postmortem: thirty-five hours later…

so a couple weeks ago (by now), i decided to try something: i wanted to see if i could—now out from under the weight of several issues ranging from depression¹ to nicotine addiction² to burnout³—work on something for a roughly consistent number of hours each day for a set schedule of work days.

…so i sketched all that. paint tool SAI 2’s 3-point perspective ruler (and concentric-elliptical ruler) is a lifesaver, to be honest.

i blocked out the buildings, then duplicated the 3PP ruler to change the angle just enough to have the car look like it was sitting at an odd angle to the building but still within its general alignment. the car was roughed out from a bunch of sketched boxes (kinda like gluing a bunch of rectangular bits of wood together) and then smoothed out by eyeballing it (which isn’t the best thing, but i also didn’t want to spend years on this).

the lines were where things started going a slightly different direction:

mainly, i’d noticed the door behind synthi (top middle) was sketched a little hastily and would have been far too wide to match the one rose (upper right) is inside if viewed head-on, so i decided to roll with it and do something probably-not-a-door with it.

_{^{the mœbius influence is pretty apparent at this point, but that’s not important.}}

i had started in on the flats after this, but decided to put that on the back burner to do the shadows first instead after being unsatisfied with my initial color choices. i thought giving myself time to think about it would help (it did, mostly).

(toning the shadows and highlights like this was mostly just a way to post it as-is. it wouldn’t have worked out for the final image as well.)

the final stretch was not just color, but all the other little additions that made it feel a little more cohesive, from reflected details to lights to fog to individual tone adjustments on each character using clipping masks and a lot of dithering back and forth between amounts of overlay and particular hue. it’s a tedious process, but necessary, i think.

on the very back end, after all the “paint” is “dry,” comes dragging it into photoshop CS5⁴ and adjusting it with the selective color tool, also known as “one of the few legitimate reasons to keep photoshop at this point.”

(some detail shots)

overall cumulative time spent was about 35-36 hours, which was about what i’d expected for the amount of work put in; there were very few points where i could have done something faster, and at those points it wouldn’t have saved much more than an hour or two. if i had to do it again, i would do it differently, but that’s true of any piece of art in postmortem: even if i wanted to do it the same i couldn’t.

no matter what though, i did learn a lot with this one.

1. st. john’s wort actually worked for me, which is great, because it’s cheap and i have no insurance ↩︎
2. i quit smoking a while back because i’m broke and it wasn’t doing anything positive for my mood. it was easier this time than last time, which is still surprising ↩︎
3. giving myself necessary rest and time (and having the ability to do so, albeit briefly) helped on this end, but mostly it was accepting that i need to do things that i actually enjoy doing with art, and if i can’t survive doing those things, than Being Out On My Ass In The Cold Weather it shall have to be, because the alternatives are either undesirable or impossible for me at this point ↩︎
4. i will never upgrade, especially at this point. get wrecked adobe ↩︎