Panzer Rat

**Skaven252** · 23 August 2007, 06:51 PM

A heavily armed and armored ratling thingy wielding his retractable chainblade weapon. This is meant to be a part of a website design, but the site is still heavily under construction so I thought I'll slap it here.

The hair on the head was made by using stroke width profiles (then turned to shapes for export to .swf), the rest are just filled shapes, painstakingly drawn point by point.

The drawing is traced from a (mirrored) pencil sketch I made years ago. You can see the original here.

**iamtheblues** · 23 August 2007, 07:08 PM

This I like a lot.
It has almost a woodcut quality to it.
Definitely worth all your effort.
Good rendition of your original sketch.
Saludos,
Bob.

**a4hire** · 23 August 2007, 07:49 PM

Looks very nice. I like the original sketch too! Good work!

**handrawn** · 23 August 2007, 08:01 PM

yes I like that too - the hair is very effective, as are the teeth and saw blades

**raynerj1** · 23 August 2007, 11:04 PM

I like both, but the detail in the original sketch is what makes it so great... I think I will vote for the pencil sketch...

PS... If you you like the traced sketch... let me know...

Don't want to post your work for leaches to grab.

**Skaven252** · 27 August 2007, 06:12 AM

Thanks for the comments, guys!

Originally Posted by raynerj1

I like both, but the detail in the original sketch is what makes it so great... I think I will vote for the pencil sketch...

That's often my perception of it too. Pencil sketches have a lot more 'life' to them because you can see the artist's handiwork better, how s/he has searched for the right lines and shapes.

However, in terms of clarity - and for printing purposes (which is not relevant in web art, though) - inked B&W wins hands down. It also allowed me to try a different lighting and shading effect, which would probably have looked pretty messy if it had been done in pencil (lots of black surface to fill).

Thanks for your trouble of tracing the pencil sketch, but I have to ask (and I don't mean to downplay your work) - but what is the point of tracing a pencil sketch to vectors? It turns into a huge amount of vector data, while looking roughly the same.

**derek.d** · 27 August 2007, 08:29 AM

I love the pencil drawing... But this is a fantastic piece of work. Would be great for a T-shirt design

**handrawn** · 27 August 2007, 08:50 AM

Originally Posted by Skaven252

but what is the point of tracing a pencil sketch to vectors?

one use would be to apply vector coloring - couple of quick examples below

the penciling would giver better results for this if it were 'cleaner' - but that was not the idea here of course - its a great pencil sketch

**Skaven252** · 27 August 2007, 11:02 AM

Originally Posted by handrawn

one use would be to apply vector coloring - couple of quick examples below

Thanks!

You can also do coloring effects by applying transparency to the bitmap, and placing a colored rectangle with a transparency effect on top of and behind it.

Or, you can try this: I changed the sketch to Stained Glass, then drew a colored, gradient filled shape underneath it, and a white ellipse on top of it to outline the ring shape on the shoulder pad. I suppose the whole sketch could be colored like this, no? (this was just a quick test)

**handrawn** · 27 August 2007, 11:15 AM

indeed

I like to vectorise my lineart with a bitmap tracer [I use inkscape] - and then I can use boolean to create all the infill shapes in one go [as I did in the example], without having to hand trace

Probably not always practical with very detailed drawings?

Advantage also with vectors - no problems resizing

EDIT: see also
http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=28911