So if you saw theses pictures in a roleplaying book…

kj1-angel.jpg [singlepic id="100" w="200" h="240" mode="" float="right" ]

… would you think they look good, assuming of course they are theme appropriate? (Click on them to see in higher resolution).

I was trying to figure out if I could do, myself, good or high quality images or at least create something that looks like it is good or high quality. I think I hit on the right technique. (Some more images after the cut).

I feel like I’ve cheated a bit to create these images. Basically, I took a photograph (one of my own), then traced elements of it and added/modded stuff. Here’s the original image. Do you think I’ve cheated? I’m not sure because the photo is original and what I’ve produced is quite original too. kj1-source-photo.jpg The interesting thing is that I took advantage of the effect scanning has on the image, by only scanning in black and white, it hid any mistakes or smudges, leaving a sharp and pure black ink image. I even played with different ways of using ink: brush, nibs, pens and even markers. I’m not sure how recognisable the differences are in these few images.

My host’s recent downtime gave me spare time to actually do some artwork, and I played with the technique a bit. I needed to know if I could use it to do urban scenes, which was meant to be part of the theme for L___ H_____. So I took a photo of a city street and added an old friend…

p1-cthulhu.jpg

I did a second example of this and took a photo of where I work, adding his all mightiness lording over us…

wrk-cthulhu.jpg alice1-fairy1.jpg I needed also to see if I could use it to create pictures of people. So I took a photo of my grumpy daughter and turned her into a fairy. But I wasn’t completely happy with the result. That’s when I discovered a nice little perk of tracing. I could quickly do another copy, benefiting from my first attempt. My second attempt is certainly better but still needs some improvements, which I haven’t tried yet.

alice1-fairy2.jpg

I do like how they come out and the sort of templating system of the tracing a source photo makes it easy to try different combinations or just to play with the images. I’m not sure I could get away with using them in a roleplaying book… I think I might have to add colour in some way to do that.

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    [...] the second one (on the right) came out really well, if not better. I did these ones the same way I did the recent work, tracing major elements from a photo and adding to the [...]