Saturday, January 01, 2011

Weighing The Options

The other day I found a random picture on reddit.com that I thought was pretty sexy and would be an interesting challenge to draw, given that it had a relatively complex background, was an image of more than one person, and, being a cell phone picture, was very low-res and poorly-lit, meaning that I would have to rely on my ability to extrapolate details.
After downloading it, I decided, "Yeah...I probably can't do it," and was prepared to scrap the whole idea.
Still, the gauntlet had been thrown, and eventually I decided that I would accept the challenge and got to work.
Right off the bat - though I didn't realize it at the time - I fucked up.
There was something about the pose and the overall shape of one of the women in the reference image that had an Alan Davis quality, so I decided that I would try* to carry tha through in my picture, and I decided to start with the line art (normally I work backwards, starting by blocking out the basic shapes in flat colors, then going in and adding the highlights and shading, then the details, and then the overall line work).
The problem, I came to realize, was that I'd put all of the line art on one layer. This was a problem because I'd done it all in black, and I wanted to change the color of some of the lines in the finished product. Having it alll on one layer didn't make that impossible, just a lot more challenging.
Ultimately, I got to a point at which I was just sick of working on it, and said, "It's not good enough, but...good enough."
But it was eating away at me to the extent that I decided to revisit the image, taking out the line art and pasting it into Illustrator to try to separate it.
Eventually I got it to a point that I was happier with it, but I still wasn't entirely happy, and so I did some experimenting and came up with several options.
Now, however, I can't really decide which option I should go with.
That's where you come in.
To avoid bogging down this page with multiple images, I'm providing a link to the Picasaweb album containing all of the options, and the original source image:


Kissing Options


Check out the album - as you can see from the thumbnail above, the image is NSFWish - decide which one you like best, and let me know, either in a comment here or in the album.
What will be the end result of you voicing your opinion? I don't know. Probably nothing.
On the other hand, unless you're Scott, you probably won't bother commenting anyway, so what difference does it make?

*"Try" is the operative word here, and, of course, I should probably heed the wisdom of Yoda on this...

2 comments:

Merlin T Wizard said...

I opted to post in the individual pics in the album. Seemed a little easier to comment on them there.

Jon Maki said...

I figured I could count on you for some comments.