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Posts tagged as “Artworks”

[drawing every day post seven]: gotta hand it to you

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If you want to get better at drawing, you really need to treat it like any other skill, and practice ahead of your performance. We may learn by doing, but you don't get enough learning time or variety just from actually performing the task. Basketball players need to cross-train in addition to shooting hoops - not just play games. Chess masters practice with coaches. Writers scribble in their notebooks. And artists sketch.

My horse drawing book was too big to fit in my bookbag, so today's exercise is from the cover of Drawing Hands and Feet by Ken Goldman.

-the Centaur

[drawing every day 2024 post six]: a distorted pony

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More practice from Foster's book. I was shy on time, so I didn't start with the proportions diagram, but with the parts diagram, and therefore the proportions of my parts are a bit off. But, it's a step.

-the Centaur

[drawing every day 2024 post five]: a third pony trick

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Well, logically speaking, if I want to "plan for success" in my art, and I've drawn a centauress with some hooves that I don't like, I should focus on getting better at drawing hooves. From Foster's "Drawing Horses" book, sketched in my little "One Trick Pony" sketchbook.

-the Centaur

P.S. I am totes going back and renaming the last art post "a second pony trick".

[twenty twenty four day five]: plan for success, but for art

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One of the productivity tools I use is a technique called "plan for success." I mostly use it for todo lists, and for that topic it's worth a blog post of its own, but, briefly, when taking on a task, I like to start off with a "plan for success" sheet where I list:

  • What the project is (e.g, going to Dragon Con)
  • Where I currently am on the project (e.g, about to leave, just arrived)
  • What the context of the next work block is (the next 4-5 days, or the next month)
  • What success would look like (e.g., attend all my panels, meet all my friends, hit the dealer's room)

Once I have that, I start listing todo items, then categorizing them into the four Stephen Covey quadrants - Urgent and Important, Not Urgent yet Important, Urgent yet Unimportant, and Not Urgent and Not Important. Making sure that the "Not Urgent yet Important" stuff gets done is the hardest part, so I usually tranche the TODOs into "do immediately, do today, do before I leave".

But the whole "plan for success" idea came from an artist - I don't remember who - talking about the difference between professionals and amateurs. An amateur may produce great art, they said, but on accident, even if they're skilled, because they don't know how they're doing what they're doing. A professional, on the other hand, makes a plan to ensure that their art piece succeeds. They may not always succeed at it - plenty of professional artists have to start pieces over - but they don't paint themselves into a metaphorical corner as much because they've taken steps to ensure the piece comes out well - for example, by getting reference art, doing perspective or construction lines, or practice drawings.

I wonder if this idea also works for learning art? Let's find out.

-the Centaur

Pictured: My drawing desk and books on drawing.

[drawing every day 2024 post four]: tricking the pony again

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Let's see you do that, ChatGPT / DALL-E! Wait, what happens if we try it?

Ha-ha! Three strikes, you're out! (ChatGPT tried and failed three times to generate this image). DALL-E may be a better renderer than me, but it isn't better at imagining the things that I want to imagine.

No plans on giving up drawing soon.

-the Centaur

P.S. This is Porsche the Centaur again, this time with construction lines drawn in pencil, later erased. The upside-down nature made it hard to get the hooves right, and I didn't want to re-draw it, so it could have come out better. But! It went much faster practicing in the smaller "One Trick Pony" notebook. Onward!

[twenty twenty four day four]: there’s some problems on that boat

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Okay, I'm going to start out with the best of the images that I produced trying to create Porsche the Centaur using ChatGPT's DALL-E interface. The above is ... almost Porsche, though her ears are too high (centaurs in the Alliance universe have ears a little more like an elf, but mobile like a dog's). And, after some coaxing, the ChatGPT / DALL-E hybrid managed to produce a halfway decent character sheet:

But both of these images came after several tries. And when I tried to get ChatGPT / DALL-E to generate a front and back view of the same character sheet, it just disintegrated into random horse and human parts:

Similarly, the initial centaur image came only after many prompt tweaks and false starts, like this one:

There are legitimate questions about whether the current round of AI art generators were trained on data taken without permission (they almost certainly were), whether they could displace human artists (they almost certainly will), and whether they will have destructive effects on human creativity (the jury is out on this one, as some forms of art will wane while new forms of art will wax).

But never let anyone tell you they've worked out all the bugs yet. These systems are great renderers at the image patch level, but their notion of coherence leaves a lot to be desired, and their lack of structural knowledge means their ability to creatively combine is radically limited to surface stylistics.

One day we'll get there. But it will take a lot of work.

-the Centaur

[drawing every day 2024 day one]: the doctor above ruby road

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Drawn from a paused frame of "The Church on Ruby Road", the first full episode of the 15th Doctor.

-the Centaur

P.S. I apparently was wrong: I thought I had kept up Drawing Every Day for 103 days in 2021, but actually it was 205 days that started in late, late 2020, with a brief spurt in 2023. So this is the third time I've tried it! Best of luck Dr. Francis on beating your past winning streak.

[seventy-seven] minus eighty-three: mondrian cat

centaur 0

Just Loki, on the back patio, looking at a leaf ... with a little added magic (full size).

Producing this relatively simple image actually involved a fair number of Photoshop tools, several of which are new "generative AI" tools, but many others of which are just plain old machine vision magic:

  • Layers (stacked images) used extensively to save original or alternate versions of things.
  • Perspective Warp (a pretty impressive tool in its own right) to distort the image into a rectilinear shape.
  • Content Aware Fill (a new Photoshop generative AI tool) to extend the warped stone tile to fill the frame.
  • The Clone Stamp tool to complete the grout lines which were only partially filled in by Content Aware Fill.
  • Quick Selection tool to isolate Loki and the leaf into their own layers for later.
  • Selection > Modify > Expand and Selection > Modify > Feather to get the fine hairs on Loki's boundary.
  • Generative Fill (another generative AI tool) to eliminate many of the leaves.
  • More Clone Stamp to eliminate more leaves and minor imperfections.
  • Layer duplication to create an original and to-be-colored tile backdrop.
  • Swatches, the Rectangular Marquee tool, the Polygonal Lasso, and the Fill tool to create the colored tile.
  • Color Burn layer blend mode (with 57% opacity) to create the primary Mondrian effect.
  • Another layer duplication to create a new version of the colored tile to enhance the grout.
  • Filter Gallery > Colored Pencil which fortuitously greyed out the colored tile and colorized the grout.
  • Magic Wand tool set to Contiguous and 0% Tolerance to cut out the greyed tiles from the grout layer.
  • Darker Color layer blend mode to enhance the grout.
  • Drop Shadow on the leaf to make it stand out.
  • Duplicating Loki into a layer with Darken to make him stand out against the colored grout.
  • Adding Inner Glow modified to Darken as well (with a Choke of 14 and Size of 87) to eliminate some of the white halo around Loki.
  • Adding a second Loki layer, Normal blend with 50% opacity, to get his sheen.

I like how it came out, especially given how it started:

I looked at that and thought, "You know, that's almost a Mondrian backdrop" and I was right!

-the Centaur