Okay, so yesterday I didn't get as much work done as I wanted to. I didn't officially get Writer's Block, but it was sorta like that.
Instead, I was trying to teach myself how to draw people on my computer. I use a program called GIMP to draw, but it's hard to use if you don't know what you're doing. It can take a while to get used to it.
I don't know if you've done it before, but drawing on the computer is waay different than drawing by hand. When you draw by hand, you have lots of control. All those muscles in your fingers to move your pencil in so many different ways... you don't really appreciate that until you try it digitally.
Anyway, I'm decent at drawing by hand, and I learned how to draw well by tracing things. That's how I started drawing. So I thought, yeah I'm bad at digitally drawing something, but maybe I'll start off with tracing something good and coloring it in. That way I could get the feel of how a good picture is supposed to look.
Of course, I had to go and choose the most difficult picture I could find:
This girl reminded me of my main character. It's sort of how I pictured her to look.
So anyway, I took this picture, and I traced it:
Past the tracing, I didn't take anything from the other picture. No merging or copying. All the rest was done by me.
So I started to color it:
And finally, I added the lighting and shading.
I still feel like I cheated a little bit (probably because I did), but for now I thought the coloring and shading would give me enough of a project.
So... yeah. That's one one the things I like to do when I can't figure out what to write!
What do you guys do when the words just aren't flowing?
--Jess
Instead, I was trying to teach myself how to draw people on my computer. I use a program called GIMP to draw, but it's hard to use if you don't know what you're doing. It can take a while to get used to it.
I don't know if you've done it before, but drawing on the computer is waay different than drawing by hand. When you draw by hand, you have lots of control. All those muscles in your fingers to move your pencil in so many different ways... you don't really appreciate that until you try it digitally.
Anyway, I'm decent at drawing by hand, and I learned how to draw well by tracing things. That's how I started drawing. So I thought, yeah I'm bad at digitally drawing something, but maybe I'll start off with tracing something good and coloring it in. That way I could get the feel of how a good picture is supposed to look.
Of course, I had to go and choose the most difficult picture I could find:
This girl reminded me of my main character. It's sort of how I pictured her to look.
So anyway, I took this picture, and I traced it:
 |
| (Don't let this fool you... it took me a few hours to trace this whole thing!) |
So I started to color it:
And finally, I added the lighting and shading.
I still feel like I cheated a little bit (probably because I did), but for now I thought the coloring and shading would give me enough of a project.
So... yeah. That's one one the things I like to do when I can't figure out what to write!
What do you guys do when the words just aren't flowing?
--Jess
