Wednesday 20 December 2017

Story & Illustrations 2

Work continues on the pictures for my story. I've experimented with placing hand-drawn characters in 3d scenery and it almost works, but not quite.
I took a look at some stills from Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings and Fire and Ice and noticed that he placed cel-drawn figures with flat colouring against painted backdrops.

Christopher Wren

Just over a year ago I participated in a project to draw the London churches designed by Christopher Wren, set up for the members of a meetup group. There have been emails since then from the leader of the group about putting together a book using our pictures and putting on an exhibition. The latest email has confirmed that we have a venue in a London church to display our pictures but no boards to hang them on.

Thursday 14 December 2017

Story and Illustrations

Yet again I'm trying to work out how to do the illustrations for my story. Last night I tried tracing over a print of one of my Poser pictures (using a lightbox) and am feeling... unsure about the results. Of course, tracing always feels like "cheating" but I'm not trying to produce a drawing so much as do extreme post work on a digital image.
The digital pictures - rendered in black and white using Poser 10's toon shader - are almost there. There are just things I can't do with Poser, like produce flexible tendrils for one image in which a character is being attacked by a carnivorous plant. And the model I'm using for the story's central character looks more or less like what it is - a child's body with a cat's head and tail stuck on it.
There's also the matter of using models by third party vendors that those vendors would no doubt want credit for if they featured in one of my pictures.

My problem is that I have a brain that overcomplicates things, always trying to find a more elaborate way to tackle a simple task.

My story is in the process of being rewritten yet again, this time in the third person rather than from the central character's perspective. It is like the weights have come off, and the writing is now so much easier, without the need to keep describing everything through one person's eyes. This whole story has been through a gradual process of simplification, in fact. To begin with I was writing it from the perspective of a character who knew nothing about the universe he was exploring and that was *really* difficult.