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 Pencil&Colour |
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When I was building my swan model for Poser, and doing texture maps and all, I though of an image something like this.... I wanted to be able to do swan portraits, close up and with realistic feathers that you could see. Um... and also, I wanted to mess around with the sketch renderer.
MetaCreations Poser 4, Adobe Photoshop 4, Blade Pro, Kai's Power Tools 3
See The Deluxe Multi-Species Swan for details about creating the swans for Poser. These are posed in Poser, using mainly the mute swan pose I had with it. I moved the swans into position and moved their necks. I gave one a bigger knob, and one a smaller one, for variety, but males and females look about the same.
I knew the wings would fold up with as little distortion
as possible, but also that they would 'break' at the joints, which I always
figured could be smoothed with a little post-production. But, it seems
they need a LOT of post-production! :/
First, I feathered out the necks, with one of
my new 'furry' brushes, an enlarged version of the 'Shop paint splatter brush
shape. This was the easy part. From left to right, here is how
I dealt with the big gaps in the wings, the boxy parts sticking out, etc.
Covered up by the frame are some sweeping-curve feathers. The biggest one was a dark feather that was there, the rest are smeared up with the smear tool. The wingcover had a big gap at the top, so I lassoed and pasted a set of the three top bumps. I used Free Transform Layer to size it down, rotate it, and squeeze it at the top (when you're using Free Transform, hit CTRL to skew/squeeze the corners, not size them). Liberal smearing to blend, and to push the white up and to the left to cover the dark gap.
The row of feathers on the far wing behind that began as one feather and a wedge. I lassoed the feather and duplicated it a few times to make a row. They are blended into the wing wedge with the smear tool.
Between the swans, the lower part of the wing actually stuck through the neck, so I had to erase the point of that. Then the cover didn't quite go all the way up, so I copied, pasted, and blended a piece of that. The feathers back there are as they came out, and i copied them to use on a piece further right.
Right past the left bird's bill are the copied feathers, smeared down and slightly rotated into place. The gap at the top of the rightmost wing cover was painted over with the clone tool. After that, I realized that the joint of the wing arm and cover was way too skinny, so I lassod a lower part of the arm, and Free Transformed and smeared it into a thicker wedge near the top. The eraser in airbrush mode also helps a lot; you can erase the edges of the pasted layer so they blend better with the layers beneath. More cloning and some cover-section pasting was used to doctor up the side of the wing cover.
Finally, I selected everything but the necks, heads and bills and gave it some blurring to soften everything up. There are some tiny details painted in on the eyes, and some shadows were lightened on the lower bill of the right swan, and the bright feathers of the left swan were burned to tone them down.
(Note: you can see the wing breaks on the sketch versions.)
The render had a plain blue background, and I was making myself nuts trying to do a blurry lakeside pond thing, or clouds, or.... finally I said the heck with it, and grabbed the background out of the Test Render of the New, Improved, Zygote Frog and threw it in there. (The swans were cut from the background and pasted to their own layer first step, of course.) It even still has the ripples and stuff still on it. But hey, I recycle. :)
I thought a rainbow might be nice. If not overdone. I wish I still had my KPT2 disks, because KPT3 does NOT have a rainbow gradient. Sheesh! Anyway, I made a big oval selection, moved it into place, and feathered it to about 44 pixels. (The feathering determines the width of your Gradient on a Path). I doctored up an almost-rainbow gradient in KPT3 (oh... I forgot to save it... drat!) and put it on... then Faded it into a semi-transparent screen. Toyed with the ide of chucking that layer in the trash or not... Finally, I think it isn't tooooo obvious, so I left it in. (Note: You can't make a gradient on a path on an empty layer... the gradient has to interact with something. So I worked with a copy of the background.)
I wanted to make a neat lucite frame like Lyne does, so I managed to select an even edge around the picture, then used Blade Pro to make the frame, then faded it to 75%. The text is supposed to be gold etching (one day I'll figure out how to do that effect), and it's some fancy font or other. It has a KPT3 gold gradient on it that was doctored up with some fading, saturation, contrasting, etc.
These are sketch renders from Poser 4. If you
take your scene and just hit Render:Sketch Style, it'll scribble your scene
in a nice pencil sketch. Pretty cool! If you go to Window:Sketch
Designer, a new control window will pop up, with a bunch of arcane settings
you can play with. Your best bet is to check out the presets it comes
with, and fiddle with them 'til you see something you like. Here are
some hints, though:
Check Colored Strokes to use the image colour. The
slider down at the bottom that says "Blend Colour" -- if you turn that up,
the sketch will render, then your image will appear under it, partly transparent.
So Blend Colour really kinda means 'sketch over image.' (See
#4.)
Don't let the Min and Max Width Line settings fool you
into thinking that there are skinny lines and fat lines. The Min width
is like the skinny part of the stroke (usually one or both ends) and the
Max is the 'belly' or fat part of each stroke.
Lo and Hi Brightness tell the sketcher to draw
the shadows and highlights, respectively. Set them to 0 and 256 to
draw the whole range of values. If the sketch render is leaving a lot
of white paper for your highlights (like on white swans), and you want to
try to get some details in there, turn up the Hi Brightness slider.
Oh, and to get those cool swirly things, like
on the Silky sketch and
Watercolour sketch.... turn off all but one of
the Light settings near the bottom. You may also need to turn up the
Stroke Length and Angle. (The Angle is how far of an angle the stroke
will meander through.)
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