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.