Tag Archives: art

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.

walkies (2)

Peggy
January 12, 2024

So on the Illustrator subreddit, a challenge was issued: what can you do with just one circle?


Well, I can do this. Custom brushes were allowed for this particular challenge as long as they were a single color, and I abused that – there’s some tricksy things going on with 0% opaque shapes in the “tunnel line” brush to help it overlap less messily.

It’s a reimplementation of this piece I did back in 2021 at the behest of someone asking “how do I make a tunnel effect in Illustrator”; the original version was pretty minimal, and honestly I wouldn’t want to do it with any fewer paths than I actually used. But hey, sometimes you have to do things the hard way.

And just for laughs here’s what I get if I use the same appearance stack on a couple different shapes…

Not how I was planning on spending an hour and a half of my work day, but, well, sometimes when a challenge is issued you just have to take it.

Source: walkies.ai

Transmissions from the Titty Dimension

Peggy
December 12, 2023

Yesterday Sabs showed me a very horny drawing of a lady with an absolutely absurd amount of titties. I kept on thinking about it and stonedly decided to draw something along those lines, containing our horny characters.

But then I remembered that I’d been threatening to draw basically that for Devalynne for a while. So I drew that. And when I went on to draw Sabs’ version I decided to just kind of merge it with the first one. And then I decided to do one with Cordite, because I’ve been making similar threats for a while. And then one purely for me because I feel like I have not been drawing horny pregnancy art any where near enough lately. And today I came back to it and started adding one for the SO, too, after asking which of their characters they’d like to see in this sort of situation. That one’s not done so it’s not part of this.

Illustrator, about eight hours, I’m not sure exactly how much time I spent finishing up the fourth part versus starting on the  fifth part.

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Source and a WIP of that fifth part on Patreon.

from the effects tag: luminous overlapping squares

Peggy
December 7, 2023

There’s been an image floating around on the Illustrator subreddit (a still from this looping animation, it turns out) with a lot of stabs at duplicating it in Illustrator. Today, a pretty good recreation got posted. I followed their instructions and got a pretty decent version, then decided to see if I could squish it down from four overlapping blends of two squares to one blend with some complicated Appearance stacks, so it would be a lot easier to re-use.

I think I did a decent job; here’s my source file. All basic Illustrator for once.

And this was the results of trying those complex Appearance stacks on more arbitrary shapes. The one on the left has “knockout group transparency” turned on, which is the default when blending shapes together. Looks like some kind of sex toy, really.

Insistent Voices

Peggy
October 25, 2023

Yesterday, my SO showed me this sketch from something like fifteen to twenty years ago.

It’s a mind-controlling insect from an obscure corner of Marvel’s comics massaging the brain of an anonymous raccoon. It has survived three purges of their “accounting” directory at this point and they’re still horny for it. Maybe, they asked, I could finish it?

I took it into Illustrator and spent two hours doing just that, using the automatic shading methods I’ve been fooling with lately. It’s really weird how they fuck with my brain, I will knock something out and it looks so finished that I don’t want to do anything more to it, but it’s also nowhere near finished. I need to figure out how to get around this and firmly convince my brain that something that looks the way this technique does is Not Finished so that it’s easy to dive in and add some more shading by hand where it’s really needed, like I did in this one. Overall though I would say that “I can draw something in a few minutes that looks so superficially polished that it breaks how my brain thinks about what to do next” is a pretty good problem to have!

The Illustrator source is over on Patreon, if you’re curious as to how I got this done in two hours. It uses a bunch of Astute’s effect plugins.