Judge This! : Drawing a pen

[foreualways]

Please judge this for me, I know it not that good. And it my very first one, vector illustration. I'm trying to learn how to do this. I would love to sketch my kids and grandkids. Have tried, but always turns over like crap. So I thought I would start learning by doing this pen.

I see some of the problem area's, but do not know how to correct them.
How do I get it to look more like the real one?

Any advice, in detail would be great!

Thank You!
Mike

[aridzone]

Looks good to me!

I think you need to feather the outside.

[Soquili]

Hi Mike,

I agree with Aridzone. It is a very good drawing.

Photorealism isn't aways desirable but may be what you want to achieve.

I made a few minor changes to your fills and added some cloned shapes with a fractal plasma fill to add the grainy look.

Take the attached .xar file apart to see the changes. Using small shapes with some feathering and judicious fills can make the image more photorealistic.

[raynerj1]

It is hard for me to compare an out of focus bitmap to a vector drawing. Once you have the vector created, I would think you would need to make a copy or two on different layers and make the copies almost completely transparent and shifted slightly to recreate the outof focused effect.

Your pen looks pretty good. Your highlights seem a little bit to bright. Try a shade closer to original color. Maybe 5% difference, instead of 10%.

[Egg Bramhill]

It looks a lot better than the original. One problem is that you've used linear fills on a lot of the drawing. They are great for fairly regular shapes but no so good on more complex shapes such as the barrel of the pen. I'd suggest you use a blend here rather than a linear fill as it follows the contour of the barrel more like the one Bill created.

I'd also suggest that your original image isn't really of a good enough quality to start with.

[foreualways]

I would like to THANK you all for your input and samples. I'm still trying to learn. I knew things didn't look that good, I've tried a few before usually my daughter portrait and about 25% of the way into it I give up.
So I figured I try to complete this one farther. The pen was just an image I got off Yahoo image search.
Someone got a good tutorial on how to do the blend your referring to?

I'll give it another try and see wear it goes.

Again Thank You All!

Mike

[Albacore]

I think everyone is being a bit too critical here. I would have been quite happy to show this after a year of using Xterme. Yes Egg a blend maybe the way to go to get a realistic shading but it is very hard to know where to start and finish and how many steps to use. I think Availor, if I have spelt his handle correctly, did a good flash video on drawing a pen and it maybe in the Tip & Tricks stickies if my memory is correct. Just had a quick look it maybe doesn't help as it is only a fountain pen nib bottom part but you can have a look http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaNM1FdXlSM

[foreualways]

Actually I watched that youtube video a few times.
I still don't get how to make the blending work???
I tried it last night and apparently I'm doing something wrong still!

Thanks Mike

[a4hire]

The pen looks great! Drawing people is a whole other thing though.

[foreualways]

I realize that, I wasn't thinking of going right to pen to people.
How about some tutorials for us beginners?

Thanks
Mike