Its Only 365 Days
A VECTOR DARKLY
I remember when A Scanner Darkly came out. The trailers looked amazing. I am however, glad I waited for it to come out on DVD, because the movie was a total disappointment. I think I ended up falling asleep twice, on two separate occasions trying to watch it. What I did fall in love with is the visuals in the movie. It was like each character was painted in almost like a very realistic cartoon.
For people who do not do photoshop works or have never attempted it, I assure you, it IS hard work. Some of my more complicated creations have taken upwards of 4 and 5 hours to complete. That doesn't even include the ones, that have taken days because I'll start and come back and work on it later. You really have to be dedicated to your vision in order to make one of these happen. With regular photography you can just snap an image and it works or doesn't, but PS works depend on tiny tiny details all matching up, coming together, to create an illusion of something that does not exist or can't exist in reality. I was told recently by someone in internetlandia that one of my pieces didn't even look all that complicated to do and that they couldn't see the work or effort put in to it. It pissed me off. It did. I wrote back that if it was so easy to do, then everyone would do it like the millions and millions of sunset pictures out there, but this takes time, effort, dedication, perserverance, hard work to transform something in a way that someone has the balls to say, doesn't even look like effort was put in to it.
(Takes deep cleansing breath)
Let me preface this by saying, this is awful. This was my first ever attempt at this, and I am in the process of learning so no judgy faces.
I'm learning to do vector drawing a la a Scanner Darkly. This is me trying to figure it out. Some parts are making more sense than others and of course this is terribly riddled with errors. I've never used Illustrator before, and now, ahhhhhhhhhhh, something else new to learn. It never ends with this medium and that's what I like about it. There are no limits to what you can do. I'm pretty sure there are programs and apps that can do this stuff, but there is nothing satisfying about just plugging it in and having it pop up. You didn't create that, someone else did. They get the credit for their artistic and technological genius.
The hardest thing about vector drawing is unlike my layers here, you have so many different tones to the skin. This was a total cop out in that I just dropper selected one tone en masse, but to really take this effect to its full potential, like paint by numbers, you must really go in, piece by piece and select the true colors and tones of your original image. This is kind of embarressing, because this is a rather simple image color wise, no distractions of background, etc., but this (laughs) is not really turning out the way its supposed to. I'll admit, I skipped like a 100 thousand steps along the way just so I could get a general idea of what the end product would look like, but in order to get this done correctly, you first need to physically draw out each feature for the outline in the rough cut, then draw out the larger features using much more exaggerated line, then go in and create a layer for literally every part of the image---hair, lips, eyes, nose, clothes, background and then break those down to sub layers for each tone. Then manipulate the lines again. It's quite a process, one I'll be working on now with a different image. The hand on the head I think is a bit too much for me, specifically the fingers, in this my first attempt, so maybe on down the road, I'll post one with much much better results.
A VECTOR DARKLY
I remember when A Scanner Darkly came out. The trailers looked amazing. I am however, glad I waited for it to come out on DVD, because the movie was a total disappointment. I think I ended up falling asleep twice, on two separate occasions trying to watch it. What I did fall in love with is the visuals in the movie. It was like each character was painted in almost like a very realistic cartoon.
For people who do not do photoshop works or have never attempted it, I assure you, it IS hard work. Some of my more complicated creations have taken upwards of 4 and 5 hours to complete. That doesn't even include the ones, that have taken days because I'll start and come back and work on it later. You really have to be dedicated to your vision in order to make one of these happen. With regular photography you can just snap an image and it works or doesn't, but PS works depend on tiny tiny details all matching up, coming together, to create an illusion of something that does not exist or can't exist in reality. I was told recently by someone in internetlandia that one of my pieces didn't even look all that complicated to do and that they couldn't see the work or effort put in to it. It pissed me off. It did. I wrote back that if it was so easy to do, then everyone would do it like the millions and millions of sunset pictures out there, but this takes time, effort, dedication, perserverance, hard work to transform something in a way that someone has the balls to say, doesn't even look like effort was put in to it.
(Takes deep cleansing breath)
Let me preface this by saying, this is awful. This was my first ever attempt at this, and I am in the process of learning so no judgy faces.
I'm learning to do vector drawing a la a Scanner Darkly. This is me trying to figure it out. Some parts are making more sense than others and of course this is terribly riddled with errors. I've never used Illustrator before, and now, ahhhhhhhhhhh, something else new to learn. It never ends with this medium and that's what I like about it. There are no limits to what you can do. I'm pretty sure there are programs and apps that can do this stuff, but there is nothing satisfying about just plugging it in and having it pop up. You didn't create that, someone else did. They get the credit for their artistic and technological genius.
The hardest thing about vector drawing is unlike my layers here, you have so many different tones to the skin. This was a total cop out in that I just dropper selected one tone en masse, but to really take this effect to its full potential, like paint by numbers, you must really go in, piece by piece and select the true colors and tones of your original image. This is kind of embarressing, because this is a rather simple image color wise, no distractions of background, etc., but this (laughs) is not really turning out the way its supposed to. I'll admit, I skipped like a 100 thousand steps along the way just so I could get a general idea of what the end product would look like, but in order to get this done correctly, you first need to physically draw out each feature for the outline in the rough cut, then draw out the larger features using much more exaggerated line, then go in and create a layer for literally every part of the image---hair, lips, eyes, nose, clothes, background and then break those down to sub layers for each tone. Then manipulate the lines again. It's quite a process, one I'll be working on now with a different image. The hand on the head I think is a bit too much for me, specifically the fingers, in this my first attempt, so maybe on down the road, I'll post one with much much better results.