3D Modeling as an Illustration Aide

I'm an extremely slow and impatient artist, who would love to illustrate children's books and graphic novels. I also have aspirations to return to technical art someday when my kids are older. It occurred to me recently that I could perhaps kill two birds with one stone. Could I design a pipeline or a set of processes using 3D authoring tools and scripts to speed up my illustrations?

My first goal is to relearn basic 3D modeling in blender. I have been working on illustrations for a poem my sister wrote about a club for animals with neat tongues. Half the story takes place in a single location in jungle ruins. Initially, I did a lot of sketching and came up with some ideas. However, it was hard for me to get a correct perspective for the composition I wanted. It seemed like a perfect project to make use of some quick and unpolished 3D modeling. 

Here is my first stab at one of the illustrations before using blender to build the scene.

Here is a similar scene I built in blender. 

Finally, here is the illustration redrawn with the help of the 3D scene. Building the scene in 3D made my poor choice of angles glaringly obvious. Note how I originally made the snake looking away from the dog. The original illustration looked wrong to me, but I didn't realize that was why until I looked at it in 3D. Then it was immediately apparent.

Paintings of the boys

I dragged out my oil paints recently and painted a picture of my nephew and my son. They are mostly from photographs since there is no way the babies would sit still for more than a second. I painted them with the exact same color palette and on similar pieces of wood. I was pretty happy with how they turned out, and thought it was interesting how different they look.

Comics

My kids are so absurd sometimes. I have been wanting a project to get me to draw more, so I thought recording what they do in comic form might be fun - hence the recent picture of my daughter with her cat toy. I was trying to come up with some new ideas when my mom sent me the link to the Far Side's website (love it btw!). It made me realize I don't have to be quite so literal and tied to what actually or could actually happen. I came up with some ideas and now I am hooked. The little drawings make me chuckle and because I have tons of other ideas, I don't spend too much time on the drawing, which has always been hard for me not to do. A few of the comics are here, and the rest can be found at sleeplessmommy.net.

Playing with proportions

My MIL gave me "Walking your Octopus" by Brian Kesinger. I love the illustrations. It made me wonder why I don't exaggerate proportions more. I really like the look of it, so I gave it a shot with the drawing from my last post. I'm much happier with how it looks now.

Remembering Kira as a toddler

First illustration for Fluffle and Flame

My husband, daughter and I are writing a children's book about a cat and a dragon - "Fluffle and Flame". I had plans for a sort of squirrel-like short-haired cat, but then I saw a photo of my friend's long-haired Siberian cat, and fell in love with it for our "Fluffle". This cat seems like I imagine Fluffle - rather unimpressed with those around her, but fond of luxury and affection.

A book about tongues

My sister wrote a really cute poem about tongues so I've been trying to do the illustrations this summer. It is really hard to stay motivated for the number of illustrations you'd need for a children's book! I ended up making a little booklet for her to send as an option for publishers. They discourage sending art in any case. Here is the cover and a few illustrations I made for the booklet.

Portrait of my Grandma

My grandparents lived in Kenya in the 50's and took a lot of amazing photos. I was excited to practice the techniques I learned in Dominique's class, but didn't have a chance to go to an open studio. So I decided to make a painting of my grandma as a young woman. The photo I chose doesn't show the interesting African scenery they usually show, but that is in the back of my mind as an interesting project. I wanted to see if I could paint my grandma and add some of the missing color information the old photographs lack. I think with time and practice I'll get better at it.

Dominique Medici Workshop

I just took a weekend workshop with Dominique Medici. It was wonderful and I learned so much. She very methodically split up the process. Here is one of the paintings I worked on during the class. I didn't have enough time to finish, but - sans the black background - I was happy with the direction it was going in.

Practice on Magnets

I have painted a few other portraits recently. The tips I got from Aaron Coberly's class have been helpful, but I still struggle with spending way too much time blending and focusing on details before I should. I found some 8x8" magnetic canvases that I've been practicing on. Here are a few of them.

Second portrait of my daughter

I am finally coming out of the morning sickness phase so I have been feeling well enough to putz around with art. My mother in law told me that she would like a portrait of my daughter for Christmas, so I made an attempt.

First Figure Painting Class

This month I took my first oil painting class with Aaron Coberly. Specifically, it was "Painting the Alla Prima Figure". Aaron Coberly's style looks very loose and almost chaotic to me. Yet he somehow manages to pull it together to create beautiful and intriguing portraits. I really like it and I originally thought I wouldn't have too much trouble mimicking what he does and getting decent results. What hubris on my part. The class made me realize blending and rendering things nicely is not exactly important, and that is what I tend to focus on. One reason Aaron Coberly has such nice results is that he is very accurate in terms of feature and shape placement - he doesn't spend his time slowly blending one color to the next like I try to do.

I learned a lot in the class and I've been trying to apply what he taught to some drawings:

First Portrait Painting

Out of the blue, I thought it would be neat to try my hand at oil painting. I got fed up with making a digital painting, sending it to the printers and having it arrive different than anticipated - many times too dark. With oil painting, what you see is what you get. Plus, spending some time away from a computer screen could be good for me.

So I made my first attempt - a 24x24" portrait of my daughter.

It was definitely an overly ambitious attempt - 24x24" is not a small canvas and I didn't have the first idea how to handle oil paints. I was lucky it turned out as nicely as it did. The pose, composition, and aspect ratio worked well. However, there are lots of problems with it. The ear and neck are incorrectly drawn and rendered. There is also something odd about the eye. Probably the thing that strikes me as most amature-ish is the washed out, monochromatic color of the skin. I really like this painting, but there is lots of room for improvement. 

OpenGL ES 2.0 Phong Shaders

I had a class during my last semester of school with a great professor who let us study just OpenGL ES 2.0 shaders. After mastering the basic programming concepts, the shader creation felt like painting with code. Pretty interesting. Here are a couple of pictures of models I made and wrote the shaders for.














Both shaders use the standard Phong shading equation. The die has a normal map applied to make the divets and slightly rough surface. There were two tricky concepts I had to learn to get the normal map to show up properly.

a. I had to put the view and light vectors into "tangent space" because that's the space the normals from the normal map are in. Tangent space is defined for each vertex by the normal, binormal, and tangent. This space is preferrable to world or view space because it preserves the normal map when transformations occur on the model. I defined tangent space with this line of code in the vertex shader: "mat3 tangentMatrix = mat3(a_tangent, a_binormal, a_normal)". Then I multipied the tangent matrix by the view and light vectors. Thus, in the fragment shader, all I had to do was grab the pertinent normal from the normal map and change the range from [0, 1] to [-1, 1] before performing the usual lighting calculations.

b. Some exporters and formats include the binormals and tangents, but the format I was using (3ds) did not so I needed to calculate them. The key is to use the vertex positions and texture coordinates. Both pieces of information are pertinent because you want to take into account significant changes in either one. I found a good website that describes how the calculations are derived: http://www.terathon.com/code/tangent.html. The code I ended up writing is below.