GIMP Tutorial and Game Preview

So I used GIMP to put together a really quick and dirty portrait of my new character in the new game campaign, and thought I would throw up a quick tutorial on how I did it. I'm not going to give all the menu paths and such; generally, selection tools are under the Select Menu, Gaussian Blur is under Filters>Blur, and the layer modes are on the Layers dialog under Windows>Dockable Dialogs.

I took as my model this photo of actor Corbin Bleu, best known for his role in the Disney Channel's High School Musical movies. He has matured into a handsome young man, and between the hair and the well-defined planes of his face, he looks a lot like the character I see in my head.

STEP 1: I used the Path tool to copy him out of the background and paste him on a new layer. There are some complicated methods using high-pass filtering to preserve the detail of the hair and such, but in general, I find it faster and easier to simply define a path around the figure, Select From Path, Invert, and Cut, then use the eraser to do fine clean-up. I will usually then Select by Color the transparent portion of the layer, grow the selection by 3-10 pixels (depending on how big the photo is) and run a Gaussian Blur of 2-3 pixels to eliminate the sharp edges to the image that are a telltale giveaway that the person has been cut and pasted.

This was a quick-and-dirty conceptual piece, so I didn't do as much clean-up as I could have on his hair and neck/shoulder areas, or the gap between his chest and his right hand. I also cloned out the necklace, although not completely.

STEP 2: I added a desert background, then flipped it to make the angle of the light more closely match that of the Bleu photo. Then because my character is of a non-human race with golden cat-like eyes, I needed to change Bleu's dark brown eyes to match. First I selected the area of Bleu's eyes, cut and pasted to a new layer, then erased everything except the irises. I desaturated the image so it was black and white, then upped both the brightness and contrast until the brown area of Bleu's eyes (hardly noticeable unless you're looking at extreme magnification) was quite bright. Then I used a small brush to paint in black, darkening the pupils and extending them into catlike slits.

STEP 3: I added another layer just under the one with the copy of the irises and painted in yellow over Bleu's irises. Most irises darken at the edges, so I left a little gap between my yellow and the edge of the iris to provide an outline (I've hidden the other layer so you can see the color more clearly).

STEP 4: I set the layer mode of the iris copy to Hard Light. This allowed the natural patterns of light and dark in Bleu's eyes to overlay the yellow color I'd painted in, making a realistic looking eyeball with shadows that match the lighting in the base photo.

The eyes look a little bright and artificial at this point, so I reduced the opacity of the color layer to about 60% and the overlay to about 80%, which made the effect more subtle and natural-looking.

STEP 5: I had the eyes looking pretty good at this point. The problem now was the color. The original photo had been taken indoors, while the background was saturated in the warm colors of sunset. So I added another layer, did a Select by Color on the transparent portion of the figure layer, followed by Invert Selection. Then I filled the selection with a tone which I thought would give a good match and set the mode to Overlay. It wasn't quite right, so I fiddled with the Hue and Saturation sliders under the Color menu and played with the Opacity until I had something I liked.

STEP 6: It still didn't look right, though. Notice that on the background image, it appears to be taken at sunset, and the shadows are very deep and black. So I needed to deepen the shadows on the figure, while making the highlights pop. I couldn't simply change the contrast on the figure, because that would also change the hues, making them garish. So I copied the figure and pasted it to a separate layer above my color correction layer. I Desaturated the image, then ran a Gaussian Blur. The figure was large, so I may have gone as high as 10 pixels on this. Experiment with what works best. I erased out the irises to allow the eyes I'd worked so hard on to show through.

I set the mode to Overlay  and kept the Opacity at 100%. Notice how it makes the shadows deeper and the highlights brighter without changing the overall hues. The blur also has the added benefit of smoothing out the skin tones and giving everything a slightly alien sheen. I probably could have done this better and more easily with an Alpha Channel or something, but I still don't understand channels, so I stick with what I know.

STEP 7: At this point, I was pretty happy with the result, although I figured I would add some processing to the overall image to add a subtle iris effect to focus attention on the focal point of the picture. I usually do this on a separate image, though, so I saved what I had to a separate JPG, then added the iris effect for the final result.

I intend at some point, once the game has begun and the character has taken better shape, to do a better portrait. But as a quick-and-dirty picture that was completed in an hour or two, this is not bad, and the basic techniques are applicable to a wide variety of situations.

If this kind of article interests you, let me know and I'll do some more. I'm no expert, but I've learned a few tricks here and there, and I'm glad to share if it does someone some good.

The Final Smeaton and Another Old Photo

So I did a little tweaking to the Smeaton portrait, and here's the final result.

I had reduced the size of the eyes previously, because the original photo was a little doe-eyed, but I decided I reduced them a little too drastically. He was too beady-eyed, like a lizard or John Wesley Hardin. So I have brought the eyes back up, just a little, and added some very subtle wrinkles around the nose and forehead. I don't want to do too much of that, because Smeaton isn't even 30 yet, so I don't want him too wrinkled. Just a little weathering and character was needed.

Basically, I'm worried that if I continue to dink around with it, I'll start to make it worse instead of better, so I'm leaving it alone.

As I was going through my virus problems last week, I searched through my discs looking for a boot recovery disc a former co-worker had given me. And in the process, I found a disc with a bunch of old family photos I had gotten from a family reunion several years ago.

It was weird looking through the photos now, because I've been on a retro nostalgia kick for a while now. Here's a photo of my dad and his family.

Ross the family partriarch is in the center rear. He always seems to have his head cocked with this half-smile on his face, like he can't believe anyone is taking this picture stuff seriously. The two women are his wife Eunice (my grandmother, who died before I was born) and my Aunt Thelma. The rest are Ross's five sons and one daughter.

Dad is the one on the left with the glasses and the crutch. He was struck by polio as a kid and has walked on one crutch almost all of his life. And I don't know what it is in a lot of these pictures, his slender face or his dark hair with the rakish combover or the way he's usually doing the Clooney (head down, eyes up), but I seem to see Loki in those pictures, something dark and sly underneath the surface (or maybe it's just the nose; Kirby always drew Loki with a very distinctive nose).

It's weird to see these pictures, because the faces are familiar but the people are strangers. I hadn't met any of them yet, and in a sense, perhaps I still haven't, because the people I grew up seeing on holidays are not the people in these pictures. They were the people these folks became, and there's a difference. My dad is a cool guy, but I wonder what it would be like to meet him then, when he was younger than me. Would he seem like the same guy? Would I like him?

Making Smeaton

One of our other gamers, the inimitable naamah-darling, posted an awesome mock tintype she made up of Tom Gentry, her character from our Atlantis game.

And after she made her character, she made up some of a couple of other characters, which wasn't hard because the female characters are apparently based on two vintage lovelies, Maude Fealy...

And Gabrielle Ray.

(Those aren't the pics she actually used, BTW)

So then, of course, the challenge was up to me to make up a portrait of Smeaton for my own tintype. Which is harder than it sounds, because I can't point to any one person and say, "That's Smeaton." I can find pictures that come pretty close in one aspect or another, like the Hibernian FC player from 1889 whose face I used for my first Smeaton photo. But the source pic was in horrible shape and the face was tiny and lacking any detail, not good for a portrait.

The historical Sundance Kid comes pretty close as well...

though a little too good looking.

Tangent time: a guy in my very first screenplay class at USC almost 30 years ago wrote a short script about a graphic artist being asked to draw a hot dog for an advertisement "like that orange you did before."

"You want a hot dog that looks like an orange?"

"No, but that orange had the quality I'm looking for. So draw another hot dog, but make it more like the orange."

Which sounds ridiculous, but in searching for a model for Smeaton, I can totally relate. Because when I think of the qualities I want Smeaton's face to have, the guy who comes to mind is the big, bald German who fights Indiana Jones in the Flying Wing sequence of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (played by the late Pat Roach).

Roach is not Smeaton, but that character has the weathered, rough-around-the-edges, old campaigner vibe I'm looking for. So take the Sundance Kid and make him look like Roach-as-bald-Nazi, and you're in the ballpark. But like the kid said in "Live Free or Die Hard,"

"I mean, more like a plan, like, a way to do that."

So finally I found a pic that looked like it would be a good starting point, an old tintype of a guy from about the right period with a bushy mustache.

And after a lot of GIMPing around, I came up with this.


Now, I don't know if I'm actually done or not, but this pic comes close. Bushy mustache, long sideburns, a dour-verging-on-angry expression, high forehead to indicate intelligence (though I think I may have gone a little too Frankensteinian here), just a little gaunt with a nose that looks like it has seen some hard times. The hair is not as unkempt as I picture it, but it wouldn't be in a formal portrait.

I won't bore you with the process unless someone asks for some step by step pics. And if any of the Atlantis crew have any comments on whether this look like the Smeaton you know, please let me know.

Cover Test

This is more in the way of a proof of concept than anything close to a finished cover, but I think it illustrates what I'm after well enough. The scene is a stylized version of something that happens in the book (not much of a spoiler since it's mentioned on the very first page), although the death ray in the book does not put on such a light show.

It's still way too plain, especially the background, and I really want it to have a sexy woman in there somewhere, but I think my basic approach is sound (that basic approach, in case your interested, is basically doing a photo montage in GIMP, then shifting to Corel Painter Essentials 4 to render it as a painting).

Random Jumble

So this is once again mainly an excuse to post another pic I threw together of Smeaton overseeing the construction of a sub he designed, but there's a lot of other stuff to mention as well. For instance, one show that I'm really loving right now is Archer, an animated spy comedy on FX.

But here's the thing: I don't usually like this kind of show. I'm not into really crude sexual humor, or cursing for its own sake. Homo jokes don't automatically make me giggle. I can't stand any of Seth Mcfarlane's shows, I'm not a big fan of Venture Brothers or Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and it took me forever to appreciate the subtleties of South Park.

But Archer has pieces of all those shows. It's probably closest to Venture Brothers in spirit, but Venture Brothers just made me uncomfortable, while Archer makes me laugh out loud. I don't understand why, but I still love the show. I'd post the link to Hulu, but because it's a mature show, you'd have to sign in anyway, so I'll just say, if you have a Hulu account or are up to starting one, you'll be able to find Archer pretty easily.

Second, I'm changing schedules at work again, so I have no idea whether I'll be at Conestoga or not. And I'm discreetly keeping my ears open for another job, which is soon, I know, but I'm not cut out for phone work for the long haul.

Third... I'm actually not ready to talk about Third yet. Maybe soon.

So here's the Smeaton pic.

Dougal Smeaton is the big fella directing the Atlantean worker while a woman watches from the background. Is she the bloodthirsty Victoria Sterling-Drake perhaps, or could she be the mysterious sorceress whom Dougal was associated with, the infamous Amyce Belden? Behind the woman, you can see the half-finished submersible craft Mr. Smeaton designed.

So if anyone's interested in crunchy details about the making of, the pic is pieced together from several pieces. The background was a color photo of a train factory from the 40's, found on this Library of Congress Flickr page. The sub in the background came from this collection of submarine photographs (it's the Grampus, BTW). The woman in the background came from this collection of Victorian era cartes de visite. Smeaton is taken from two other cards in the same collection: his head from one, and his body from another. I had to cut out the arm, reposition it and clone-paint the hand from resting on a table to pointing a finger. The Atlantean is a screen capture of a Babylonian extra from D.W. Griffith's silent epic "Intolerance."

So I pasted everything together, the color background and the sepia-toned Victorian photos and the black-and-white photos of hte sub and the Atlantean. Tweaked the brightness and contrast and got everything sepia-toned and matching pretty well. Spent more time putting in grungy elements to simulate the damage you'd see in an old photo like that and not being very satisfied with the results. And finally, as I'm looking through tutorials to try to find the missing element, I see a reference to a Photoshop filter that will do much of that for me.

So I check GIMP and sure enough, there's a script-fu that will age and damage a photo, make it sepia toned with a ragged, faded border. So I run that, and it's the final element I needed to tie everything together. I think this one turned out much better than my last one.

See you tomorrow for Big Game Wednesday.

Introducing Dougal Smeaton

Just an excuse to post another GIMP experiment, really. This was assembled from several photos scrounged off the internet here and there, then painstakingly pieced together to make a vintage-looking photo.


Click the image for a better look.

Dougal Smeaton is my Scottish engineer, a giant of a man who believes in steam and not magic, even though he keeps company with a witch and an empath. He comes from a family of whisky makers, so he's been around boilers all his life. His name is a tribute to John Smeaton, the Glasgow baggage handler who became famous for intervening in the terrorist bombing attempt on Glasgow International Airport (however, in a cool bit of serendipity, there also happens to be a noted civil engineer of the same name from the 18th Century-perhaps an ancestor?). I'm thinking of using this guy in a story sometime.

The body was a British soldier's portrait taken in the 1870's. The face was of a player from Hibernian FC, a Scottish football team, in the 1880's. I combined those into one person, pasted into an old photo of an empty factory, and added in some steam boilers. Every object I added had to have an extra layer to change the angle of the lighting, a fairly simple effect that doesn't work perfectly, but well enough, and a shadow as well. I did a bit more fussing with the lighting on Dougal than on the boilers, and it shows. Then I added a layer of damage on top, and another subtle iris effect on top of that to tie everything together. If you look closely, you can see the seams, but it looks pretty good at first glance, I think.

(ETA: Looking at the photo further, I realized that the lighting and shadow on the big boiler was really poorly done, so I fiddled with it and futzed around with the lighting on Dougal more and replaced it here. There are still some little details that nag at me, but I think this is as good as I can get this one, so I'm going to move on now.)

GIMPing Again

Sorry for the missed Big Video Wednesday. The new job has me exhausted and without the free time I had to pursue the old shows like I had. In the meantime, while I was off-line, I played with GIMP some more and came up with this holiday greeting.


The original model was from Met-Art (Nina B, NSFW!) which does some incredible nude photography. I'm using a (slightly) more explicit version for my desktop wallpaper (1024x768) and will send it it upon request.

Distractions

It has been a unique feeling for me, in the days since I finished the first draft, for me to have no interest in the manuscript whatsoever. The books I've finished before, I was on such a high after finishing that I couldn't wait to go back and start reading from the beginning, experience the whole thing in one big panorama.

I haven't done that this time. I actually started divorcing myself from the manuscript even before I finished it. After 32 or 33 days, I was sick of pushing myself, especially at the end when I could feel the failure pressing in on me. So I did the GIMP-shop that serves as my new profile photo. Then I made myself finish the manuscript, and instead of rereading it from the beginning as I formerly have, I didn't even think about it.

Instead, I started up another GIMP project. It was originally supposed to be a quick and dirty test of a concept for photoshopping a picture of a person into a superhero (and yes, I just used "photoshop" as a generic verb--if Adobe wants to sue me, they are welcome to learn just how broke I am). No, the character is not anyone you would have heard of. I just made her up as I went along, obviously ripping off the outfit from Mr. Incredible/the Flash, and going on from there.


As you can see, it eventually grew into something bigger, and is now the wallpaper on my desktop (this is a scaled-down version for web display).It's not perfect, but it's better than I expected it to turn out. If I were trying to sell this (I can't, because I have no rights to the model image I used), I'd spend a lot more time on details like making the boots and belt and bracers more realistic and improving the graphics spelling out Neutrina's name down the side.

On the other hand, the logo symbol I tossed off for the character looks pretty good, and the background, which was assembled as an afterthought, isn't horrible either. I learned some valuable lessons putting this together, and added some techniques to my toolbox, like layer modes. If I had the patience and inclination to do this all the time, I almost start to think I could make a living at it. Of course, you could say the same thing about writing, probably. Alas, I don't have the patience or inclination to become good enough at any one thing to make a living at it.

That would appear to be my doom.