More 3D Stuff

I don't know why this didn't occur to me before, but it's totally easy to take 3D pictures with a regular camera. I found a tutorial on how to do it, but it basically just boils down to dropping the green and blue channels out of the left eye image and the red out of the right and multiplying them together.

My first attempt was kind of wack, I think because the two images were too far apart and not parallel. It's my mouse and tea mug:



Then I took this picture of my bike, which I thought would be a good reference for my 3D pencil drawing. It came out amazing, despite the right image being a little blurry. It looked good enough that I went back and redid it in color. Still awesome. The handlebars and near pedal really jump out:



And finally I did this picture of my messy desk and bookshelf. It looks alright:



I think the first and third images both suffer from too much variation in depth. You can see that, e.g., the laptop screen in the first picture and the phone cord in the last one are way far apart from each other in the two channels, and when you look at them through the glasses those parts are not easily resolved into coherent objects without refocusing your eyes.

Now that I had more of an idea how to work with this stuff on the computer, I scanned in my original ink line art that I had traced for the 3D pencil drawing. I separated it into red and blue/green layers and then moved stuff around and the results are actually okay:



I plan to keep playing with this stuff...I definitely need some 3D cat photos, and I want to try the drawing kit with some better pencils.

3D Bicycle Drawing

A couple months ago Peter and I were talking about how to do 3D drawings. I was thinking of just doing line art and then shifting stuff around in different colored layers on the computer. But Peter happened to come across this little 3D drawing kit and picked one up for me:



It's this little plastic "compass" that holds a blue and red pencil in place so you can draw with both of them at the same time at a fixed distance apart from one another. Here are the instructions from the back of the package:



And here it is in use as I draw some practice shapes:



Today on my day off I was fiddling with my bike, and I swapped out my flat bars for some drops from a bike salvaged from the trash a couple months back. I did a quick ink drawing of it so I could trace it with the compass:



Here's the finished drawing. I started tracing at the rear wheel with the pencils very close together and then as I worked my way "forward" I moved the pencils farther apart. I'm not sure how well the 3D ended up working, but it still looks sort of cool:



Update: as soon as I posted this and was looking at the finished drawing again, I thought to check something. The blue pencil that came with the kit is totally the wrong color: if you hold the red lens of the glasses right against the paper then you only see the blue lines, but if you look through the blue side then both lines are clearly visible. I think actually the pencil is close to "true blue," whereas the glasses are cyan. I'll have to pick up a cyan pencil and see if I can get better results.

Comics Nooby

I took a sketch pad and my new brush pen home with me over the holidays, hoping to get in some good practice time. I wanted to both practice laying out full comic pages as in my baseball drawing, and to get a little more comfortable with the brush pen.

The second day I was home, I drew a couple panels portraying part of the previous day, when my mom took Nate and I on a walk down to the creek to see where the salmon were all dying after spawning:

It was a nice little vignette, I thought, so I decided that each day I would do a full page depicting something I'd done the previous day. I was laying out the panels, drawing in blue pencil, and then inking only with the brush pen.

Unfortunately, because of how vacations tend to go, most of the rest of my days were not nearly so exciting, and rather than drawing little episodes, I tended to just summarize each day with a bunch of confusingly juxtaposed panels. So the result is neither coherent nor really very interesting.

Also, the first page gave me practice drawing from different sources: the establishing landscape panel I drew from real life, then the second panel was from memory, and I used a reference photo for the third. Later pages tended to be almost all from memory. Here they are:











I also noticed that while I didn't have any trouble coming up with different facial features for made up characters in Night-Wight, I have no clue how to look at an actual person's face and distill their features into a drawing. So everyone looks exactly the same in these drawings, and going back I probably couldn't even tell you who is supposed to be who.

Was this exercise a success? I don't know. I didn't even really do any shading after the first three, so I don't know that I actually got any better with the brush pen. But I did come up with a good variety of panel layouts that I think mostly worked pretty well, and I know that I need to work on looking at faces and figuring out how to portray them (or rather, how to model them in my mind so that I render them as accurate portrayals). It was fun, too, so I'm glad I decided to do it.

Mets @ Houston

Peter, Andrew and I met for dinner at a local restaurant. Peter had been watching some YourTube vidieaux about drawing comics, and the Mets game was on, so he drew a little baseball comic while we ate. Andrew was tired and went home early, but Peter and I stayed to watch the rest of the game. My precious Mets of New York trounced those hapless dummies of the Houston Astros.

Napkin Drawings

Peter made a little drawing of the 4th of July on a bar napkin on Tuesday (Independence Eve), and then started doing other little sketches of fun summer things. I did a couple too, including a baseball one.