My icons and artworks for Summer of Giles

[feliciacraft]

Yesterday was the first of my two posting days at Summer of Giles, and to make things interesting, I created icons and artworks for our favorite Watcher this time around.

My life has been rather crazy lately, and large contiguous chunks of free time for writing were the first to go out the window. But the wonderful thing about image editing is

Comments

[feliciacraft]

It's been a decade since I last compared different versions of Photoshop, and that was back when it was still shrinkwrapped software. It's all online now. I have no idea if there are variations.

Completely agree that it's much easier to get it right in camera than fix it later. Back when I shot slide film, I bracketed in one third stops for shots I really cared about, which got expensive pretty fast. But even so, some things are just not possible in camera, and I spent whole days in the darkroom working on a print at a time, burning and dodging the Ansel Adams way. Not that I ever had a fraction of his level of mastery, but the principles were the same, and Photoshop just made it incredibly inexpensive to experiment, and without toxic chemicals too.

I don't know if "layers" in image editing/illustration software all mean the same thing now, but you can't do much in Photoshop without using layers. Every tweak/edit/effect/mask is on its own layer, to be adjusted ad infinitum. I don't play in Photoshop much these days because it's the ultimate time sink. o_O

[torrilin]

Yeah, I was one of those kids who got good at drawing because pencils and paper make for a cheap hobby. And you look appropriately busy, so it's a good way to dodge getting yelled at for not paying attention or making a ruckus. No scanner tho, and no photoshop, because they were "too expensive".

I didn't pick up photography in any real way until a few years back when I got a digital camera. In film days, Dad would sometimes hand me his SLR and tell me where to stand and what to look for, so everything was all dialed in and I just had to know when to press the shutter. Stage a shot where he had to be in it, have me act as a fancy remote shutter trigger. But since I drew a lot, and there were black and whlte photos of everything, I picked up stuff by accident. Mostly not darkroom stuff tho, more in the composition vein.

I've done a fair bit across different programs, and layers are pretty consistent. The blend modes are named the way they are because they're describing a particular bit of math. I haven't always worked out what the hell the math involved is, but things like multiply and subtract are pretty obvious. And from the programming side, the whole reason to use a ton of layers is so you can do math on a grouped portion of the art. But from the drawing side, a lot of the time working out when to use another layer because this stuff should be grouped together for math later is... Not so straightforward. Studying up on how Disney did hand animation and how comics artists speed up drawing a page tho is very instructive.

That's why transform tools get me excited. Draw a character on a layer, don't worry about whether they fit in the background while you draw. Work big, add plenty of detail at an easy scale. Use transform so you can scale the drawing up or down into your background. If you've got distort transform tools, you can even draw stuff like you're facing it head on, and have the transform do the math to make it in perspective.

All very exciting, and it's a level of art math that easily fits in your pocket. And has a built in scanner. Technology is MAGIC. I would have killed for even half this stuff as a kid.