Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
Cover Art
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
I have two choices when it comes to creating a cover for The Winds of Winter: hire an artist, or create it myself.
Way back in the day, I worked in acrylics, and I got to the point where I could do a reasonable job of painting what I was looking at. (Astronomical scenes were a specialty.) But I haven’t transferred all of this skill over to the digital media I work in now. Some of it, yes — I created all the graphics for this site. But I need some practice with Painter’s brushes to get up to speed. (I’ve been working with Painter off and on since version 2.0. I got a demo with my first digitizer, and was hooked. In those days, the software came in a paint can.)
I also need to improve my figure drawing, if I’m going to paint a cover. That’s always needed work, in any medium.
I spent my leisure time this weekend working through Painter tutorials. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to handle a cover painting by the time I need one, but it won’t hurt to try. If I don’t get there, I found an artist whose work interests me.
Visualizing Your Characters: FaceGen
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
Here’s what I’ve been up to over the last week (well, part of it, anyway): modelling in FaceGen.
FaceGen Modeller is 3D software that allows you, with some tweaking, to build your character’s face, assuming they look generally human. I want to buy it ($300), and I want to buy the Customizer package so I can build my own props (another $300). Problem is, last time I shook my wallet, only moths flew out. I guess they ate my money.
So I’m using the free demo, which goes a fair way to showing you what the software can do. You can’t export your 3D model from the demo, and the selection of props (that’s basically hair and eyeglasses) is tiny. But if you’re handy with Painter or Photoshop, you can save a 2D image, get rid of the SI on the forehead, and draw in the hair.
This is my best effort at rendering Shazemar, main character of The Winds of Winter, to date. It shows you the model and the first control panel. Shazemar’s hair is grey, not chestnut, and it isn’t that long, especially in back. If I could afford a license and the Customizer, I could go into another 3D package and model the correct hair to import. Since I can’t afford it now, when I’m really happy with my model, I’ll tell the program to render without the hair, and add hair of the right color and length in Painter. (I see the Debroans as a brachycephalic people whose facial characteristics probably would suggest a mixture of European and Asian ancestry, if they lived on our Earth.)
Shazemar modelled in the FaceGen 3.3 Demo
Unless you start from a photo (I didn’t have a suitable photo), Generate tab is where you set the most important characteristics of the face. You’ll then individualize it with the Shape and Texture controls (and there are a lot of them!), and you may use the Tween and Genetic tabs to refine it. The Morph tab, by the way, doesn’t do what you probably think if you’re not used to 3D jargon — you can use it to create facial expressions and lip positions for speech. I haven’t done anything with the View and Camera controls, since the defaults are pretty good, and since you can grab the head and drag it to different orientations in the viewport.
Some more models (and I’ve done very little to individualize these; they’re close to the ‘default face’):
East Indian woman, smiling
Southeast Asian woman
African man
Older European man, no hair, photographic texture
The program can’t automatically generate realistic wrinkles with the age slider, but the demo comes with some photographic textures you can use that are helpful particularly for older faces. Hairstyle can change one’s impression of the shape of the face and head, so having only two available in the demo can throw you off if you’re not used to thinking of headshape without hair.
There are a lot of sliders in the Shape and Texture panels, which can be overwhelming until you get a feel for how they work. Your most important sliders for shaping a face are the age, sex, and race in the Generate tab, Head (thin/wide) in the Shape tab, and Skin Shade in the Shape tab. After that, it’s Shape: Mouth (wide/thin), Mouth – Lips (thin/thick), Nose – bridge (shallow/deep), Nose – bridge (short/long), Nose (short/long), Nose tilt (down -up). Then, in Texture, all the Eyebrow sliders: that’s how you shape the eyebrows. If you get the head width, nose, mouth, and eyebrows somewhere near where you want them, then you can start refining the head with the other parameters.
Save intermediate results often. The program has never crashed on me, but I have often wanted to go back to an earlier version of the model, after making changes that took me down the wrong path. Also, remember this: faces that are considered the most attractive are often close to the human average. If you’ve made a mess of a face by making some part of it too extreme, you can sometimes get back to a better model to work from by moving the sliders that are farthest from zero back toward it.
Showing Off Artwork
Sunday, September 6th, 2009
While contemplating changes to the beginning of Dragon Winter, I scribbled a map and checked over the geography; and then I decided to draw a more presentable map. I don’t need a presentable map to finish the poem. I do need some time to think about the story, though, and map-drawing is a good way to accomplish that.
This brought to mind some maps I’ve made in the past, and other fiction-related artwork. Here’s one I created for a roleplaying campaign, years ago:
A Map of Aerhengard
And here’s a portrait of a character from the same campaign. Yes, Sean Connery in The Hunt For Red October was my model. No, I didn’t try to make the portrait look exactly like the actor.
Father Monahan
(If, at some late date, you stumble over this post in a search and you recognize the names ‘Aerhengard,’ ‘Grey Hills,’ and most especially ‘Dern Borgensson,’ do email or comment! I’ve lost track of an old friend who used to play in this roleplaying campaign.)
Images and Downtime
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
I’ve archived a copy of the Accentual-Alliterative Poetry: How the Verse Works article in the Prose section of the web site. I’ve got a number of comments on it, and requests for more. In the future, then, I’ll write more articles on particular verse forms and poetic techniques.
I took a long weekend off. I’ve reached a point, in working on my fantasy poem Dragon Winter, where I need a break from the intense effort of trying to cast my ideas into metered verse.
Some writers insist that you should write every day, and it works for them. Not for me. I start doing bad work if I don’t, every so often. back off from the writing itself. I need to give myself a rest from the effort of verbalization; and, at certain points, I need to step away from the work and let my subconscious turn it over for a while. Give my subconscious enough time, and it will come up with fresh approaches to the story in areas where it hasn’t been working.
Sometimes I want a vacation from writing altogether. Other times, I may need a short break from writing itself, but I need a longer break from my work in progress. That’s what’s happened this time: my fantasy poem would benefit from a longer simmer. But I could be writing a story in prose — if I knew what else I want to write yet.
I’ve discovered that I’m more than capable of coming up with ideas for stories that have every virtue except that of interesting me; and if I start casting an idea into words too early, that’s what I’ll get. So while I’m letting Dragon Winter stew, I’ve been flipping through the artwork at Epilogue.net.
I’ve got three reasons for that:
- I don’t know that Dragon Winter will ever go to print, but even if it doesn’t, I’m going to need a cover image. To make a work look professional on a place like Scribd, you need a cover. I’m either going to need to commission a cover, or come up with a good idea for one myself. I’d love to commission artwork from some of the Epilogue artists, but odds are I can’t afford it. But I might pick up ideas for successful approaches.
- The artwork is likely to suggest ideas for a new story, and it will suggest different ideas than I’ll get if I try to make anything take shape in words yet. Different, and probably more interesting.
- For fun. Some of the pictures on that sight are gorgeous.
I’ve come up with part of an idea, over the last few days, but I sense that it needs more, and I’m not ready to start writing yet.
Brainstorming and Art
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
I want to write a mystery with a weird element to it. I say ‘with a weird element’ instead of ‘fantasy,’ the way I originally thought of the idea, because I don’t necessarily want the tropes of genre fantasy limiting my thinking.
I haven’t gotten very far in developing this idea yet because I’m putting most of my active writing effort into my fantasy poem Dragon Winter, and that tends to draw down the creative juices and leave me with comparatively little to spare for a first novel. There are times, though, when I need a break from Winter, but I’d still like to be writing fiction. This is one of those times.
I’d really like to be one of those writers who can write successfully with no planning at all. So far that hasn’t worked. So I spent part of yesterday looking for ways to brainstorm. I want an idea for a story that won’t end up looking like a clone of half the other books on the shelf. That’s one of the things that’s boring me about modern fiction — the cookie-cutter similarity of so many books in recent publication.
Last time I was worried that I might end up writing a knockoff of everybody else’s genre fantasy, my Muse helpfully solved that problem for me by insisting that the tale should be in metered verse. That worked, after a fashion: whatever you can say about Dragon Winter, it isn’t Extruded Fantasy Product. But I’d like to write something in prose, in the interludes when I can’t face trying to cram a complicated description into suitably brief pentameter.
Recently I read an interesting article in Vision, the writers’ ezine, called “Worldbuilding and the Chaos Mind,” by June Drexler Robertson, about a procedure she uses for finding novel approaches for stories. It involves finding unusual associations for the basic ideas of the story. I tried it; it’s potentially productive, but it occurred to me that there might be faster methods of producing unusual associations.
I downloaded a demo of a brainstorming program called Thoughtoffice (apparently, it used to be named Ideafisher). It works well enough technically, has an expert module for writing, and it might suit some people very well. I don’t think it’s for me, because I want to make stranger associations than it seems designed to produce.
Random drawing from a deck of cards that has idea-generating scenes and symbols on it is another approach I’ve used. I’ve noticed, though, that if I get used to the cards and the associations I’ve made with them, they quit being so useful for sparking new ideas. Then, I don’t really like the artwork on my largest and most varied deck — the cards that came with an innovative, now out-of-production roleplaying game called Everway. It occurred to me that if I found a large and varied source of suitable random images online, though, that I could get visual sources of inspiration that wouldn’t have the problem of going stale.
Google image search, of course, is a possibility. But I was looking over fantasy art galleries for another reason a while back, and I came across Epilogue.net. Epilogue has a very large database of stunningly good fantasy, science fiction, and horror art, and a ‘random image’ button. So I spent some time last night flipping through images, and I’m likely to keep at it tonight. I think it will suggest interesting story ideas to me that I probably wouldn’t have come up with on my own.
Even if you’re not brainstorming speculative fiction, Epilogue has glorious artwork to look at. It makes me wish I had wallspace to hang some of it.
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