gemmapeter.co.uk

Those of you who visit here through the front page probably noticed the new picture on it. I drew it and here’s how…

The bike part of the picture is a tracing I did of a photo of Wasi* (pronounced wah-zee). It was done in Sodipodi.

The part with me and my penguin was first sketched out on paper and then it was traced in Sodipodi using the bezier curve tool. I like the bezier tool because it gives nice smooth lines the only thing I don’t like is that the lines are too constant in thickness which doesn’t give a nice effect like inking the drawing would but is less messy and it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes (all hail the great Undo Button).

The two line art vector graphics were put in the appropriate places and the result was exported from Sodipodi as a PNG image. The image was opened in The Gimp and the base colours were fill-bucketed in on a separate layer by using the the magic wand tool on the line art.

The shading on the hair was the result of a lot of experimentation. The effect was achieved by first selecting the outline of the hair using the magic wand tool. The next step was to create a white outline on a separate layer. I used the Stroke tool for this. The selection was removed and the stroked outline was put through a high radius gaussian blur. Then the inverse of the original selection was selected and the blurred edges outside the lines were removed by using Clear Selection (Ctrl-K). The resulting layer was composited over the top of the flat shaded layer with “Merge Grain” effect and the transparency adjusted to something appropriate.

*I named my bike after the first part of its number plate “WA51″. It is the only was I can remember it, plus it’s a lot cheaper than a personalised plate.