Tag Archives: art

the crying of lot 49

Peggy
September 21, 2024

Illustrator, 1h.

I decided to fool around again with the “big swooshy line with a parallel line brush” technique I played with yesterday.

 

I’d drawn this big swoosh in the same file before I closed it yesterday. I duplicated it and started fooling around – I rotated it, stuffed it in a distortion mesh, rotated the mesh back, and made two new mesh lines close together in the middle, then pulled it apart. And made a bunch more mesh lines to let me wave it around.

It looked vaguely like a figure so I added a few more mesh lines to make a rectangle around the head area, and another mesh line down the middle of that area to create some points to pull around.

 

The parts coming up and around kinda felt like a hand holding something, so I drew a stylized post-horn and some hands.

I really wanted this to just be B&W but I was lazy and used a second color to knock that hand back. Then it started to look like an old super-designey Penguin Books cover so I looked online for the grid they structured everything around for a few decades, dropped it in, and moved things around until it looked good.

And then I rendered it out and posted it and now you are looking at it.

If you got this far down maybe you would like to support my patreon if you’re not doing that already and have more money than you know what to do with.

horny doodling (NSFW)

Peggy
August 26, 2024

I was looking for something else and I found the figure that became this in a Horny Peggy Doodles file from 2016. I decided to throw some of my 2024 coloring methods on it; an hour later it had just sort of turned into genie/potgirl/modular weirdness.

I have a whole lot of files full of horny doodles of my fursona in these sorts of situations. Sometimes they get finished. A lot of them just stay doodles.

A Visit With Future Me

Peggy
August 8, 2024

(This is an eight megabyte animgif, give it a moment to load.)

“Visit your perfect, wise, future self,” the guided mediation said. And I got this.

The next morning I decided to doodle the image in Illustrator. And then a little voice in my head suggested doodling it again in Moho, the animation program I’ve been playing with lately. I did. And then I set it up for animation, put a little breathing cycle on it, and started playing with various rendering effects. I spent about three hours here but once I get the hang of this thing it’ll probably be more like a half hour to do a little “living photo” cycle like this again, and that’s pretty cool.

shitportraits

Peggy
June 28, 2024

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.

Electric Stripe

Peggy
June 24, 2024

Commission.

Have some rough sketches.

I was lazy when doing my first sketch and forgot that the request involved her playing guitar. Oops.

So I did this second rough instead. Usually my roughs don’t involve shading but I wanted to make sure I was selling the “dramatically backlit” part of this thing.

The guitar was drawn flat on, over a photo of a real guitar; a symbolized copy of it was put into a distortion mesh to get the right twisted cartoon perspective. All the knobs and pickups and strings were drawn on top of that copy because life’s too damn short to try and do a double reverse distortion in my head. The marble’s an image I found on the internet, with its color bashed around via Astute’s Phantasm plugin. Part of me is sad that the head ended up out of frame,;I feel like when you are drawing someone rocking the fuck out on a guitar, it is very important to get details like “yes this is actually a guitar and not a bass, count the tuning pegs” correct, but there’s six strings visible and that’s enough.

Outline view. A little less messy than usual because I’ve been refining some techniques to do a lot of basic lighting automatically. Important stuff gets more lighting added by hand, unimportant stuff stays simple, especially if it’s going to get blurred like the foreground crowd or the cameo of Drumbot in the background.

My inspirational searches for things like “guitarist rocking the fuck out” made it very apparent than when you are rocking the fuck out, electricity tends to appear around your guitar. This happens at live shows, too, right? Maybe I should get out more.

Secret Doppleganger

Peggy
January 22, 2024

Sometimes you look in the mirror and the wrong fursona looks back out.

Prints and stickers and suchlike on Redbubble.

Illustrator source and high-res on Patreon.

This one got started back in August of last year, and sat in my working directory for five months until I finally took it out today and did some finishing touches. Sometimes these things just have to lurk for a while until their time is right.