I don't like Halo. The story leaves me wanting and the Master Chief is kind of an empty shell. And he's supposed to be. Bungie's whole point was to put YOU behind his visor. You are supposed to feel like the Master Chief. Well, I don't. I like it when I know who I'm playing as. Well, who would make a kick-ass Master Chief? I'll tell you who:
Brock Samson.
Incidentally, if you don't know who I'm talking about, you need to rent The Venture Bros. It is the best cartoon I've seen in a very long time. So anyway, let's talk about the picture. It is entirely digital art, dear readers. I know I promised that Cthulhu would be, but I got sidetracked. Basically, I did a whole lot of things to get this far. First, I found this picture on the Interweb to serve as a base pose. Actually, I should clarify: I found a different, larger version of that image. God, that picture is small. Anyway, I then found a picture of the Master Chief (also thanks to Google Image Search) to serve as the model for the armor. Made a new layer and starting building the armor, layer by layer. Bodysuit, big pieces of armor, smaller details, and then his head. Oh lord, his head.
I was getting nowhere fast with his head. I tried resizing my image and starting over with the head, but I just couldn't match the sheer awesomeness of Brock Samson with my own trembling hand, so I just found a picture of his noggin online, matched its size to what looked right here, and pasted it over my sad, sorry attempt. Then I added a new layer and drew some lines of continuity between the body and the head, erasing some bits here and there. I think it's turning out nicely. I employed the same methodology for the Energy Sword (Brock doesn't use guns--just knives), but it was more complicated. I did a whole lot of erasing, rotating, and resizing to get it to match my drawing. I'm still not super-happy with it, and I'll probably end up tracing over it in a new layer, which would also make it match the blackline of the main drawing.
Gotta figure out a background. Erik suggested that Brock be holding his helmet in his other hand (which is why I haven't drawn it in), which would be nice.
Anyway, as my first piece of totally-digital art, it ain't half bad so far!
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4 comments:
Just remember -- you can duplicate layers, so when you redo the energy sword save the original layer in case you might need it again.
And if you want to darken up the line work try going to the adjustments menu and using a Levels adjustment on the layers (or the duplicate layers -- if you've got the memory always save unchanged versions of your root material) and mess around with the controls.
Levels affects black, white, and the overall value of an image. I've scanned in pencil drawings, darkened the lines and brightened the background using levels, and then cleaned 'em up. The results are as good as ink.
So you're drawing straight into the machine through your tablet? Cool!
If the mini-Photoshop your using has layer modes/blending modes I can pass on some nice tricks when you get to the coloring stage...
Sheer. Awesome.
Well, I'm using Corel. Haven't actually touched Photoshop Elements yet.
I can't wait to see the final product.
Big fan already. The actual brock head is a nice touch.
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