though, I would have had the sun hit the drinks and illuminate Sylvia's face. Stupid sun, being in the wrong position! If I could, I would have moved the table around to make the shadows hit precisely. Failing that, maybe gigantic proton thrusters mounted on the Earth's crust would have shifted the planet enough to make the sunlight fall correctly. Either way, Sylvia would remain equanimous as the Mona Lisa.
Far easier to make a drawing, which is what I did back in JSVB Post #1466. I'll repost it here:
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| Print this out! Colour it in! |
After posting this drawing, I received comments about all the hatching work. I'm not much into hatching - using small, repeated lines to create a mid-tone value in a line drawing - so this is something I would like to learn how to do well. The intent of the drawing wasn't to practice hatching, but to use this artwork as the base for working out schemes of light and shadow like in the photograph. I'll post my results in the next few days!
More on the hatching. There were three areas I felt that needed mid-tones: the hemp curtain, the wicker partition, and the pebbled tabletop. I've broken down these three hatches in this illustration below:
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| From top to bottom: 1. Wicket hatch 2. Hemp hatch 3. Circular pebble tile 3a) Circular pebble tile solution by K. Neko, 4) Original pebble tabletop |
To speed things up, I made simple hatches in Photoshop and then tiled them. You can see clear linear hatches for the wicker and the curtain: they are basic repeated patterns. I used Photoshop's distortion tools to make the hatching fit the perspective of the picture, and in the case of the curtain I warped the lines to make the fabric appear to curve. No sweat!
The pebbled tabletop was a lot harder to finish. I really liked the contours of the small stones, but tracing them all would be time-consuming. I opted to make a selection of each stone and combined all of the selections. Then I used Photoshop's stroke command to automatically generate the lines. Unfortunately, there were dozens of imperfections in the selection that the smoothing algorithm could not fix. I ended up making the repairs by hand, which took a couple of hours. The results still looked awkward, as you can see from above.
I decided to simplify the stones into circles which would look cleaner. I wanted to make a repeatable tile of circles of varying diameters. At first, I tried freehanding the arrangement of circles, but as I worked I recalled reading an article about a computer program that would arrange circles efficiently into a square space. As it turns out, this is a very complicated task for a computer. Sorting applications have a lot of difficulty understanding the difference between a circle and a square, as the math to optimize both becomes complex.
The small grey image is a solution from Kuroi Neko, who is a programmer at Stack Overflow. The solution is not to use a rectangle as a boundary, but rather a shape made from the edges of four nearly infinitely large circles, which in practical terms amounts to the same thing as a rectangle. Using this new system the program will run very smoothly. I used this application to generate the tile and then duplicated it a few times in Photoshop to make the tabletop. The clean circles replace the irregular rocks and they look good.
The next three JSVB posts will show the results of my experiments in light and shadow using this picture. Stay tuned!
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