Art: Jump Rope!

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I painted this back in November 2011. It’s my original pin-up gal, Catherine dressed as a Dominatrix and playing jump rope with Albino Grimby (the stuffed rabbit looking thing). As you can see, she might be a Dom, but hardly a serious one.

Catherine Jumprope full Art: Jump Rope! pin up photoshop jump rope illustration great seal dominatrix deviantArt Catherine art albino grimby

You can see a larger version on my deviantArt site. Below is the original sketch tinted blue so I could do the inks. I drew this in my sketchpad. BTW, if you’re looking for a good sketchbook to use, I really like the Robert Bateman sketchpads and I usually get the 11in. x 14in. ones. I like the paper quality — it’s pretty sturdy so it can hold up to a lot of erasing. The paper doesn’t warp and it doesn’t really bleed. Really nice sketchbook. Just google it and you can buy it online.

For this drawing, I remember a great deal of time was spent trying to get her high heel boots correct. I’m not 100% sure if I succeeded, but it looks correct. The legs seem like they’re in proportion. I didn’t jump rope much as a kid, and I’m absolutely terrible at it — I found that out when I did some jump roping in a cardio class — but I do know that jumping rope like that, with your legs kicked up behind you, is not really the way to go if you want to speedily jump over the rope. Also, probably not recommended that you do this all dolled up in leather dominatrix gear and stiletto boots, but that’s why it’s a pin-up. A goofy one at that.

Catherine Jumprope sketch Art: Jump Rope! pin up photoshop jump rope illustration great seal dominatrix deviantArt Catherine art albino grimby

This inking and sketch stayed pretty much the same. I went a bit thicker around the hat and the whip. I probably should have given it a bit more motion, but I’m not that adept at inking just yet. I’m still learning, but this was one of the milestones on my road to getting better. The emblem was the major thing that got touched up. For the sketch I phoned it in. To get all the minute details would be difficult, and since I knew I’d probably handle the final drawing on a computer, I could fudge it and fix it later. Also, I’ve done the Great Seal emblem before in other drawings of her so I actually have the whole thing done up in vectors that I can quickly rasterize. The tricky part was to angle and skew it to fit the perspective of her hat. Once again, not perfect, but I managed to get the job done and then I re-inked it since the line quality diminished as I skewed and squashed the thing.

Catherine Jumprope ink Art: Jump Rope! pin up photoshop jump rope illustration great seal dominatrix deviantArt Catherine art albino grimby

Here’s a close up of the Great Seal.

Catherine Jumprope emblemink Art: Jump Rope! pin up photoshop jump rope illustration great seal dominatrix deviantArt Catherine art albino grimby

In color:

Catherine Jumprope emblemcolored Art: Jump Rope! pin up photoshop jump rope illustration great seal dominatrix deviantArt Catherine art albino grimby

I did try to adjust it for a 3/4 view. It’s by no means perfect, but I’m fairly happy the way it turned out. Her hair though is another story. I actually don’t like it at all. The lines and the way it’s painted just don’t jive together. It looks more painted than it should for something that’s obviously drawn as a bunch of wispy clumps. I really should have shaded the tips and left out all the minute strides of highlight and shade. It could be done a lot simpler and take less time. With the drawings I did after this, that was how I began to shade hair.

Below is a close up of Albino Grimby, my mascot character:

Catherine Jumprope albino Art: Jump Rope! pin up photoshop jump rope illustration great seal dominatrix deviantArt Catherine art albino grimby

Just for fun, here’s an older version of her I did in 2010. Catherine dates back to something crazy like the year 2000. I didn’t conceive of her as a dominatrix. As with Jessica Rabbit, she’s not naughty, just drawn that way.

catherinedominatrixcelshade final Art: Jump Rope! pin up photoshop jump rope illustration great seal dominatrix deviantArt Catherine art albino grimby

Here’s a more comprehensive view of her history as a piece of art done by me throughout the years. In this odd way, because I repainted her time and time again, she’s become this milestone marker in the evolution of my art ability. When you look at them side by side you can see all of the little tweaks I made over the years. I didn’t like her cap before. I had reference of a military cap and vectorized the emblem from it. I didn’t even know it was called the Great Seal until later on. It just looked cool. I still like the 2006 version. This was back when I was trying to do more painterly style pieces, but it was time consuming and I fell out of doing art for a while after it. The main issue I have with the 2006 version is that her boobs look like a shelf, but that’s based on the original sketch. I also dropped the riding crop in her hand. When I went to redo it, it seemed cheesy, so out it went.

dominatrix progression 579x372 Art: Jump Rope! pin up photoshop jump rope illustration great seal dominatrix deviantArt Catherine art albino grimby

I originally posted “Jump Rope” as a sketch on this blog. You can find “Jump Rope!” right here. Thanks for viewing!

 

Anime Photoshoot #2

I’m by no means any expert at photography, but it’s fun to play with. Shooting small things and toys are cool.

I showed you my lego photo box before. This time I borrowed a macro-lens from a friend. It’s a Minolta lens which fits into the Sony A-mount. It does 28-85mm, but I only cared about the macro mode. There wasn’t any autofocus with the macro, so I just had to focus it myself, but I think the photos came out pretty well. Here’s a look at my setup — it’s the same as last time — a lego frame and then white paper for the sides and backdrop. Something that’s not pictured here is an aluminium foil reflector I created out of a piece of comic book bristol board and crumpled foil. Since I’m incredibly lazy the lamp just shines a top down light onto the toy. Alright it’s not really due to laziness. I played around with the light’s orientation and I didn’t like any of the cast shadows. I wanted the shadows to be right under the toy and if I did that I needed to bounce light back up to illuminate the toy further or there would be some hard shadows.  There’s still a lot of post-processing done on my computer to adjust the exposure and the black levels of each photo. I just moved the sliders until I felt happy with it and wham, bam, done.

I wanted it to look overexposed and very white and bright. I like that look a lot.

I’m exercising my Otakuness these days. I’ve got a bunch of new figures I want to purchase and adorn my house with — all of them are K-ON! figures. Alter released these figures of Mio, Yui, and Azusa, and I’ve ordered them. No idea when they’ll come in though since the dates are all further out, but I figure it’ll be like a nice surprise later on.

The setup in picture form:

4357455745 2fd90a5bc2 m Anime Photoshoot #2 white box sony a200 Photography maria sama ga miteru kasumi Haruhi Suzumiya Galaxy Express 999 albino grimby

First up Haruhi. The first image is ‘shopped from three images I took. I’m no expert in photo-manipulation, which puts me on par with everyone else who sucks at photoshopping images.

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I recently got the Galaxy Express 999 figures. So here they are again. I tried some different shooting techniques with these figures. The upshot of Maetel and Tetsuro I achieved by laying them down on the “infinite white paper. I then held Tetsuro about level with her and as straight as I could and shot them together. I played with DOF with some of these photos as well and since GE999 is generally pretty (melo)dramatic, I thought it would add a nice touch to the toys.

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Symbols for Ladies Chinenesis, Gigantea, and Foetida (just a warning, this image is fakkin’ huge):

mariasama roses half 150x150 Anime Photoshoot #2 white box sony a200 Photography maria sama ga miteru kasumi Haruhi Suzumiya Galaxy Express 999 albino grimby

No set is complete without Albino Grimby sitting on top of Kasumi.

4357401983 10c0cc9444 t Anime Photoshoot #2 white box sony a200 Photography maria sama ga miteru kasumi Haruhi Suzumiya Galaxy Express 999 albino grimby

That concludes my anime toy shoot for the time being.

Albino Grimby

My latest work-in-progress. A “bunny rabbit” character that I created with my brother named Albino Grimby — hence my Interwebs nickname. His Interwebs nickname is Grimby Slayer. Here’s what Albino actually is:

albino front tn Albino Grimby blender albino grimby 3D Modeling

A small stuffed animal. He might look cute, but we all know the truth. He’s evil to the core although all he ever wants (porportly) is to bite your face off with his non-existent mouth or get some candy and let it absorb into his body as if he were the blob. My brother and I knew of his fowlness and thusly, his full name is “Albino the Brain Sucking Grimby.” He doesn’t actually do that or anything else. Now here he is in 3D with fur and without fur:

albino composite tn Albino Grimby blender albino grimby 3D Modeling

The fur one, when you look at it closely, isn’t there yet, but I didn’t spend much time on getting the fur to move correctly. The model itself is a work-in-progress. I still need to add details to his paws (hands) and figure out how I want to texture map him or just use base colors and furry-ize him to death. The fur version of Albino has 100,000 fur particle covering his body. I would need to use forcefields and whatnot to get them to stand in the correct way. Might be do-able. I spent all day yesterday familiarizing myself with Blender’s particle system — mainly for doing hair, but that’s really tough. I tried to add hair to my head model (see previous post for bad renders the head model). I managed to get the hair from looking really, really bad to looking like barbie doll hair or a washed-up punk rocker chick after a night of binge drinking and cocaine. I need to improve my technique or there are tools that Blender needs in the barber shop area. I saw that they’re working on some, and I look forward with great anticipation at what the next release of Blender will harbor for hairstyling.

My goal for Albino Grimby is to make him a fully articulate 3D character. So he’ll be modeled, textured, and rigged. Then I can do some animations with him. Like this one:

http://www.paradiseworld.net/animation/albinofly.avi

Notice, though, that the Albino in the animation has a big ole mouth. That would actually be Albino’s japanese brother, “Mangabino.” From there, I’d even like to experiment with him in Blender’s game engine or in DirectX. That might be fun to have a fully articulate character. It would also be great to test him with my OBJ code to ensure that it still works and raytrace him via my homebrewed raytracer.

Where is all of this 3D going? I’m definitely not interested in getting a job as a 3D modeler. I’m quite happy as a software engineering. I’m content with this being a hobby. I’m also happy to support Blender and freeware. If freeware is this damn good, then I say, let’s keep going in that direction.

I’d like to see my characters live in 3D most of all. Especially this one, which is the ultimate goal. (BTW, potentially NSFW.)