Mark Twain T-shirt design cartoon

 

Mark Twain is one of the best know and most read novel writers who graced this world with his preseance and works. Years ago I painted a portrait of the man in pixels from scratch in Affinity Photo, which is the Serif company's equivalent (and I mean this quite literally) of Adobe's Photoshop, but at a low one time fee, so artists aren't bound to a hugely expensive subscription model. Even though Photo still misses some minor functions compared to the industry standard, while on the other hand having some that exceed it, Photo is a most excellent alternative for artists that hate being forced to pay a high amount of money every month to purchase the 'alleged privilege' to use it.

But Serif has also created a magnifient alternative for Adobe Illustrator, a vector program that - like Photo - misses a number of functions, that it amply compensates with different functions that are not included in Illustrator. Creating various level of hard / soft edges around an object being the most interesting for artists who dislike the unnatural hard edges many vector programs offer. The type of artist I am referring to, prefers to create more realistic art, in which had edges are mostly absent. This program is named Affinity Designer, my favorite program, since quite often I create realistic portraits in it (the progress sequence of which can be seen in this blog).

While normal people on average use about 3000 different words to communicate, Twain used approximately 8000 words in his books most of the time. Expressing himself with such an extended verbiage allowed him to say and write things that makes people wonder at least and feel mind blown in other cases. Even the most simple and basic things of life he managed to craft into small or impressive literal miracles, simply because no one ever before had the idea to express them in the eloquent way that became his trademark manner of writing.

One such quotes I used to create a cartoonish image of Twain, around which I placed his words. It is an all vector image, created in Affinity Designer of course. Below you see the different phases of the cartoon portrait, including the misinterpretations that were in them before reaching the end result. Google's Lightbox can be accessed to see the various stages, by clicking on an image. On a PC or Mac it is also possible to scroll through the images, using the mouse wheel, which allows to see the changes in the stages more clearly in Lightbox. Newest image on top, the older ones below that.

Years later I found the penultimate image below and thought: this could be done better and I came up with one that is directly beneath this paragraph.

Fiddling with GIMP, dumping Corel PhotoPaint

As I indicated in the previous blog entry I got fed up with the Corel PhotoPaint bug of crashing every time when attempting to export images as .png-files, I began practising with GIMP. The latter is an open source image editor which is completely free. Png files are important because they are lossless files, which means they do no lose quality after each time they are opened, like jpg. It is possible to define the resolution and colour profile - these are necessary functions for artists who intend to have their work printed.

I start this blog entry where I left off while creating the Mark Twain portrait project. I resized it to 40 x 40 cm and changed the resolution from 72 dpi to 300 dpi. This required some work on the details since it basically made the image 20 times bigger - 5 times because of the rescaling and 4 times because of the increased resolution. GIMP had no problem whatsoever exporting the image native format into png.

I am still getting used to the program's interface and functions, but I feel I'm getting there. The main thing I appreciate is that the program is stable and actually does the export job very well. GIMP took its time (approximately one minute) to convert the native format (xcf) to png. So far the file size is 8.74 MB. I resized the file for the blog to 888 x 888 pixels, resulting in a 547 KB file size. I work on a computer with an i7 CPU and 16 GB RAM memory. The graphic card is an NVIDIA GTX 750Ti.

I had to create custom brushes to render the skin pores texture, which works quite well once I got the hang of it. I created animated custom brushes, because emulating the skin requires an organic texture. GIMP allows to create very complex animated brushes, but I discovered that an animated brush based on three different layers will do the job. The skin pore texture is made with a transparent background and three layers with different dot patterns that rotate randomly when drawing. The spacing (space between rotations) is kept at a default setting of 20.

I placed the date and time in the captions below the images of different stages. The oldest will be at the bottom, the newest on top.

The final stage was made in Affinity Photo that I purchased a while ago after dumping Corel and Adobe - the first for being buggy, the latter for being hugely overpriced. The Affinity products, Designer for vector drawing and Photo for bitmap creation and editing, are very competent replacements for the leaders in the graphic market, available at a very low price (50 Euro each). Its functionality isn't yet on par with that of Corel and Adobe, but they are closing in rapidly and have some advantages over their competition that make them shine.

Added hair detail and colour filter layer Dec 2018

Sep 05 2017 17:25

Sep 04 2017 22:30

Mark Twain - digital portrait

I'm a temporary host for two cats that live in my attic, separated from my own cat who lives downstairs. One of my temporary companions lays herself down on my keyboard when I'm upstairs, making it impossible to work on my regular computer. So I am working on the machine in the livingroom that has modest specs. I downloaded the open source program Gimp that I've never used before and try to see if it's an option that works as well as Corel PhotoPaint that I use to make digital portraits.

The learning curve isn't very steep, but it takes some time to turn out a quality similar to that which is possible with PhotoPaint. The latter (2017 version) has a lot user friendly options that speed up working that aren't available in Gimp or perhaps that I just haven't yet discovered them. Besides, Gimp is free, so what the developers have achieved is more than excellent. Below you see the sequence of a portrait of Mark Twain; the oldest stage at the bottom, the newest on top. I forgot the record the first stages and started when I made some progress already.

Gimp is somewhat more coarse than Corel PhotoPaint and lacks on canvas controls (which speed up working significantly), but hey... it's free. I should have defined the resolution before starting to draw, but due to being unfamiliar with this program I forgot. The image size should have been larger as well to make sure prints would have the desired quality.

Tip for desktop users: Click on one of the images which will bring you to Blogger's Lightbox that allows you to scroll through the different stages, allowing you to see the difference between the stages faster and more clearly.