Art Evolution

biccy on 2009/09/01 10:32 of eggs

I can't draw birds, if you watch my twitter you would have seen two very ugly drawings of birds I did on day 1. I've had to draw birds in past PyWeeks and they end up as one of the things I spend the most time on. The bird from Make Me took me about two hours to do and then you don't see half the detail due to resizing it. The birds I did for Kite Story are just plain ugly and makes me sad.  

So when Alex told me his idea for Feather...I kind-a hit a wall... The game idea involved birds.  
Day one was a bummer, I couldn't make up my mind what I art style I wanted to go with pretty much wasted a whole day. 

Yesterday was much better, I spent some time and gave myself a crash course in drawing birds. I have to say things came out pretty well and I ended up with about 2 and a half pages of birds. 
 
Once getting the art of drawing birds down I went back to see what art style I wanted.     


After going back and forth with a number of different programs, my weapon of choice for this pyweek is photoshop. I ended up with a water-colour look, which sadly didn't seem to transfer when I resized the image. :( 

To save time I'm colouring the birds with shades of grey and then are tinted with code. So our little grey bird became colourful:      
 

 And I was like "Wow that's cool!  But Alex was like "it'd be _really_ cool if we did two-tone" 
 
 And so we did:  
 
A little worried about having to clean up the pencil line art I took the image file into openCanvas and traced the outline. Which lead to a much nicer two-tone-ness.  
 

And then it was bed time. 

Today I did some work on animation. 

Whee it flys. 

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Comments

nitrofurano on 2009/09/01 10:50:

some oppinions:
- Very good pencil drawings! But anyway, i enjoyed much more these pencil drawings than the pastel one - they have more detail and expression. - maybe will be hard task having such sharp drawing detail in coloured sprites, it can be a very interesting challenge! :)
- About the animation: Eadweard Muybridge teachs a lot about it: there are lots of aerodinamics related to wings, and when wings goes up, head and body goes down - take a look at some studies he made: http://images.google.pt/images?q=eadweard%20muybridge%20bird

biccy on 2009/09/01 11:15:

Thanks, 
 I've been meaning to find some of Eadweard Muybridge's books but they are some what hard to find.
In the mean time I've been looking at youtube, hummingbirds are awesome.  

nitrofurano on 2009/09/01 11:25:

from google you can find something - still very low resolution, but i think with information enough helping - anyway, if someone know any museum or library providing these animation sheets in high resolution, please let me know! (they are all public domain, i think there is no problem at all) :) - at youtube, i found none with birds yet... - about books, i think i found something from Amazon, but i don't know how good they are: http://www.amazon.com/Muybridge-Eadweard-Arts-Photography-Books/b?ie=UTF8&node=1349

tartley on 2009/09/01 11:45:

Ohmygosh, reading about Muybridge's personal life on Wikipedia is so sad - head injury from a stagecoach which made him grumpy, then his wife starts cheats on him, and when he finds out, he goes and finds the fellow in a bar, and says "here is the reply to the letter you wrote my wife", and shoots the chap, killing him. So much heartache, possibly all stemming from that one five-second incident. Ohdeary.

tartley on 2009/09/01 11:46:

and OMG, your bird drawings are fantastic. Before next PyWeek I *will* have worked through Betty Edwards learning to draw books...

nitrofurano on 2009/09/01 14:31:

@tartley the most important is understanding drawing more as an analysis process, seeing your pencil, pen, or whatever, a tool for 'sculpting' the paper you have in front - and the analysis process, understanding what you're drawing can be important - this may help: http://images.google.com/images?q=bird+skeleton+diagram http://images.google.com/images?q=bird+skeleton

tartley on 2009/09/01 15:19:

Noted and many thanks. I'll ruminate on that and try to apply it, although it might be a bit too much for me to digest for this PyWeek. Time will tell...

nitrofurano on 2009/09/01 15:44:

you welcome! next step after understanding the birds bones is understanding birds muscles, but i couldn't find good pictures of skinned birds (specially diagrams) online - that's important as well because also explains a lot about its shape (outlines and shading, when needed) , balance and articulation

gcewing on 2009/09/01 22:53:

I don't think your bird will stay in the air. :-( The wings need to be angled more flatly on the downstroke than the upstroke.

biccy on 2009/09/01 23:05:

Magic will help