So this week I had a really stupid idea.
Richard Feynman, 45min.
Fuck around with refining my automatic lighting methods, and get better at drawing humans after several decades of mostly drawing furries, by plopping a photo of some Famous Person into Illustrator and working over it.
Jim Belushi, 1h
Then slap on a quote from someone else who is vaguely related, and attribute it to a third person. Post it and say it’s yet another person. Ideally these people are just close enough in most people’s conceptual catalogs to be really annoying.
Beyonce, 1:20
And declare it “finished” in a half an hour.
You will note that the times quoted for these are nowhere near a half an hour. Bill Murray had like a half an hour of expanding the lighting system I’m playing with in these as part of his time, and some work lost to a crash near the end. Margot Robbie had an entire half hour figuring out how to make Illustrator do the hair curls for me in a way that looked good but didn’t become absolutely the most important thing in the drawing due to having too much detail. Before I did her I also spent a half hour expanding the lighting system in another file; now I can easily build a set of styles that let me draw a simple shape and have it automatically lit and shaded in multiple directions.
I am not 100% happy with how the lighting system is working out but it’s definitely going somewhere, Illustrator is generating a lot of paths and effects for me here. If I’d painted all the lighting by hand there would be 2-3x more shapes visible in these outline views, with a corresponding increase in the time I’d spent.
If you would like to play with it, here it is.
lighting system.ai
The intended use is to use the ‘lighting’ Graphic Styles as parts of other styles – bring these into a new file, pick a direction of lighting, turn off the other lights/shadows, and add more fills at the bottom of the appearance stack with the colors of your actual subject. Tweak the lighting color by changing the global swatches, and possibly by reworking the associated gradients. Apply the individual light/shadow styles to entire layers to add bigger chunks of light. If you’ve got the Astute Graphics plugins then make liberal use of the Opacity Brush to clean up edges on overlapping lit shapes. If you don’t then I guess you get to manually make a bunch of opacity masks or something. There’s a bunch of refinements I’d like to make to this system but I’m really not in the mood to spend a half an hour changing all these styles right now.
Once I get a few more styles together for various kinds of hair, I should be able to get a lot closer to doing one of these in a half an hour, and that’ll be nice. If I’d left Robbie’s hair as a simple flat abstraction like I did for Einstein and Murray then she’d have been more like 45min and that’s doing pretty good.
Illustrator source to the actual images is over on Patreon.