So I’m sure that there’s at least someone out there who wonders what criteria I use for selecting images to draw.
If there indeed are any of you out there wondering that, this is your lucky day (At least in this limited respect; I have no control over how the rest of you luck turns out, so if your cat gets run over, you flush your wedding ring down the toilet, you get fired, or you have any other kind of mishap(s), I claim no responsibility whatsoever.).
And if there's no one out there who wonders, well...tough.
Throughout the following I am primarily talking about my reproductions of existing images, whether in my conventional style or the experimental Nagel and Nagel-ish (more on that one in a bit), styles, and not about my original images, though it does apply to some of my original images that are modeled off of an existing image (like the two Fontaine images I’ve posted that were inspired by images of Angelina Jolie, and were subsequently modeled after).
In any case, what I’m talking about doesn’t apply to my wholly original images, which are pulled entirely from my mind, though I seldom create those these days anyway.
In any case, there are actually several different factors that, individually or in combination, determine whether or not I think an image is worth reproducing, and here they are in a semi-categorized fashion.
A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words
This one is basically my gut-level reaction to an image. There may be something about it that just, for want of a better term, speaks to me.
Precisely what that is can vary.
Sometimes it’s the outfit the person is wearing. Sometimes it’s the expression on the person’s face, or the style of the hair, or the pose. Sometimes it’s a combination.
Take the image of Jessica Simpson in the striped dress as an example.
There are several things about the image that drew me (no pun intended) to it. For one thing, I should just take this opportunity to mention that the woman is FREAKIN’ HOT. Yeah, there’s something a little…off about her face, like maybe her mouth is a little too wide or something, but it doesn’t really detract from her hotness. They might be a little wide, but those lips are full and luscious, she has great eyes, nice hair, and, oh yeah, a tremendous rack. I mean, just look at the size of those things. Most of her body weight must be concentrated RIGHT THERE.
*Ahem* Okay, anyway, moving on…
Secondary to her overall attractiveness, I really liked the dress she was wearing in the image. While I wasn’t thrilled about their color, I did like the style of the shoes (out of faithfulness to the original, I opted not to change the color in my version).
Also, I thought it was a great pose.
So this was an instance in which pretty much all of the factors about the overall appearance of the image made me want to reproduce it.
That’s obviously not always the case, though.
For example, there’s an image that I once did of Britney Spears in which she’s wearing a really ugly dress that I don’t like. It’s gaudy and it’s an awful color. However, I really, really liked the pose and the expression on her face, so I opted to reproduce it. Ultimately I made some changes to the dress in my version, but overall I stuck to at least the spirit of the original, even though I found it repulsive.
Because It’s There
Often cited as the reason to climb a mountain (I once saw a cartoon of a guy descending into a deep valley and saying to an onlooker “Because it’s NOT there.”), the point is that fact of its existence, whether “it” is a mountain or a photograph of Jessica Simpson, poses a challenge that is, in some way, impossible to resist.
Going around it, or not drawing it, simply isn’t an option.
Look at those pain in the ass stripes on that dress. I knew that reproducing them would provide some amount of artistic challenge, if for no other reason than recreating them would require a fair investment in time and patience.
Ultimately, that’s why I opted to draw this image.
Duh, a Challenge I Can DO
There’s an episode of “The Simpsons” in which Bart, as punishment, is sent to a military school. Lisa, feeling dissatisfied with the failure of the public school system to challenge her intellect, decides that she will also be attending the military school.
Being the first girl to attend the school causes a great deal of friction, causing Lisa to be totally isolated, and the physical demands nearly prove too much for her.
As she’s struggling to perform a final, grueling task and is about to admit failure, Bart reminds her that she was looking for a challenge. She responds, “Duh, a challenge I can DO.”
(As an aside, that episode contains one of my favorite lines ever. Earlier, when Lisa is talking to Principal Skinner and demanding a more challenging curriculum, he responds, “We COULD make things more challenging, but then the stupider children would be in here complaining, furrowing their brows in a vain attempt to understand the situation.”)
Lisa’s point relates to my selection process as well. While I do look for something challenging, there are limits to what I’m willing to take on, based on the limits (or at least my perception of what my limits are) of my talent, skill, time, and patience.
There are some images that are just too tricky, or that I feel that my best efforts to reproduce them would be half-assed at best.
Some image elements that will deter me include (but are not limited to) lace, excessive moisture/perspiration on the person in the image, and overly complex patterns on clothing.
Another big deterrent I run into is the image file itself. For example, an image that’s only 80 pixels by 80 pixels is too small to work from, so if it’s not big enough for me to see details, particularly if I lose detail if I try zooming in, I just can’t really work with it.
Poor overall image quality is also a problem, as are some of the “watermarks” that content “owners” place on their images.
(I put “owners” in quotes, since so many people out on the Web think that they own an image just because they put it up on their site. I’m sorry, but taking an image that you downloaded from the Maxim site and putting your name in huge letters across it, blotting out most of the image, doesn’t make it yours. Neither does scanning in an image from a magazine, for that matter.).
I usually gauge my minimum size requirements based on the height, since, depending on what the image is of, the width can vary considerably. 600 pixels seems to be about the bare minimum, and that’s assuming that the actual image takes up most of that. For example, a picture of Britney Spears that’s 2,000 pixels high by 1,000 pixels wide isn’t all that useful if Britney herself only takes up a total of 400 pixels in the image.
The best images to work from are HDTV captures, and scans done at about 300 DPI.
Given that most monitors only display 72 DPI, the 300 is excessive, and frequently I will resample it down, but it does give me some wiggle room, and works well if I ever want to print it out.
Still, all of that being said, no matter how many problems there may be with an image, or how impossible it may seem, I might still persevere and boldly give it the old college try…there’s just a really good chance that the end result will completely suck ass and that no one will ever get to see it.
Referring back to the Jessica Simpson image, though, there was an additional challenge that nearly made me consider not trying to draw it.
That challenge was none other than her husband, Nick Lachey (damn husbands are always causing problems).
In addition to Jessica standing there looking hot in her striped dress with her foot up on the wall, in the original image you could also find Nick standing there taking up space.
In the movie “Fair Game,” Cindy Crawford made her less than auspicious acting debut. It’s a lousy movie, but there is a scene in it which, if the random Baldwin brother weren’t in the way, the movie would have been TOTALLY worth the cost of admission.
(I’m talking about the sex scene on the train, when Cindy is lying naked on the hood of the car and we get a shot of the random Baldwin brother’s bare ass as Cindy wraps her legs around him. If you’ve seen the movie, image that particular camera angle sans Baldwin, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.)
It’s often the case that a man gets in the way. How many drunken frat jackasses have ruined a perfectly good “Girls Gone Wild” shot by sticking their drunken, dumbass faces between the camera and the stuff we want to see?
When will the damn men get out of the way?
Sorry, started to go off on a tangent there.
The point is, though, that Nick Lachey was in the original image doing nothing more than taking up space and ruining what was otherwise a great image.
Luckily he was mostly located behind Jessica (…okay, no, I won’t make a lewd comment here), however, enough of him was still in the way, obscuring the view of Jessica.
What I had to decide in looking at the image and considering whether or not I was going to attempt it, was whether I had enough skill to remove Nick from the image and extrapolate well enough to imaginatively fill in the blanks where he had been.
Ultimately, obviously, I decided to give it a shot.
I’m undecided as to how well I succeeded. Overall, I think the image turned out okay, but I think that as you look at it you can probably tell where I had to draw on my imagination rather than making use of what was actually there.
Maybe not, though.
In any case, this has been a glimpse into the process by which I decide whether or not I’m going to reproduce an image.
It’s much the same process when I’m drawing one of my original images modeled on a reference photo, though often the pose is the primary consideration, since I often don’t reproduce the outfit or the hair, and if it’s one of my characters, such as Fontaine, features and expressions usually need to be altered.
For those sort of images, it’s usually a question of whether or not the source image reminds me of a particular character (as was the case with the Angelina Jolie Fontaine images).
You may be wondering, as the Nagel Experiment continues on, how I decide whether or not I’m going to do an image in the Nagel style.
It’s much the same process. In the case of the Jessica Simpson image, the stripes seemed in keeping with Nagel’s style, as did the pose, so…
Beyond that, though, as the Nagel style is considerably simpler, I decided to go that route with this image as another “rough draft.” It’s my intention to recreate this image in my conventional style, and in the other style I mentioned.
The “Nagel-ish” style is something very similar to the style of that last Fontaine image, the pseudo-comic book style. I’m hoping to play around with that style a little more.
In any case, drawing this image in the Nagel style gave me the opportunity to try removing Nick and to create something of a detailed sketch.
That’s the theory, anyway. I’m not sure I’ll get around to the other versions.
Besides, the Nagel-ish style is surprisingly tricky, for much the same reasons that the Nagel style is a challenge. It’s very hard to not fall into my conventional, hyper-detailed style.
It is, in essence, the style I’ve been trying to develop for 10+ years (since before I created Fontaine), the thought of which led me to the current Nagel Experiment in the first place.
My main impetus for attempting to create this style is to find a balance between simplicity and detail that would allow me to satisfy my desire to put a lot of detail into an image, but also save time and increase productivity.
I actually tried playing around with it last year when I was attempting to create an online comic book, but I never quite got it down, and, like most of my ideas, the online comic idea got set aside,.
In any case, I’ve rambled on more than enough, though I did warn you in the last post that I would be discussing the image “at length.”
So you can’t say I didn’t warn you.
No comments:
Post a Comment