SKETCHY: Ludwig Von Drake
Added 2022-11-30 14:38:40 +0000 UTCHere's a process video for the first of my Advent Ducks.
As November wraps up I just want to thank everybody who has stuck around and been so encouraging as I've begun to incorporate my art into my channel and this Patreon. We lost a few pledges this month and I lose several YouTube subscribers every time I post one of these art videos, but I actually expected much worse. Overall the response has been very positive, and I believe over time I will find new viewers and supporters who are specifically interested in the artwork.
In the meantime, thanks again for your support and your kind words, and stay tuned for more art, new on-camera discussions, and - of course - more riffs in December. Cheers!
Comments
... or someone who tends to look over their glasses while talking. In any professional-ish photo of them they'll have their glasses on correctly and their head tilted at some standard angle. But if you want to capture a fun version of "them" then it's better to draw them talking and with them looking over the top of their glasses.
Garance A Drosehn
2022-11-30 15:55:26 +0000 UTCMaybe what is needed is at least a short video of the person, so you can see the head from multiple angles. I've had several times where I meet someone in person after seeing just a few photos of them, and I notice they don't look the same "in 3d" as I had imagined them. Once I knew them in real life then the photo is obviously them, but when all I've seen is a few photos then the 3d image that my brain dreams up can be significantly different than the real person. And I suspect many people have had the experience of seeing some person from the side, and being absolutely certain that person is a well-known close friend. You walk up to them and say "Hi [friend]!", and when they turn around they look *nothing* like the person you thought they were. I'll also note that my friend could bring in personal behaviors, or exaggerate some feature which was different about one person compared to the rest of us. So one friend would often tell jokes using a pen as if they were Groucho Marx with a cigar, so his bird portrait included the bird with a cigar in their, uh, wing. Or someone else had the habit of adjusting their glasses a lot, so the bird-portrait included a stick-figure wing which was adjusting their glasses. Or if they had unusual eyeglasses, his bird would include an exaggeration of that unique style of glasses.
Garance A Drosehn
2022-11-30 15:50:32 +0000 UTCThat's a fun idea! I had actually considered the possibility of at least duck-ifying myself as part of this project. Your comment also touches on something I've noticed since I started taking art commissions. People are impressed with my portrait style and get excited to hire me to draw their loved one(s), but very often they are displeased with the results. I think it really comes down to personal knowledge and shared perceptions. If I draw an actor or movie character, I'm tapping into a shared level of familiarity and perception. But if I draw someone's Aunt Cindy who I've never met, I may feel that I captured the likeness from the photos I'm provided but I cannot perceive that person in the same way or from the same perspective my client does. It actually has me reconsidering whether to continue drawing personalized portraits for/of people I've never met.
Josh Way
2022-11-30 15:35:37 +0000 UTCBy "portraits which looked like stick-figure flamingos", what I mean is he'd draw a bird which had a small stick-figure body, but a *large* head on it. The head was maybe one-third the height of the whole drawing, but with enough of a body that it was obvious they were flamingos. And the body was about the same width as the head, or maybe not quite as wide. So the result had the effect of looking like the portrait of a person's face, even though it was a full-body drawing.
Garance A Drosehn
2022-11-30 15:31:11 +0000 UTCIn my senior year of high school one of my friends started drawing "bird portraits" of friends. He'd draw what looked like stick-figure flamingos, except that it'd have a fully drawn head and the face would be an exaggerated version of some person's face. They were pretty good and also pretty funny due to the exaggerations he would do. Maybe you could do something like that with ducks, and people would buy portraits of a duck-version of themselves. ... although he was doing that for people he knew in person. It is probably harder to do a good job at something like that based on just a photo or two. His drawings worked because he could really capture some aspect of a person such that anyone else who knew the person would recognize who any given drawing was based on. But if you didn't know the people, you'd think it was just an imaginary funny-looking face.
Garance A Drosehn
2022-11-30 15:22:30 +0000 UTC
