Tuesday, June 26, 2007

New Cover, step by step....

The brief asked for Smantha Slade to be hanging from the edge of a tall building a bit like the shot from Blade Runner.

I knew it would be tough to get the pose right from this angle, so I used Poser. Poser is a simple 3d computer app that allows you to manipulate a figure into different poses you can then light it and set the camera up for the angle you want.










Having done this, I tweaked it a little in PS flipped it and printed it out light blue.








I then worked on it in pencil and scanned the pic back in to PS. I comped it into a still I'd found just for ref and a perspective guide. I sent this off to Matt for approval. Matt said the angle was right but wanted her to be hanging off part of the scales of justice from the Old Bailey, and to make the scarf more prominent. In the strip she'll be wearing a "sentient scarf".









I printed this all out artsize and inked in the figure and the part of the scale. I started getting a bit stuck on the background at this point as the imag was quite big it was quite difficult to not get bogged down in the detail of the bg buildings. I thought it might be easier to go for a looser approach. I scanned in the figure and scale, shrunk them to print size and printed them out light blue with some rough perspective lines. I then went straight in with inks and drew a load of buildings. With a white pentel correction pen and some toothbrush splatter I added a bit more detail and texture to it.



I Scanned this in and combined it with the previous inks and coloured it up.

8 comments:

Adrian said...

I had a go with Poser once, it's a great idea if it works though I found it more trouble than it's worth personally - like a lot of CGI it didn't really give anything a sense of weight and the poses looked, well, posed. Also, like with using photos, it took the fun out.

dylan said...

yeah it's a real pain to use. It's the first time I've used it for figure ref and it was only because of the tricky angle. I don't see myself using it too much in the future tbh. I got it on a free offer from the Daz website a while back. What is quite cool about it is using it as a quick lighting guide for faces.

Chris Weston said...

Isn't that Ace Garp's scarf she's wearing?

Dominic Bugatto said...

Nicely done!

dylan said...

Thanks Dominic.
Chris, the scarf is an Ian Gibson design it was on the page Matt sent me. I was going to chicken out on doing the big cartoony hands but it was more fun with them.

Adrian said...

It'll be interesting to see the work of anyone who uses it for laying out all their art before inking over it, though I'm not aware of anyone who does this, except of course for artless rubbish like (shudder) Striker.

It sounds like a good idea as an alternative to using photos but just didn't seem to work in reality, though I know Chris (Weston) has mentioned he uses fixed 3D figures for some ref mixed in with the 3D objects, photos and stuff he made up, presumably when he doesn't feel like squeezing into a dress.

Mark Kardwell said...

So, not very often.

James Kircough said...

I've used Poser for a lot of stuff in recent years, mainly for larger group scenes, but I also find it useful for hands and close up faces.