FDN: CGA Notes 12

Page Notes 12
Previous Page Notes

3/2/01
(Or the 6th... O_O )
The update has finally been finished and people will likely be disappointed that I didn't actually put up a CG...I only put up a title. This title took quite a while to make, as I redrew the basic pose several times. I wanted to do a really skewed top-down POV! But I couldn't do it. ~_~ So, we have a plain angle...again.

Painter 6 is quite odd in what it remembers. It will always remember what I changed the various brush sizes to (whether I want it to or not...) but not what the last tool I had was (all the time) and it never cares what tool I was using the LAST time I ran the program. :\ Other than that, I can't set the scratch disk to the D: drive... Huh? Ah, well...I'll just have to learn.

The little white bubble on Dusk's right shoulder is the remnants of my brave, brave attempt to do highlighting! Wah! As if I understand how light works!

I was displeased with the lack of reference materials I had to use for this Title. I was only able to get 1 small picture off Game Arts' web site and 1 smaller detail from UbiSoft. The two pics were apparently done by different artists, too...so the details varied. I was also unable to figure out exactly what Ryuudo wears on his head, so I dunno if Dusk's ear would really be seen like that. (I suppose I could have looked in the game, couldn't I?) Skye has been replaced with a cuter bird whole beak, unfortunately, gets lost at this resolution. Poor colouring, I suppose. Technically, the overshirt is wrong; it should be baggy around the shoulders and elbows but I didn't feel like it (really! I didn't forget!). But somehow, over all, the colours also look just plain weird. Too colourful or something. Hmm.

The Title Screenshot was captured with my trusty Snappy and painstakingly modified, then fuzzified. I don't know why I bothered taking so long, since this pic's gonna be replaced very soon and not many people will see it anyway. ~_~ But I guess it's to show myself...I can do it! But other than that...it's been made so small, too...so..? The colon is also way too small. I blame the fact that I shoved the C and G over just about when I was done and inserted it in that tiny space that made. Ugh. But before all that, I accidentally wrote out "Fred Duck's Nest" in a Grandia-title-esque font and CGed it and coloured it...only to notice that HEY! This is the FDN: CGA title CG, not an FDN title CG! Argh...At least I was clever enough to remove the katakana. Replace it? Heck no!

GIF animation? Why not! Abusing Painter 6...

3/9/01
Close...It's the 10th. But this week's was done rather quickly. I didn't intend to spend a long time on it, though. It's not too bad, except that it wasn't a very good idea to start off with. Perhaps I'd better practice action poses all week. ^_^; Originally, Caroline and Atéo started off on separate layers, then I flattened the image. However, she was about a picture foot away from him, so I had to lasso and move her closer. Whoops. After drawing the little bitty picture, I blew it up 2x to colour it and so, this is 25% or 50% of its working size. An entirely new (but perhaps worse) CD for Atéo...

3/16/01
This picture is very unusual. It's my second ever serious attempt at drawing flowers. For reference materials, I went onto Excite and looked up various flowers in the Photo Search. I had to think up names of flowers, too. ^_^; From left to right: sunflower, daffodil, periwinkle, violet, marigold, lily, tulip. For my original sketch, I drew out the flowers on a second layer and then used that as a guide when I watercoloured them into the final image. After painting the flowers onto that, I erased all of Rita's lines that were in that space so voila, line-less flowers.

It would have been very difficult to do this picture in Painter Classic because of how many times I moved and resized the flowers. ^_^; Rita's lines would have been horribly torn up. As it is, the flowers on the right side of the picture strategically cover up her not-actually-really-drawn left hand. :} This is 50% of the Coloured image. But I can't recall if I'd doubled the resolution before colouring, as I've been doing lately. Probably, judging by how big it is.

3/23/01
It's WonderHam and Cheese! I didn't like having to hyphenate 'WonderHam' but it was either that or 1) make the picture longer or 2) shrink the lettering. Neither was a particularly good choice, so I went ahead and hyphenated it. Sadly, this is actually the second coloured version of it. I would've had the picture up on Friday but just as I finished and in another minute, would have had it saved and ready to go...some moron IMed me with some stupid message and unluckily, this killed Painter 6. ;_; Now, if this had been an important message...or even a friendly one...I wouldn't be so upset but no, it was just something mean. And he shows no remorse for his actions. So! The moral of the story: bad people should all die. Or was it 'save early and often?' I DID save early...right after I started colouring, in fact. :( But then I didn't save any other time than a mid-way step. I tried to recover the art by running the scripts, as the manual suggests (and when I did it last time, it worked) but somehow, the script file was corrupted and not even the the initial script of me starting the picture from the very beginning until the end of the rough sketch worked properly. ~_~ These scripts also wrote all over my previous saves (oops), which isn't so big a loss but I should have learned my lesson from last time I ran scripts...it records saving, as well. I guess it's 'cause I didn't expect the scripts to fail...

So...anyway, after that horrid tragedy (which set me back about an hour, I'd say...plus the half hour I took playing with the scripts), I didn't touch the picture until today (3/25). Sigh. I was prouder of my initial colouring.

WH's profile doesn't look quite right...does it? I didn't think so. And perhaps I should have pointed Cheese's eyes, huh? ^_^; BTW, this file is 16.666% of the final working size, which was 2x the resolution of the uncoloured version, which was 2x the sketch's resolution...which means...something. Ah, yes. This really was done in 2B pencil but I forgot to change the colour from black black to dark grey before starting the rough. Why I didn't change it for the final lines, I don't know. Also, I went ahead and darkened the lines around 'WonderHam' to make it more legible. It was fine before colouring but after colouring, the contrast wasn't high enough (I guess) so that it was not so easy to read. But there...all happy.

3/30/01
This picture was actually done several weeks ago, close to 4/4/01. ^_^; But for reasons unknown, I didn't post it...Now, I've finally posted it and I'm only 3 CG behind again... Argh.

This picture, like the others I've done, is an attempt to do something that I couldn't do in Painter Classic. In this case, I used a fine pen and sketched the picture out on two layers...I didn't know what I was aiming for when I started. So, in that sense, it would have been difficult to do this picture in Classic. But other than that, I used Watercolour paper texture and added little white lines in her hair. :} As if this is supposed to make a noticeable difference. Ah, well...her arm's too long, too...