Yo, vom_marlowe!

[telophase]

This book on digital painting is available through interlibrary loan! I know, because I'm holding a copy of it. Which is due June 10th, more's the pity, so I think I'll be spending the weekend after A-Kon intently studying it.

Comments

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Ooooo. *rubs hands together in glee* So pretty!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'm going trhough it at the ref desk, and I have to say that I'd probably be disappointed if I'd paid $65 for it. It's more of a $30 book for me. :D Each artist (4) has several of their pieces and 2 tutorials on how they do their work, which is more interesting in a "how the artist thinks" way than in a "what techniques are they using" way, except for the last guy who has 4 and spends one talking about his Painter brushes. Yay. and they each invited several digital artists to put a picture in there, and they say what they like about it. It's nice as a wide collection of digital art - heavily on the fantasy & SF, but there's something from every genre.

BUT it's worth reading, just because it alerted me to the existence of this husband-and-wife team from Taiwan (http://gallery.aethereality.net/list/artist/43/). That gallery appears to be a ripoff of their out-of-print artbook (http://www.hlj.com/product/SGK87016), which I now covet like a coveting thing.

I shall spend the weekend after A-Kon playing with techniques from this, I think, then send it on back to the library from whence it came.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Oh dang it. You know I hate it when they do hand-wavy tutorials. Like, 'and then using a variety of brushes I applied colors in layers'. Waaah. I love the super technical details best. Give me brush types! Give me filters used! Etc etc. Sigh.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

They're like "I'm in Painter now and I used a brush at 50% opacity" and I'm all WHICH ONE OF THE MILLIONS???

But the last guy tells you specifically which brush he used and how he changed it.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

LOL, yes, exactly. *Which* brush for the love of god!

I am currently trying to pick a couple of poses to do in some different color styles. I want to use the same basic pose/underlying art, and color it several ways. (Yes, yes, I am so insane.) I'm sort of thinking dom!Aya, just for a change of pace. But then I think, wait! I could stick somebody in cat ears! Who would be most embarrassed by being cat-eared? I dunno. See, I really ought to be drawing my collaborator's awesome new characters, but that is scary and shit, so I am dashing off to madly procrastinate instead.

I haven't ever tried Painter. I'm finally starting to kick Photoshop into submission.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Painter is incredibly user-unfriendly and nonintuitive and a resource hog, but has the best brush-rendering engine and the best color picker/mixer out there. I've been messing with various incarnations since 2002 or so and haven't gotten very far, but I'm also not the sort of person who can start messing about in a program and figure out nifty ways of doing things for myself - my particular genius is, as with many other things, to build on what I pick up from other people.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

I've been in kind of a weird fuge state over Photoshop ever since I had a dream about it in which I figured out an intuitive way of doing tones. I haven't brought that particular dream to fruition, but I am getting closer.

If only we were independently wealthy, you know?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Oh, lord, yeah.

I have also figured out, that, true to form, I have purchased an upgraded version of OpenCanvas that no longer includes the functionalities that were the reason I bought the damn thing in the first place. This happened to me with Painter 7, which dropped the Watercolor brushes in favor of something else that didn't do what I wanted to do, and they didn't put it back until 8 or 9. I've got 9 now, but have lost the desire to do that which I wanted to do before with the Watercolors.

OpenCanvas 1.1 is supposed to be free, and I had a copy of it once before my hard drive died, and it should be floating around somewhere. I need to find it and see if I can work out the blending modes and the actual blending techniques that I wanted to do.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

And 2 of the artists picked pieces by Vovo Tzeng (http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/database/art/list.pl?gallery=4508) to be in the book.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Lovely. Just so soft and beautiful--luminous. *sighs in envy*

[cyancat.livejournal.com]

Oh, I feel like going to the library right now and requesting that book. It looks loverly.

I just wish I was at college still and I could get it free through the library there. Our in town library..... I dunno...

But here's hoping.