Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

I wanted to draw more faces that were shadowed. So I put on a hooded sweatshirt (that was black), turned off most of the lights in the room, used a flashlight to illuminate one side of my face, and took a few pictures using the laptop's camera. I think put the pictures into Photoshop and thresholded them so they'd be pure black and white. The two faces on the left are from that. The arcing cut-off in the left-most face is from the hood. For the middle face, I tilted my head back and laughed maniacally and the shadowing is mostly from the flashlight illuminating the side of my face.

The third face was a bit more complicated. The threshold filter lets you select the threshold level (where the cut-off is that separates what will become black and what will become white. As I slid the adjustment thingy in Photoshop, there were different aspects that were captured, specifically my face, the inner edge of the hood, and the outer edge. So I created 3 different threshold images and then loaded them into photoshop as different layers. I then added a mask to each layer and "cut out" a chunk in the middle of two of the layers, so the lower layers could be visible (the top layer had the bigger hole cut to see down to the middle and bottom layer, the middle layer had a smaller hole since it only needed to see down to the bottom one).That image showed the elements of all three of the threshold values that I wanted and I used that as a reference.

Perhaps this animated GIF can help. The first frame showed the original color picture. The second is the thresholded one that has my face, the third has the inside of my hood, the fourth has the outside, and the fifth has the combined reference image.

Because some of the in between areas appeared as a pale white and all I had was white, I improvised a little, with some crash-hatching on the left side and some stippling (i.e., dots...the word rhymes with nippling, but I can't really make much of a joke with that, probably because it's not actually a proper word) on the right. The reference image had some weird shattered-glass patterns on the top and I liked how that showed a contour while also kind of looking weird (suggesting magic or wizard or, well, just weird), so I went with that.

The pointing finger isn't great and can be hard to tell what it's part of. I hadn't intended the three faces to be part of something, I just had space on the page. But all in all I'm pretty happy with it. Oh, and I like how the left edge of the left face is a little ragged suggesting some texture at the very edge of the light.

The full size image is here.