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August 14th, 2008 |
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A detailed pencil drawing. I seem to have problems with straight lines. -_- |
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| Comments |
| Name |
Time |
| Stickman |
August 14th, 2008 |
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That's why we have rulers!
No, seriously. Because of the way our wrists bend they're inclined to make a curve that approximates pi. Our elbows are floating out in space and aren't meant to be held still, so they have a terrible time drawing circles, which is what they'd be best at. Our shoulder is the first place we can bend that'll give us a circle. But a straight line? You have to either move fast enough that you bypass the natural curving motion of the hand (can't curve when it's moving that fast) or use a tool to help you. I mean, the pencil is a tool, and we can use that, so what's wrong with using a ruler, too?
Have said that, your straight lines are forgivable enough to be considered straight. If you had used a ruler you would have lost a lot of the organic-ness of the picture.
Anyway, this is a really good picture. How long did it take you? I like how the shutters are constructed out of light and dark shapes instead of just lines. The hatching looks great, too. Though be careful -- the direction you hatch in says things. Most of your hatching is top right to lower left, but some of it is the other way, or side to side. You can use changes in hatching direction to separate objects to say that it's on a different plane.
I think the one thing that would help this picture the most is a focus on composition. Here's a previous writeup I did on it: [url]
Now, pushing a composition in one direction or another is more a matter of taste than logic, so I can't really tell you to do it one way or another. However, I can give you my opinion on how things look and what I think would help.
The shape of the composition is almost a square, so you could emphasize that. This could by done by cleaning up and tying off the right side. Right now it fades out.
You could do something with reframing where the frame of the window acts as a separate frame than the border of the image and pushes us closer to the tree, which seems to be a main focal point. You can also just crop us really close to the window itself, cutting out most of the shutters, to give us a reframing.
To help us focus on either the tree or the shutters you can fade one or the other out. Using accelerated atmospheric perspective can be a reason to fade the tree out. Using dim lighting in the room and sunlight outside can fade the interior while making the tree have more contrast and therefore pop out more.
Also, since we're focusing on composition, make sure the picture is straight. Right now, you can see the left side is tilted up a little. By pulling that back down (just twist the image in a manipulation program) it will feel less off balance compositionally, because it will be less off balance.
Nice job on this one, and glad to see you still coming around. It's been quiet here for a while. Partly because I've been so busy on other projects. |
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