Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

And the (sadly) final version with some shading in the color. I say "sadly" because after playing around with the colors for a bit, I decided to add some textures, as having the road be one color would be boring. And then I added some sidewalk cement texture. Then I looked for some brick texture. That took longer, but I found something. I knew simply mapping it on straight would totally ignore the perspective, but I wanted to see how it would look as a first shot. Then I organized things, since I knew I would want to make 5 different images to show the progress (I decided against an animated GIF, since the delay would always be too long or too short or both). After some re-organization, folder making, and file moving, I then looked into how you do perspective in Photoshop. It seems fairly reasonable and feasible. And then I discovered that I had deleted the Photoshop source file that had the color and shaded version in it. It wouldn't be that hard to recreate, but I wasn't motivated to do that. I also noticed that the bricks and sidewalk don't abut smoothly, so that's something else I could fix. But instead, I decided to just declare it done and move on to other things.

In general, it's not bad for a primative, first cut. One of the things I wanted to do was get some serious, black shadows, not just cross hatching. The light pole and the side of the guys face and shoulder have that, as does the side wall and the side of the curb. A second, later notion, was to make some non-trivial backgrounds in, as that's usually a lot of work for me and I tend to skip it. I wanted the (or a) light source to be coming from the right side of the frame, off frame. So I tried in general to illuminate the left side of his body, legs, face, arms. His shirt is the exception, as the jacket would shadow things. Perhaps it all should be dark, but I like the shadow on the yellow shirt. Using Illustrator let me actually have straight lines, which I'm mostly incapable of drawing by hand (sometimes even with a ruler). I decided to skip putting anything inside the shop window, which was actually hinted at in the first picture, because laziness once again conquered all. And as for what the guy is doing and why he's grabbing the light pole, I've no idea, I just wanted a street scene with a background and something the subject could interact with that was not another person.