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BEYOND TV SAFETY

COME ON MYLENE, OR: THIS OLD ART
(continued)

Step One: The Basic Elements

If I was reworking from scratch the first thing I would have done is to redraw the figure, trying to get a more dynamic pose.

3d1.jpg (6455 bytes)

The original pose is stiff, more like she is drinking a cup of coffee than singing.

Right: "Um... (feedback) Hello? ...I-is this thing on? Hello?"

3d2.jpg (7694 bytes)
3d3.jpg (7375 bytes)
"Yeah! I love singing these Tom Jones songs! It's not unusual..."
3d4.jpg (7372 bytes)
"And give a big hand to the band!" or:

"This one's empty. (hic) where's that f*#@$ing roadie?! (hic)"


What I had in mind was a more dynamic pose showing that she's up there really getting into her music. There should always be some element of dynamism in any illustration. This is not to say that the character should be in motion but the character should look and feel alive.
  I cannot stress it enough:

The head and facial details should be the last step of the drawing process.

  Amateur artists are easy to pick out—all you need to do is look at the face then the rest of the image as separate pieces and you'll see that the amateur puts more work into the face than the rest. When drawing any human or other living character (or a close facsimile) the body position and pose must be determined first.
  In the retouch I decided to work backwards from the head down though because I felt the head needed the most work.


Step Two: Isolate and Fix the Various Problem Areas

I scaled the image up to about twice the original size so that I could have a larger area to work with and shrink it down later. (Art always looks better shrunken down.) Then I copied the body layer multiple times so that I could isolate the different elements. I ended up with separate layers for the background, mouth, eyes, eyebrows, hair, nose, neck, body, right arm and  collar. Each one of these would get a separate layer or two for shadows, highlights and other enhancements. I take this approach because it's akin to cels which is still the easiest way for my brain to handle things. If I was doing a watercolor style illo I would probably only have 2 levels, the character and the background.


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