Brian Crick

Category: Illustration

Play Ball

Got some good work done over the three day weekend. Not as much as I’d like to have gotten done of course, but still, I feel like I’ve gotten things back on track. Even did an elliptical workout.

Have a pretty picture:

So here’s a nearly complete version of that baseball player I mentioned the other day. It’s feeling a little flat to me; I might need a number on the player’s jersey to add interest and provide a background for the ball, which is getting kinda lost now.

I think it sorta looks like he’s passing the ball to himself, rather than preparing to pitch it, but I’m mostly ok with that. Some weirdness is to be expected here, and I’d even go so far as to say that’s going to be part of the appeal of this style. As my first character with limbs, this is the first time I’m actually seeing that weirdness that comes with your typical playing card characters.

Terribly Overdue Scopa Updates

Got a new Scopa card (mostly; just noticed the missing icons, number & title on the bottom). I thought I’d try doing this character from the back just because I thought the bun & chopsticks would look neat that way.

There’s a back-view baseball pitcher coming up too, hopefully.

So actually the top image has been sitting on my computer for like months now. Didn’t add it to my gallery, didn’t send it to the client, didn’t have any motivation whatsoever to move this project along.

I’m not sure what the deal is. I want this project out of the way so I can concentrate on other things. This is, as far as I can tell, a fun, interesting project. I’m happy with my output. It’s for free of course, but the client has reacted positively to the drawings I’ve sent.

I should, all things considered, be highly motivated to get this done.

So in an effort to get back on track, here’s a guess about my lack of motivation: it’s surprisingly tedious.

My first image for this project took like forty five minutes to an hour to complete. Each image thereafter has taken two or three hours.

You’d think it would go faster, the more images I produced, but in many ways, trying to get new images to match the existing ones is harder than coming up with things from scratch. I suppose that’s a skill I need to work on. My workflow could clearly be more efficient, for this and any other project that involves hand-drawn illustrations. Which is most of them.

What I’m doing right now is, I’ve got a basic character template printed out. I’ll trace that with real pencil and paper for new characters, take a picture of my new drawing, then trace that in Illustrator.

There are many parts of this process that are a bit janky, most notably the duplication of effort with the traditional drawing and the Illustrator tracing. But I think the big issue right now is just getting my pencil & paper drawing into the computer. Right now the process looks like this:

  • Find a nice bright spot to place my drawing.
  • Take a picture with my phone.
  • Realize that the light wasn’t bright enough for the picture to come out.
  • Futz with camera settings, relocate random lamps from around the house and try again.
  • Email the picture to myself.
  • Download the email attachment on my laptop.

This is, of course, less than ideal. My scanner broke years ago,  and my new phone blows up if you try using it as a USB drive, hence the icky multi-step process.

Ideally, I’d hold up my drawing in front of my web camera and just skip the external scanning/photo taking devices entirely. I have no idea if that would work, but it’s a thought. 😉

In the absence of that though, some sort of photo-taking setup with a bright light right in my office might be helpful. A desk lamp pointing at a clipboard on the wall (desk space is really tight), or maybe an improvised light box taking advantage of the fact that my desk is made of glass. Something like that. Anything to make this more frictionless.

I should see if I can cobble something together from random stuff in the house.

Postmortem : Celestial Stick People

As always happens with postmortems for projects with no set deadlines, it feels good to write that subject line. So on to the dissecting.

making it up as you go

It’s not like I sat down twelve years ago and said hey, I’m gonna try to draw and sell a full 78 card Tarot deck. So I can’t really evaluate this in terms of how well my final product matches my intent. However, I’ve definitely learned the importance of good planning, as there was no real planning for this product. There was an awful lot of backtracking here. Some things I should have done better:

  • If there’s any possibility that what I’m doing will make it into print, I should make sure my Illustrator files have print-quality raster effects. Changing the effects resolution after the artwork is mostly finalized is a huge pain.
  • Keep separate images in separate files. While it’s convenient to have everything in one place, Illustrator crashes frequently on my large, multipurpose files.
  • Keep files organized. Which is to say, I totally didn’t do that here… just finding the files I needed for any given task became rather difficult late in this process.

those jargon-free rules

Looking over my rulebook, everything feels reasonably straightforward. Unfortunately, I never really had a Tarot newbie try reading the rules and tell me if they made sense. Really should have done that.

In terms of layout, I’m not thrilled with the layout of the instructions, but given the constraints I was under (limited to three separate, unordered sheets of paper) I think it’s adequate. Not good, but adequate. Again, lots of backtracking here as I figured out what format I would need.

the ilustrations

I really can’t think of any changes I’d want to make to the illustrations, looking over them again. Maybe the backgrounds could be better, more textured. But my only real complaint is that, because I changed the contrast fairly late in the process, you can see some slight banding on the background.

(Okay, I can see slight banding. Most people probably won’t notice.)

Anyway, I do need to learn how to do color management better so I’m not changing contrast in Photoshop at the last minute.

web site

Because of some errors I made in my scripts, the web site for the product was effectively down for a few days shortly after launch. Whoops.

I made the site years ago, and barely changed it for the product launch. I briefly considered moving it to WordPress like my personal site, and in hindsight, I probably should have done that. I just don’t think it’s worth my time trying to maintain custom scripts for a web site; most of this stuff is pretty cookie cutter, and the nice thing about a third-party CMS is, a lot of people have tested it for you. It’s all standardized, and easy to get help on.

dead ends

So for a long while, I was considering getting this printed through a local professional printing press. The minimum order would have been like 100 or 200 decks, with an upfront cost of two or three grand.

While everyone I talked to at the printer was friendly and helpful, I’m really, really glad I didn’t go that route. Did you know that playing cards aren’t just colored pieces of card stock? They’re coated in plastic, and have this thin layer of graphite in the middle that gives them a lot of springiness.

I didn’t realize this until I’d shrugged off professional printing as an option and bought my own paper cutting machine and nice color printer with which to do everything myself. And I got some nice cardstock and printed out cards… and they didn’t feel like playing cards. At all. They didn’t slide against each other right, and they didn’t bend right. And while your typical Tarot cards and board game cards don’t feel nearly as nice as nice playing cards, you can still shuffle them and slide them against each other, which isn’t a guarantee at all with any random card stock.

I would have been terribly disappointed if I’d only realized this after dropped a few thousand dollars on printing a hundred of these things. So while I didn’t end up using my own equipment for this, having it and trying it out taught me a lot about printing.

So I’m happy I went with The Game Crafter, with their nonexistent upfront costs and suitable-for-games card printing. There’s no telling how cranky I would have gotten collating and packing all those boxes myself, and I’m glad I didn’t have to set up a storefront. Again, this is pretty cookie cutter web site stuff and I’d just as soon have someone else do it.

to sum up

I’m sorta surprised I got this out at all, considering how long it’s been in development. But overall, it was a good learning experience, and I’m super excited about printing an actual board game through The Game Crafter now. And making a card-reference tablet app in Unity or something.

And trying to get this in real stores. In many ways, this project is just beginning.

 

Postmortem : Girl Wonder

So here’s my submission to the Girl Wonder banner contest (click to enlarge):

And just to get the good stuff out there first, have a new revision:

This was made after the contest deadline, but I was kinda fried on Sunday and thought I’d try to clean this up a bit, just to do it.

Rather than a what went right / what went wrong sort of thing, I thought I’d break this up into smaller chunks by subject. So here goes…

motivation

It’s amazing what an external deadline can do. I’ve wanted for quite some time to work on my people drawing skills, and this contest was a great excuse to do that. Also, Marie and I have been talking about doing a superhero comic together, and this was a good way to dive in and see if I was really capable of doing comic-appropriate art to my satisfaction. (I’m pleased to report that I’ve decided that the answer is yes, which I wasn’t certain of at all going in.)

You could say the timing could have been better — also had a big work deadline coming up — but ultimately, I think that having a single, isolated project to work on during such a deadline helped me focus during regular work.

anatomy

Overall, I think the character’s body came out pretty natural and realistic looking. Mostly I  credit careful planning — figuring out the character’s proportions in advance with a simple stick model that I then drew over.

But as you may recall, when last I posted about that, I had a decent looking sketch with a not-so-well-proportioned upper body.

The next time I was able to work on this, I was away from home, and unable to transfer any changes to my sketch into the computer. So I just went straight into Photoshop and enlarged the arms and shoulders a bit, which nicely fixed the long torso problem.

(Yes, I used Photoshop to try to make a figure’s proportion’s more realistic. 🙂 )

I mentioned I might do this, and while it was kind of cool and necessary to be able to do this while away from home, I’m thinking now that it’s not really a great solution. My first priority should be learning to detect problems before I’ve started drawing over them. If a problem does slip through, generally speaking, it would probably be best to adjust the sketch directly, so I get good at doing this right on paper.

layers, layers, layers

I made extensive use of Photoshop and Illustrator’s nondestructive filters and layers. I’m not sure I can explain in well here, but basically what that means is that things like colors, shading and special effects can all be handled independently.

So in the image below, you can see each of those things getting added, one by one, to a simple black & white outline.

Despite its complexity, this worked out pretty well. I could quickly go back to any layer in my documents and make changes that would propagate forwards to the final product automatically. So, for instance, if I decided I didn’t like the color of the cape, I could change just my color layer and the shading and shadows would be preserved.

shading

So like 14 or so years ago I was trying to do coloring for an online comic (that sadly never got off the ground), and I was trying to do it in Photoshop, using its drawing tools. It didn’t turn out very well; everything was kind of muddy. There were highlights and there were shadows, but my shading didn’t really clue you in to the precise shapes of things at all. Sure, my skills weren’t very good, but that distinctive Photoshop brush muddiness is something I’ve seen even in professionally produced comics.

For this contest, I wanted to make sure my shading was crisp and detailed, so you got a sense of cheekbones and wrinkles in the cape, things that aren’t being expressed with linework.

Illustrator has this thing called gradient meshes, which I figured would work well here. The third image on the top row of the image above introduces some gradient meshes I used for shading, most notably on the cape. Again, I don’t want to go into too much technical detail, but while I got the crispness I wanted, all those meshes were a pain to work with.

Next time I do this, I guess I basically have to options: I can learn to work more efficiently with gradient meshes, or I can revisit my homemade paint program, which contains what’s supposed to be a simple system for doing this kind of work, but which needs some fine tuning before it’s really usable. Neither of those options sounds immensely attractive.

drapery

The cape makes no sense. It isn’t just unrealistic or poorly executed; the geometry of it is simply impossible.

I only realized this the morning after I turned in my submission.

I think my big hangup there was that I was trying too hard to figure out what this thing would like like, when I should have been thinking about how it behaved.

For my revision, I tried to think of the cape as a bunch of strings. Like a beaded curtain. I imagined that the curtain was anchored on the character’s back and shoulders, and I imagined individual strings draping over and hanging off of different points on the character. It was easy to figure out where each string would fall. And then, you can kind of mentally stitch these one-dimensional strings together and figure out how this two-dimensional piece of cloth is going to look in three dimensions.

I don’t know if that’s the best approach, but it was good to figure out some sort of manageable approach, if only after the contest deadline.

triage

The reason the background isn’t colored in is that I realized I wasn’t going to have time to do everything I wanted, and rather than have a whole image half complete, I thought I’d submit something with a good looking character and a sketched in environment. Getting the character right is what I needed the most work on.

Similarly, I totally punted on the costume; again, while I’d find it an interesting challenge to come up with something theatrical and tasteful, it just wasn’t a priority.

That’s not totally a bad thing. There’s something kind of appealing about the utilitarian jumpsuit look.

looking ahead

Marie and I have been talking for a while about this superhero comic thing, and I’m really excited about it now. There’s still a lot of workflow issues I need to sort out if I were to do that many illustrations, but this experience has convinced me that it’s at least possible.

 

Girl Wonder Sketches

Here’s what I got last night on the Girl Wonder thing. You’re looking at maybe 90 minutes’ work here. Don’t have a lot of time to work on this.

Since the desired image size is sorta widescreen, I thought I’d have my character standing sideways, on the side of a skyscraper, to fill the space better.

I had a sketch of that (not pictured) and it just wasn’t that interesting visually, so I thought I’d add in a gargoyle that the character could be leaning against. So I drew a quick thumbnail sketch of that.

In this composition, the character could be upright and still fit, but hey, I like the way this is balanced. So you’ve got a character with her arms folded, cape hanging down, standing on the side of a building, leaning up against the bottom of a ginormous gargoyle rain spout thingie, with a bunch of skyscrapers in the background.

So far, so good.

Then I started a new sketch just focusing on getting the proportions and body of the character right. Like I said before, I’m not terribly skilled at this.

I had my anatomy book open the whole time, and had to force myself to do this in stages: I started with an 8-head-high ruler with little tickmarks on it, used that to draw a simple skeleton (you can kind of see that around the hips and legs) and built the body around the skeleton. Pretty basic stuff as I understand it, but I’d never done that before.

Mostly, I think this turned out quite well; the stages really helped. However, I do have a couple of quibbles.

First, the torso feels too long. My torsos always feel too long. While I think I got the proportions of the skeleton right, I think I made the widest part of the hips/legs way too low. Gotta brush up on my anatomy there, especially male/female differences to watch out for.

Second, I was going for a little bit of contrapposto there (having all your weight on one leg, which results in the hip being all slanty), but I think I made the torso too twisty. There’s a little bit of butt sticking out there, which is the last thing I want. However, I think I’ll leave the basic shape as is, and when I scan in my sketch for real for tracing in Illustrator, I’ll just bend things a bit in Photoshop so the general upper body is more to my liking.

I haven’t given a whole lot of thought to the costume, besides the off-center cape and asymmetric collar detail. I figure I can (and should) design the costume separately from the actual act of figuring out how the body looks in my sketch.

It’s very, very tempting to just give the character a decorative pull-over short-sleeved shirt with a cape, leggings and short boots, and call it a day. There would be nothing particularly feminine or cheesecakey about it; it would be very safe.

But I expect superhero costumes to be a bit theatrical; I’d expect skirts and gloves and shiny accessories. Getting that sort of stuff to work, that’s half the challenge here. And like the formal wear I was talking about the other day, I think it’s important to get at the roots of these design decisions.

Take thigh high boots for example, common in girl superhero costumes. True, there’s a bit of fetishism going on there, and you can be dismissive of that… but they also emphasize the length of the legs, just as the long gloves commonly paired with these boots emphasize the arms. If you’re going to have a character kicking and punching bad guys all the time, you want to draw attention to their limbs. It makes sense. The trick, I think, is to place emphasis where you want it without having it be too obvious to the viewer that there are specific things you want to focus on here.

I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get to this next. I’ve got stuff happening tonight and tomorrow night, and friday night is, well, friday night. 🙂

Girl Wonder

The web site girl-wonder.org is having a contest to design a banner for their Facebook page. Deadline is this Friday.

I’m not real familiar with the site, my people drawing skills aren’t very good, I think it would be tough to beat the refreshingly tasteful banner they’ve already got, and it’s exceptionally unlikely I’ll be able to crank something out that I think is remotely acceptable in the next three days.

So I’m going to drop every other pet project I’ve got for a bit and give this a shot.

I can always use practice working absurdly quickly. I’d like to finally have a reason to open up my anatomy for artists book and practice drawing oddly shaped body parts like knees, which are plainly visible in your typical superhero costume. And I’d like so see if I can actually design a costume that meets my standards for tastefulness and still retains many of the lines you’d expect from this sort of thing.

It’s something I’ve wanted to try for a while anyway, just to see if I can do it.

I’ve already got a broad idea what I want to do… hopefully I’ll have a rough sketch up at the end of the night.

Make a Difference

I have high hopes for the game developer’s group I’ve joined. Not just in terms of getting along with the group; sure, I was worried about that, but I’m talking about, like, the group being this positive force or something. I’ve always been hesitant to look for communities of people with similar interests — I’m worried about things getting a bit insular — but I get this feeling like, I’m watching something really wonderful take shape here.

I want to do whatever I can to help this along. To that end, I’ve volunteered to give a talk to the group — maybe with some other people — about music composition.

I don’t know where or when this will take place, but it scares me a bit . Then again, this whole joining-a-developer-group thing has been all about getting out of my comfort zone from the beginning. I’m excited to continue that trend. It’s been a while since I actively looked for things I was uncomfortable with, since I looked for more opportunities to fail and learn from those failures.

* * *

Been stressing out a bit about my Robin character model — and character models in general — for Tinselfly.

To recap, here’s what she looks like:

The odd thing about this is, in my head — if this were live action or something — I’d want the actress playing Robin to be a bit chunky. In my head, that’s how she is. She also has shoulder-length, unmanageable, curly hair, but I wasn’t sure how to model that.

But despite all that, as a stylized character in this stylized world, she’s absurdly elongated and has a simple bob.

I want the characters to look fragile. It just seemed like the right stylistic choice, the way the angular features of the characters in Samurai Jack complement the spare, action-based storytelling, or the way tile-based video game characters are frequently short and square, so the player can more easily tell what tile they’re in.

There are supposed to be elements in Tinselfly about larger-than-life people being all vulnerable, and given the 1920s aesthetic, I wanted my characters to look a little like those elongated, bronze art deco statues you see here and there.

* * *

Whatever I do, I don’t just want to make good products. I want to make good projects that feature made-up worlds that are the sort of egalitarian place I want the real world to be. That’s why Celestial Stick People has some male Lovers.

Getting some strong, layered female characters out there in the video game world is a major force driving the development of Tinselfly. I won’t argue that I don’t have an agenda here.

However, if I want that agenda to succeed, it’s imperative that I’m not preachy about it. Otherwise, the people I want to reach the most — the people who aren’t so obsessed with this whole egalitarianism thing — will simply tune me out.

* * *

So back to the skinniness.

Body image is also a hot topic in feminist discussions, and for good reason. And while I’m trying to move forward on the empowered-female-character thing, I’m kind of moving backward on the whole healthy-body-image thing.

For the most part, however, I’m comfortable with this design decision. Now, I may be completely wrong, but here’s how I’m currently rationalizing it:

  • It makes sense for the story, as mentioned above. If 100% of my design decisions are based on my agenda, I’m afraid I’m getting into preaching territory. I’d still argue that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with super-skinny stylized characters in a work of fiction; it’s when it’s ubiquitous that it becomes an issue. If my next project has super-skinny characters and thee’s no real point to it, then I’ve got a problem.
  • Everyone and everything — men and women, dogs, cats, spaceships — will be just as long and skinny as Robin here. There’s not going to be a lot in the way of gender dimorphism, either, and I think that that will drive home the idea that this is a stylistic choice, not a normative statement on women in particular. (Sure, Barbie is scary looking. But compare her to the average Ken doll, and you’ll see how the dimorphism makes her so much creepier. In contrast, I like how male and female Bratz characters are similarly oddly proportioned.)
  • This isn’t targeted at adolescents. I’d love to produce something fun and positive for my 10 year old sister in law; I’d love to live in a world where there were lots of products with strong, positive, non disney-princess characters that adolescents could look up to… but this just isn’t one of those products. If I were targeting that sort of age range, I’d be way more particular about what I’m including and what I’m unintentionally saying about things.

Like I said, I’m open to the idea that I’m making the wrong call here. We’ll see how this universe feels when it’s more fully fleshed out, I guess.

Variations on a Theme

Well, that was a nearly perfect weekend. They’re so much better when I actually follow my own rules for managing them. 🙂

In addition to visiting the wonderful new Greater Cleveland Aquarium , visiting friends, exercising and going out with Marie, I managed to get through a full cycle and a half of pet-project work. There are six things on my plate at the moment; here are the weekend’s highlights.

* * *

Made a King of Swords for the Scopa deck. I was really happy with the medal salad going on there, though it got lost when I applied all my Photoshop filters. I’ll have to up the contrast on that a bit.

* * *

Am continuing work on my generic procedural NPC costume thing for Tinselfly. So what you’re seeing below is my test character, wearing a pair of boots whose thickness and length can be set to arbitrary values by the game at runtime.

It’s a bit sluggish, but you can watch this stuff animate in the game. It’s kinda spiffy. Need to work on adding procedural seams and details to things next.

* * *

My new font is starting to look like ya know, a font family. Whee! I’m really happy with how this is turning out.

About a Sharp Dressed Man

Finished my King of Cups.

I tried a white tux, but the large swatch of white just didn’t work… it felt empty. So I just made it black like the businessman.

I feel a little weird about how not-detailed the sides of the tux are, but in some ways I like it.

Don’t have too much else to say about this, except that copy/paste is definitely not the way to go here. While there’s a similar end result here to the businessman, the underlying shapes used to create that result ended up being very different. Would have been faster to simply start from scratch.

Abstraction

Have the beginning of a King of Cups.

As you can surely tell, I started with the King of Coins and made modifications from there. I still need to change the suit, to make it a white tuxedo instead of a black business suit.

I’m not sure if this copying-and-pasting approach is actually faster than starting from scratch. I’ve spent 45 minutes on this so far, which is already quite a bit longer than the 15-30 minutes per face card I was hoping for. Of course, I really have no idea what sorts of expectations to set here, so I’m not going to beat myself up too much about the time spent… this is, after all, a learning process.

I didn’t really sit down and design the cup icon; I just drew something straight in Illustrator really quickly. But I rather like what I ended up with. I think I’ll keep it, with only slight modifications probably.

* * *

While I’m waiting on answers to some questions I had for the client, I thought I’d post some ruminations on what I want to get out of this. And what I want is to do work for precisely the sort of games I don’t like playing.

I like games that are about building stories. Games with memorable characters and places, where after the game, you find yourself joking about the funny or surprising or hero-clobbering plot twists that came up during the game.

These sorts of games tend to have lush, naturalistic illustrations where every picture could be a still from a movie.

I have neither the skills nor the desire to produce this kind of stuff. I like making illustrations that are a little abstract. The sort of illustrations that would be well suited for more abstract games, where your characters aren’t characters so much as ideas represented by people.

My stuff tends to lean towards Art Deco, so this is no real surprise. If you’ve got, say, an Art Deco mural with a bunch of construction workers… those workers aren’t people. They’re the visual manifestation of the idea of hard labor, and the nobility thereof. They’re archetypes. If you’ve got an abstract strategy game where you can summon any number of identical snipers each turn, those snipers aren’t individuals. They’re sort of platonically ideal snipers, and I like it best, from a visual standpoint, when the character portraits for these more abstract games have more abstract art for these kinds of things.

I’d love to have done art for games like Pandemic… there are people, but not really interesting characters you can connect to. I would have loved to have seen some stylized, glorified doctors and engineers in that. That would have been pretty awesome.

Of course, when my board game project gets further along, I’ll want to do more naturalistic illustrations for that since it’s supposed to be story based. Should be an interesting challenge.

Copyright © 2017 Brian Crick.