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This is a picture of Raistlin Majere and TygerSong, two
on-line friends of mine. They get along quite famously, or perhaps
infamously. (If you ever hung out at Ye Olde Q-Link RyDIn, maybe you've
seen them.) Tyger can't stand magic, and Raistlin... well, he's developed
quite an intolerance for felines. Despite all that, they've managed
not to kill each other.
(Note: This sucker is long! But I did edit
it down from my original notes.)
Pencil, paper, ink; CorelDraw 4, Fractal Design Painter X2, Photoshop 2.5
I built the fireplace in CorelDraw, which has a nice
brick pattern. However, if you skew the square containing it, the pattern
remains stubbornly parallel to the picture plane. I exported it and
skewed the pieces with Photoshop. I gave the bricks a texture in FDPx2.
The wood on the mantle is a Corel Photo-texture fill, tiled to be very
long. I drew all the utensil stuff with simple shapes.
Circle with a chopped top for the pot, extruded ellipse
for the rim, another gradient-filled ellipse for the inside. A rounded corner
rectangle copied and rotated for the feet. I mirrored and distorted a copy
for the smaller pot. The handles are combined circles and arcs, with pieces
chopped out where the bar goes through them.
The bar is all rectangles and one drawn arc. I
added nodes at its tip to make it stick up realistically. I used a skewed
rectangle and its clone for the hinges. Cloning is great! I changed
the fill and pen and zap-zap, could see the results for both hinges.
The pans are 2 off-center ellipses with a rectangle handle.
I converted to curves and added some nodes to squeeze the tip round, combined
with an ellipse to make a hole, and enveloped a curve onto the whole thing.
The floor/walls were drawn as flat outlines in 'Shop
and embossed. In FDP, they got a rocky texture, and the whole background
was given a lighting effect. The fire was painted in 'Shop. First,
I painted in some yellowish flames, then used the smudge tool to fingerpaint
them upward. With the lasso, I grabbed the general area of the fire,
feathered it, and turned up the brightness until it was hot.
After the image was complete, I expanded the canvas in
'Shop. I gave each edge a fountain fill for shading. Then,
in FDP, I gave them that surface texture.
The plaque I drew in Corel. It's just a rounded
rectangle with two circles welded to it on the sides, and a custom gradient
fill. The whole thing was envelope-distorted to make it look as if
it is curved with the frame (not very successfully, I think). The text
didn't export well from 'Draw, so I erased it with 'Shop's clone tool and
re-did it. This is about the only instance where 'Shop was better than
'Draw for text.
I worked on several sketches for this. Originally,
it was going to be a black & white pencil drawing, but I decided to test
my compu-painting skills. (Especially when I thought about having to
create and draw a background!)
I traced the final sketch outline with a fine-point black
magic marker, and I scanned it in. I used the closed shapes to select
friskets in which to paint. Unlike my
NegaDuck picture, though, I feathered these
friskets and used some careful smudging to paint over the original lines.
I used gradated fills for Raistlin's hair and eye, and
parts of his robe. I also overpainted with lots of airbrush, and used straight
airbrush on his cowl. For his face, i used the paintbrush to lay down some
shadows and semi-transparent flesh tone (well, his flesh tone is bronzish)
over top of that. Then some Dodge & Burn for shadows and highlights did
wonders for him. Then i used some white to make the highest-lights stand
out. I did the same for his hand and arm. I also used the smudge tool to
rub the skin tones over the leftover black lines to get rid of them.
I didn't like Tyger's airbrushed fur, so I exported her
over to FDP. I cloned it and erased it so I could use tracing paper
to paint her without lines. I used a frisket to cover her cheek fur while
painting her neck, and one to cover her mouth area while painting her face,
but that was all. I turned on Wet Paint and used the Simple Water Brush.
(This gives the smoothest paint-job.) I painted her just as you'd expect,
some dark orangish-brown for shadows, orange and yellow-orange all layered
in nice watercolour. (When using tracing paper in FDP, remember to turn it
off so you can see what you're doing. Otherwise, you can only see 50%
of your paint and it looks too light! Don't overpaint!) I customized a slanted
brush for painting the black stripes. I painted those into the wet layer
without drying, also. After drying, I painted on the fur-texture highlights
with a texture-sensitive brush, rotating the picture so the paper texture
lined up with the fur direction.
Then I pasted the FDP painting into the outline of the
original, then selected the blank background and pasted the fireplace image
into it. And after several weeks of tweaking and screwing around, it
was done.
Whew!
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price list: This image is not currently available as a print. However, if you are interested in obtaining a print, please let me know. It will print at about 3 x 5". For contact details, click here.