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Art "Reboot"
16 years ago
ZOMG! An art journal and not some emo rant. The crocodile must be sick.
Today I decided to forget about all the unfinished sketches that I've made in the past, and start again from zero with new stuff. Just like a computer gets slow when its memory is cluttered with lots of stuff, I've been feeling that all of those images from the past were slowing me down. It's like I want to work on many of them, but either not being able to decide which one to work on, or not being able to do much with those I chose.
Those into writing probably can identify with the feeling. You make a passage or a scene for your story that sounds kinda okay, but later on you find out that it simply holds the story from being better. But it is your "baby"; you don't want to get rid of it. In the end, you have to delete what you wrote, no matter how much effort was put into it, and you end up writing something that turns out to be a lot better.
But don't worry; the sketches are not gone permanently. I simply erased them from my brain's "RAM". The "files" will still be in a pile, sort of like an external drive holding old stuff that you want to keep but don't connect to your computer. Perhaps once in a while I may decide to pull out one one of them, but rather than finish it, I would redraw it from scratch, in a completely different way.
Ditching all those sketches all has been rather liberating. Immediately I felt the desire to draw, even trying to draw in a completely different way from what I've been doing. For lack of a better name, I'll call it "angular curves". It's like using quick, short strokes to draw parts of the body, making look it kinda angular in parts, yet I find it more pleasing to my eyes. Not to mention I end up working on them faster.
Now... if I could only color the pencils without having to ink. That kind of "OS upgrade" I definitely do want for my coloring.
And I know exactly what you mean, I'm trying the same thing. Take a fresh approach, try new things, ect. n.n
Best of luck with it, man! I look forward to seeing what you can do! :P
What I want to do is leave my images as pencils and color those. Somehow it seems (to me) that my images look less "alive" after I ink them compared to the original pencil lines.
It's possible to color pencils, but it's a bitch in my experience.
But instead of inking, when I scan the image in, I have an image level setting. This setting the makes the dark marks darker and you can make the bright parts brighter. I usually don't like doing that though because the lines appear jagged and I don't like to use ink anyways so I'm stuck with using vector art, like with the pen and pencil tool.
Oh yeah, I used to delete everything too and shared up work that was a year old. But I think that practice will work for everybody.
Some of the best advice I ever got was to throw away your portfolio every year and start over.
Though thats not to say you couldnt go back and rework old ideas if you find you still like the concept.
First, you just clean up the sketch as best you can, make the lines the way you want them. You can make more precise alterations in photoshop, but try to remove the excess lines.
After you get it into photoshop, do the usual thing of switching to greyscale, and then adjusting the brightness and contrast. (Try to do it in a way that keeps the background white, and lines black. Avoid grey. Sadly im not really sure the best method of that.)
After switching back to rgb color, if the layer the linework is on is locked, duplicate the layer. Either way, make sure that there is a layer with your finished sketch on it that you can edit.
Then, edit the properties of the layer. (Double click, right click, or the drop down list just above the layer in the layer window.) Change its mode to "multiply" so that everything in that layer is only used to darken the layers under it.
Lock that layer, and make a layer under it for the color.
Now you dont have to do any kind of cleaning for the sketched linework. You dont have to erase the white, redraw the black, or any of that time consuming stuff. You will however have to use the brush as bucket fill and magic selector dont like this method.
I absolutely love using the multiply and screen modes for layers in photoshop.
Im glad to see that your working on new methods of doing things and i hope it all works out for you. Hehe and i hope you find advice from a lower leveled artist usefull to ya.