So as promised, I’ve been working especially hard on editing the photos from my shoot last week with You And What Army. I’ve finally got around to doing the head shots for their myspace. Halfway done! You can check out Dave’s and Kieran’s already.

Incidentally, here’s a time lapse of how exactly I went about producing Kieran’s head shot from the original photo for your viewing pleasure:

Again, all of the shots were initially taken with a Nikon D40x in manual focus and with a standard lens.

The backgrounds are transparent, too – nifty! It’s still proving a lot of fun to do, though, I relish being able to go crazy with colours and effects, and YAWA are the perfect band to do that with. I’ve still got to finish editing the photos of Jamie and Zak, but these two should give you a good indication of things to come.

The second time lapse I’ve done, featuring Pete from Technicolor Flipbook!

This is to demonstrate how even a small resolution photograph can be used as a basis from which to create a stylised and eye-catching cartoon style vector portrait in Inkscape (though this kind of technique can be easily executed in programmes like Illustrator or Photoshop, as well):

Here’s two detail shots of the mouth and the eyes for you, too. The video is 10 times the speed of the original recording, and to really achieve that comic book feel for a simple but effective background, you can use the same ‘retro dots’ resource from deviantART that I did, by clicking here.

And finally, you can view the finished piece in full by clicking here.

I’ve just finished the 2nd video! Inkeeping with the simplistic, cell-shaded theme I talked about, this is a time lapse of the piece I’ll be doing the tutorial on later this week. Nothing too special, but in creating this, I used pretty much every basic function and tool in Inkscape that I could think of (which of course, will be fully explained in said tutorial):

The sketch took me roughly 5 or 10 minutes and the actual vectoring, around half an hour to 40 minutes. I apologise for the rushed nature of both the sketch and piece in general, I’ve been ridiculously busy as of late. But, at least it’s not anything particularly complicated, and it’s material that’s good enough to make a fairly comprehensive tutorial from. I’ll also be explaining my colour choices, as well. So, watch this space! The tutorial should be done and posted by Saturday the 23rd of August, provided I can stop being quite quite so busy!

For those who are interested, you can also view the initial sketch (complete with irrelevant, anatomy-defying dinosaur) here and the completed image here. It’s a little too flat for my taste, but I was working with speed as a main priority.

And finally, in terms of personal updates, I got my A level results today: I got an A grade at art, and feel as though this is an achievement the whole internet should know about. Huzzah!

This week’s blog won’t be quite so informative, I’ve been kept very busy again (my time has been divided between band, family and friends, and being on hideously disgusting antibiotics), so I’ve had very little time to devote to Graphics Girl – however – I have gotten around to doing quite a few odd bits and bobs: you can now find any updates relevant to the site on both Twitter and YouTube! The channel is fairly new, but be sure to subscribe for all upcoming tutorials and time lapses.

Which leads me quite nicely onto my next point; I’ve finally gotten around to creating my first time lapse video. Following An Introduction to Vector Art, I thought it best to do something simplistic and fairly straight-forward in Inkscape to kick things off with, just to demonstrate a typical process before I piece together a tutorial. So, here, Internet, have a free, pointlessy cute little vector duckie:

This took about 25-30 minutes originally, for those who are interested. I had a whole bunch of problems trying to navigate my way around Camtasia initially, so the clip does end rather abruptly, but I’m hoping it gets the point across all the same. Mainly just using (abusing, if you will) the pen tool, with gradients, scaling, and gaussian blur. I’ll be covering all this in a comprehensive video tutorial sometime next week (I’m aiming for Saturday the 23rd of August), schedule permitting! Starting from scratch and in ecruciating detail, so anyone can follow along. Then at some point I’ll progress onto how to produce vector art from a photograph, since once you’ve mastered the basics in Inkscape, this should be far easier!