Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Day 6 - Nothing Like a Dame


Monday, Tuesday and Wednesdays are really tough days, and so they will be the days I commonly do illustrations. I've really got to work on my sketching and rendering, and so I will be doing some replications of bits from pulp magazines for a while.

Today's picture is from the cover of a pulp magazine, The Storyteller, from 1937. I love that pose. Even though it is a stylized "surprise" pose from the period (specifically for sexy dames when interrupted getting into bed by nasty gunmen) I think it is something that will make a good foundation for something completely different. Like a mysterious figure pointing something out. (That's why I gave her that longer, more fairytale romantic hair.)

I'm doing these pictures in Photoshop CS3, with a little Wacom Bamboo tablet. It's not the smallest one, but the one that's about 3.5 by 5 inches. It lists for about $99, and I got it from Staples for about $70. (Amazon currently has it at, ulp, $450! So you won't see any Amazon Associates affiliates link for it here, much as I would like a share of that price.)

While I'm working on the sketching and rendering at home, I am working on a fuller variety of drawing skills at work, because I need to get good at Corel Painter so I can help more of our students. Painter is a very very cool program that imitates real artistic media - from oil paints to chalk to watercolor to pencils of various sorts - with a lot of nifty computer features thrown in. It is, unfortunately a very buggy program, and prone to give people technical trouble, however.
I am not counting that work in the Dare, but I will probably post some of it later on. (In some cases, I might redo the work I'm doing here with Painter and a big tablet, just to see how much difference it makes.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The expensive Bambo is the older model. Newest generation is $58 + change. Strange because you can get that size of Intuos for $199.

The Daring Novelist said...

Now that I've got the bloody comments fixed....

Yeah, I got the one for about sixty bucks, and that's the exact same model that Amazon was listing for $450 and everybody else had at $60-70... but I noticed today that all the stores that had that model no longer have it at all. Either Amazon made a mistake, or one of their sub-vendors were taking advantage of a scarcity.

Some of the new models look like they are trying to imitate an enhanced track pad. Yuck!