Ingvar The Cheap Booze Monkey Presideth

[Logo Kid]

And before anyone says it's slander / libel the man himself freely admits ... he's get enough money not to have to sue people.

PS still waiting for the mesh gradient tool as you can see - but this was a great exercise in just bodging together lots of other types of fill and a bit of transpatency here and there.

PPS Not finished .... like always.

[parahandy]

Powerful drawing Logo Kid, hope to see the finished picture. I don't know the man, the only Ingvar I know is the Ikea man. Rich beyond the dreams of creosote (English joke)

[Logo Kid]

Mr Ikea it is ...

[mikalele]

Hey Logokid!

I am quite a big fan of your portraits. What i like very much is your use of colors, i wonder how you manage all those skin nuances. Could you please explain a little on how how you use color or how you get to the colors you use?

[Logo Kid]

What i like very much is your use of colors, i wonder how you manage all those skin nuances. Could you please explain a little on how how you use color or how you get to the colors you use?

It always good to have a few different bases to the image. So you might have one bad which is an eliptical fill so there's an overall light source and then over lay the same shape a few times and have sume subtle transparencies. Then after you have the base it's a case of sectioning off the face and doing more and more subtle transpanercies to build it up over and over till it starts to take shape.

With my work I have tended to use lots of different methods of shapes to achieve the overall feel. I think that just feeling the image is so much better than trying to copy something verbatim and not to worry it looks perfect as long as it has the feeling of the right shapes of the face. I guess I tend to take a more expressionist route to achieve an end result - the 'none-perfect-photorealism' is what adds to the character and the soul of the picture.

On this one I just drew lots of sections used the eye dropper to get picture and did a lot of different eliptical fills with transparencies where the edges blend into one another. Then used my wacom art pad to put lines in which had a profile and a transparency but like I said when I posted this it's not yet finished.

I would say the secret to doing anything is Experimentation, Enjoyment and most of all Patience. At the moment I'm still learning myself and am not ready to start to offer my work. I think I'm a couple of years off being 100% with my art.

[mikalele]

Thank you for your explanation, LogoKid. I really have to check out elliptical fills, i rarely use them. I mostly just draw using transparent, flat fills.

One more question: Are these named colors you use?

[Logo Kid]

If you want something to look natural then I would say there's a few things that you need to do with colour:

1. Always keep the colour editor open; that way you can change colours ever so slightly - this keeps the palette diverse. The more colours in a picture the more natural it will look.

2. Include very light transparencies of colours that you wouldn't expect in a face / flesh; there are always tints of Blues, Purples and ever greens in faces.

3. Avoid Black and White; this is something that I've learn over time. If you use these colours it will look unnatural. Use either very very light or dark version of colours but leaving some colour saturation in there. It's the same with my commercial design - I like black and grey but there's always a small amount of colour in there blue for coldness, brown for warmth, green for nature, etc.

At the end of the day the more different colours in a picture the better it will look.

If you want to drop one of your pictures on here I don't mind giving you advise as to how you could improve it. If you want.

[mikalele]

Thanks again for your useful tips!

I'm currently experimenting with transparent elliptical fills. It has a pretty cool effect, i think.

I still have one more question though: I suppose you have a photograph on a locked background layer? If so, how do you get to work with non-transparent fills?

I will post an image for criticizing later, probably at the weekend.

My first attempts using transparent, elliptical fills


She's got birthday in ten days, till then i'd like to have a finished portrait of her.

[Logo Kid]

Yeah exactly I have a layer with the picture locked on a background layer and then another layer for each element of the picture which is an exact number of pixels to the side ... so i can create the larger outline parts which I can move over to the actual picture with the shirt cut Shift + Left Arrow. I've attacked an example of that one I am working so you can see how I do it and all my layers and pull appart the picture.

[mikalele]

Thank you for sharing your experience, Logokid!

It was very interesting to see your .xar file. I love the glasses! And the idea with the photo moved to the side with fixed pixel distance is so simple but so good! Thanks!

I'll be posting my portrait attempt in the next days...