Advice please on drawing heads

[Turan]

With all this talk of tracing and that cool pic in the gallary of SUN FUSION. Had to try it out.

Below is a pick of my 4th and youngest child (Zara - no I did not name her after Xara!).

I'm happy with it but feel I could improve. Can you give me feedback and advice.

Thanks,

Turan

[Turan]

With all this talk of tracing and that cool pic in the gallary of SUN FUSION. Had to try it out.

Below is a pick of my 4th and youngest child (Zara - no I did not name her after Xara!).

I'm happy with it but feel I could improve. Can you give me feedback and advice.

Thanks,

Turan

[Turan]

Tried blending between colour transitions on face, but because they are odd shapes it give very bad results.

Turan

[gwpriester]

About the hardest thing you can attempt to render is human flesh.

Basically your colors are too red and too saturated. When you look at the photo and compare it to the photo of your adorable daughter. Her flesh tones are almost like translucent porcelain. Of course getting the luminous quality from such an unsaturated color is very difficult.

You can cheat and use Xara's Color Picker (the eyedropper tool in the Color Editor) to sample some of the colors in the photo so you can come closer to the flesh colors.

You might try using Contours instead of blends, or blends of the same shape for a smoother transition. And the Feathering slider is great for creating soft edges.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

<a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~garypriester">
Be it ever so humble...</a>

[roman]

Use a color picker. And for simpler picking simplyfy the image. Either blur image a lot or even better use filter usually called MEDIAN multiple times combined with sharpen. You would get bigger areas of the same colour.

[bcdeb]

My first attempt at a portrait looked much like Xara Zara. I was really peeved. That is how I came to do the "flat" simplistic portrait I posted on the gallery of "the nude". I came to the conclusion that - apart from the painstaking style of the Russian gentleman who is Xara's featured artist - there is no way to do portraiture other than simplistically. I hope I'm wrong. But we don't have many Xara portrait artists in these forums to guide us. We might have to be the ones who discover the techniques on our own.

BTW, she's a darling [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[Turan]

Dmag - will try out the simplification process.

What I did is convert to palleted 256 colours. It gave me the sharp edges but lost all sense of the real colour.

I'm aware of the picker tool to select colours but without trying what Dmag says, when I select a colour it always seem to hit a off coloured pixel.

I'm happy enough to work on the colours, but any comments on the detail?

Turan

[Soquili]

Hi Turan,

I've been busy, so it wasn't until today I could try my hand at a portrait. This one took about 6 hours, and it's not an exact likeness. I'll attach the .xar file in the following post so you can take it apart.

I don't use blends in portraits, only feathering and transparencies.


Soquili [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[This message was edited by Soquili on September 01, 2001 at 13:15.]

[Soquili]

Here's the xar file for you to examine.

Soquili [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[standay]

I'll attach one I did recently. What I do is to think of these as paper cutouts and approach it that way. This tends to help me keep things simple and not to try and over do the detail (like the hair).

Stan