I have hopefully painted out the photoeyness now, and the Christmas card project is complete. Yes, the shadow is a little too perfect for a painting, but not distractingly so in my opinion. I am 97% happy. Mission accomplished.
I'll shut up about it now until I post the whole thing at Christmas.
5 comments:
That too-perfect shadow shall haunt me until the end of my days.
Good grief! 97%!!! That's as good as it gets, man! (Anything above that and you're only deluding yourself.)
Great card!
there's a mitten on his tail!
-->> ..god he's so coooooooooooooool. . >v<
I agree about roughing up the shadow a little, since nothing else in the image is that crisp and perfect, but otherwise, I'm totally fooled. It looks like it was painted in photoshop, but painted for sure.
I've recently been faced with a similar dilemma, and have also caved. I hate drawing perspective. Hate it hate it. So I started using models in Google sketch-up. I draw my figures and sketch out the scene, and pose the models to correspond, then I trace-up the models and ink the image freehand, adding details and making the geometry a little less perfect as I go. The effect is indistinguishable from something done by hand, takes less time, and looks great.
You have to have a working knowledge of perspective to make something like this work--the figures still have to look like they belong there, anything else you draw has to correspond to the vanishing points of the models, You have to make sure the scale is consistent. It's not a substitute for knowing how perspective works, just s short cut.
Is it cheating? I don't know. People who do go to the trouble to measure out all those vanishing points get a similar result--unlike other CGI stuff--using a computer font for lettering, computer textures--there's absolutely no way to tell a computer was involved. To some people perspective comes really naturally. For me it's like pulling teeth. I don't use crazy correct perspective all the time--sometimes it makes things look way too perfect--but when I want to make a convincing space with cars and multiple figures, sketch-up is my friend.
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