Monday evening, the 4th of December it is, and in less than 4 hours my food card will be charged up with 137 bucks worth of food.
There is a half bag of red kidney beans and another of great northern beans in my cupboard, along with the popcorn which I stopped eating, along with other corn products, about a year ago, now, and that's about it.
Alex in California has given me a good idea for the production of cartoons of myself rather quickly.
There is a "photocopy" effect in the GIMP editor, which removes the color from and leaves, to varying degrees set by the user, the outline of any picture.
He mentioned that some artist called Tom Tomorrow, or something, actually would photocopy something repeatedly until the same effect was produced, and then would color in the things to make his cartoons.
This is basically what I did to the right, rather sloppily.
I took a picture of myself with my webcam, ran it through the "photocopy" effect, and then colored in what was left.
This Cheating Art Of Mine (will make you weep)
The first time I saw an artist "cheat" in drawing, aside from the circles and x-es that Rembrandt would mark on his canvas for where the eyes and mouth would go, etc., was a guy that I met in jail in Virginia.
He was making drawings, copying other inmates photos of their family members, and then bartering for coffee, honey buns, socks, tee shirts and, of course, more paper and pencils, with them.
But, he had a little plastic ruler and a protractor, and was using them to scale his drawings from the sometimes wallet sized originals, to the 8" X 11" works that he would eventually produce.
He was measuring things like the distance between the eyeballs of the subject, and then using a multiplier of 2 or 3 or 4, to "blow up" his drawing to that dimension.
Photocopy!
I copied him, and found that this is a hugely useful cheating technique.
I think that the human brain uses things like the symmetry of a face and the orientation of the features in order to recognize other people.
And I have even seen a study done whereby the faces of "the ten most beautiful people in the world," were found to be consistent in that the distances and angles between the facial features followed a formula, whereby the eyes would sit almost exactly midway between the top of the head and the chin, and the height of each eye was something like one 7th of the height of the whole face, etc. There was even a pentagram that could be superimposed over the face (of Angelina Jolie, at least) which would line up perfectly with certain points, such as chin and cheek and middle of forehead. Ugly people had more of a hexagram thing going on, or worse, a triangle LOL!
So, yeah. I would even go so far as to make a rubber stamp of my cartoon face that I could just stamp into the frame and then focus upon inserting the humor in the surrounding scene. I could have rubber stamps for other characters, like Lilly, perhaps. Thwack! Done.
Now, I place a white sheet of paper over my laptop screen and am able to trace the outline of the face, after maybe zooming in a bit, and mark, especially, where each eye pupil is going to go, in relation to the tip of the nose and the ears; so as to set the pentagram in place to work around.
Another thing the guy in cell block C would do is make a copy of the original photo, blow it up and then blacken the reverse side with heavily applied graphite. He would then flip it over, place it on a blank white sheet and then trace over as much of the face as he could, bearing down enough on the pencil so that the graphite on the back of the sheet would leave tracings on the blank white sheet.
These, he would use as guidelines, and would have a cup of coffee and a honey bun in no time, once he finished shading.
The limitation that the only pencils available in the jail were made of rubber (and not wood so you couldn't even stab a problem cellmate with them) actually worked in his favor because he always had "not bad for using these shitty jailhouse pencils, eh?" to fall back upon.
It is even good to have a protractor to measure things such as the angle at which the tip of the nose sits in relation to the left eye's pupil, for example. This helps to set the x-es and circles at least in their proper orientation to each other. The beauty can then become focused on the details of shading.
There is a half bag of red kidney beans and another of great northern beans in my cupboard, along with the popcorn which I stopped eating, along with other corn products, about a year ago, now, and that's about it.
There is a "photocopy" effect in the GIMP editor, which removes the color from and leaves, to varying degrees set by the user, the outline of any picture.
He mentioned that some artist called Tom Tomorrow, or something, actually would photocopy something repeatedly until the same effect was produced, and then would color in the things to make his cartoons.
This is basically what I did to the right, rather sloppily.
I took a picture of myself with my webcam, ran it through the "photocopy" effect, and then colored in what was left.
This Cheating Art Of Mine (will make you weep)
The first time I saw an artist "cheat" in drawing, aside from the circles and x-es that Rembrandt would mark on his canvas for where the eyes and mouth would go, etc., was a guy that I met in jail in Virginia.
He was making drawings, copying other inmates photos of their family members, and then bartering for coffee, honey buns, socks, tee shirts and, of course, more paper and pencils, with them.
But, he had a little plastic ruler and a protractor, and was using them to scale his drawings from the sometimes wallet sized originals, to the 8" X 11" works that he would eventually produce.
He was measuring things like the distance between the eyeballs of the subject, and then using a multiplier of 2 or 3 or 4, to "blow up" his drawing to that dimension.
 |
| Coloring books were teaching us valuable life skills! |
Photocopy!
I copied him, and found that this is a hugely useful cheating technique.
I think that the human brain uses things like the symmetry of a face and the orientation of the features in order to recognize other people.
And I have even seen a study done whereby the faces of "the ten most beautiful people in the world," were found to be consistent in that the distances and angles between the facial features followed a formula, whereby the eyes would sit almost exactly midway between the top of the head and the chin, and the height of each eye was something like one 7th of the height of the whole face, etc. There was even a pentagram that could be superimposed over the face (of Angelina Jolie, at least) which would line up perfectly with certain points, such as chin and cheek and middle of forehead. Ugly people had more of a hexagram thing going on, or worse, a triangle LOL!
So, yeah. I would even go so far as to make a rubber stamp of my cartoon face that I could just stamp into the frame and then focus upon inserting the humor in the surrounding scene. I could have rubber stamps for other characters, like Lilly, perhaps. Thwack! Done.
Now, I place a white sheet of paper over my laptop screen and am able to trace the outline of the face, after maybe zooming in a bit, and mark, especially, where each eye pupil is going to go, in relation to the tip of the nose and the ears; so as to set the pentagram in place to work around.
 |
| I'm not making this stuff up... |
Another thing the guy in cell block C would do is make a copy of the original photo, blow it up and then blacken the reverse side with heavily applied graphite. He would then flip it over, place it on a blank white sheet and then trace over as much of the face as he could, bearing down enough on the pencil so that the graphite on the back of the sheet would leave tracings on the blank white sheet.
These, he would use as guidelines, and would have a cup of coffee and a honey bun in no time, once he finished shading.
The limitation that the only pencils available in the jail were made of rubber (and not wood so you couldn't even stab a problem cellmate with them) actually worked in his favor because he always had "not bad for using these shitty jailhouse pencils, eh?" to fall back upon.
It is even good to have a protractor to measure things such as the angle at which the tip of the nose sits in relation to the left eye's pupil, for example. This helps to set the x-es and circles at least in their proper orientation to each other. The beauty can then become focused on the details of shading.
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