Lettering

[Laurence Finston]

This is another drawing from around the same time as I drew the ones for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Nutcracker", i.e., around 2003-2005. It's a pencil drawing. It illustrates a couple of problems with the approach I used, namely cleaning up and finishing an original sketch as far as possible.

The area of the gray background corresponds to the entire sheet of drawing paper I used. I have a tendency to go over the edges. Obviously, the right wing needs to be completed and the position of the figure relative to the lettering needs to be adjusted. The lettering itself also needs to be improved.

Now that I have a light table, it's no problem to fix these kinds of things.

(In progress)

[Laurence Finston]

Ran out of time to edit my previous post. The files stormfield.mp.txt and stormfield.txt contain the MetaPost and TeX code, respectively, for creating stormfield.pdf, which I haven't uploaded because it's very large.

Around 2005 I had a number of drawings (digitally) photographed by someone at a camera store who had a camera stand. Even back then the resolution was quite high, so the files are quite large. So far, the only way I've found to reduce the resolution using GIMP is to export the XCF files as JPEGs. With EPS, PNG and PDF, there doesn't appear to be any option for doing this. I'm not sure about PS. I created a low resolution PDF by importing the low resolution JPEG and exporting it as a PDF, but it was still pretty large. There probably is a way to reduce the resolution in GIMP without exporting the file.

By and large, I'm happy with this drawing, except that the hand holding the pipe needs to be fixed, as well as the points mentioned above. I'm sorry to say that my knowledge of human or any other kind of anatomy is rather shaky. Unfortunately, when I was young, the art education available no longer included things like anatomy, perspective, technical drawing, or learning about how people, animals and things actually looked and functioned and how to represent them.

I didn't bother to make a frame in the proportion 16:9 because in its present form, this drawing is more suitable for the title page of a book than for a film title, where the title and author wouldn't appear in the same frames. This time, I included the drawing in the TeX file and made the frame, crosshairs and tick marks separately in the MetaPost file.

I have two other drawings for "Stormfield" and I'd like to fix them up, too. However, there are a couple of problems with the story from the point of view of illustration or animation. It's really only the beginning that would be suitable, because in the latter half, it's all philosophical observations with no action and it doesn't really have an ending. In addition, there's already an excellent stop-motion film with a section that tells the beginning of the story, namely Will Vinton's The Adventures of Mark Twain: The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985 film - Wikipedia)

[Laurence Finston]

These are the other two "Stormfield" drawings. I think they're both suitable for animation. Unfortunately, I made a mistake with the second one: The character that yells at Stormfield from the freighter isn't a common sailor, as in my illustration, but rather the captain. I think the way I've done it makes for a better picture but I don't think poetic license goes that far.

[Laurence Finston]

On the title page, I also inadvertantly made the figure left-handed. It's no problem to reverse it using GIMP and it wouldn't be much trouble to reverse only the figure, but, as the attached JPEG shows, reversing things doesn't usually work well. I don't quite understand why not.

[Laurence Finston]

This is another illustration for "The Nutcracker". It also went off the page, so I scaled it down to leave room for corrections. It's suitable for animating, so the frame in this example is 267 x 150.1875mm, which is in the proportion 16:9. Since there's nothing in the center of the drawing, I put a crosshair there.

I could add a frame, crosshairs and tick marks, scale the image and add a border to make a page in the format DIN A4 landscape in GIMP, but some things are easier and/or just easier for me when using MetaPost and TeX. For example, I can scale the image in the TeX file without affecting the GIMP file and without making a copy for each size.

I did a better job with the hands than I've done on some other drawings and this drawing is another example of how good Polychromos pencils look when photographed or scanned.

In the original story, the Mouse King has nine heads but I don't think that would work well in a drawing (or a ballet).

[Laurence Finston]

This is a "proof of concept". It tests having the sailor's face grow. If the frames are subsequently shown in reverse order, it will shrink again. Basically, it's just a zoom on a portion of the drawing while leaving the rest untouched.

There are several types of camera moves: zooms, pans, tracks and tilts. In traditional 2D animation, zooms and pans are easy to do. Tracks aren't needed, because for a track, if you had a figure walking, for example, you would just have it make the motions of walking but leave it in the same position relative to the camera. You might use this in combination of a pan for the background. Tilts don't work in 2D; if you were using perspective drawings, you'd have to make different ones for each (tilted) camera position.

To make this example work, I'd have to make a drawing with the missing parts of the freighter, position the heads correctly and get rid of the white border around the smaller ones. I'm also not happy with the smoke coming out of the back of the freighter.

[Laurence Finston]

This example demonstrates one way of rotating a figure. It shows the ladybug fairy rotated in increments of 45°. In the first line, from left to right: 0, 45, 90, 135, 180 and in the second line, from right to left: 225, 270, 315 and 360 (= 0).

The images are all rectangular. In GIMP, the area surrounding the figure is transparent but when they're included in the MetaPost file, the transparent areas are converted to white. I'm not entirely sure why this is, because if I make an EPS file using MetaPost and don't fill in the background, the latter will be transparent. In the TeX file, I therefore can't have the figures overlapping.

However, if I import the PDF file with all of the figures into GIMP, I can convert the background to be transparent and shift the figures around to make them overlap.

I think it was a little faster to do the rotations with MetaPost rather than GIMP and I could possibly automate the process to make it faster. On the other hand, I might be able to automate the process in GIMP, too. This second attempt was faster and more successful than the first one, but still rather tedious and time-consuming (like so many other things).

[Laurence Finston]

I replaced the white background with green using GIMP and MetaPost, then I changed the green to be transparent in GIMP. Then, one by one, I copied each individual figure to a separate layer, moved the layer to a different position and then combined the two layers into one again. This way, I could cover a portion of the original layer with the figure on the new layer.

A problem is that antialiasing caused some of the green pixels to be left out when they were supposed to be made transparent. It's probably possible to fix this by having MetaPost create PNG output instead of EPS, and then convert the PNG files to EPS. I need a break now, so I'll try this some other time.

[Laurence Finston]

Originally Posted by Laurence Finston

A problem is that antialiasing caused some of the green pixels to be left out when they were supposed to be made transparent. It's probably possible to fix this by having MetaPost create PNG output instead of EPS, and then convert the PNG files to EPS.

I was wrong about that. It apparently doesn't work to create PNG output when using exteps. However, it is possible to get rid of the pixels in various shades of green in GIMP. This also removed the stalks of the antennae but this can probably also be fixed, too.

In this test version, the resolution of the figures is quite low. For "production", it would be better to work in a larger size and then reduce it. That should help prevent eliminating thin lines.

[Laurence Finston]

Another example. Put a watercolor background behind the "swarm" with the transparent background.