Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

It started in a fairly simple way. My thumb was feeling sore and I saw a doctor (well, a PA) and was given a "thumb stabilizer" which is a sort of half-glove neoprene/velcro thing to protect my thumb from moving in ways that might hurt. And a few weeks later things felt a lot better. But when I first put it on and tightened the the glove and felt the surge of cold, cybernetic energy flowing through my hand, and realized it was a power I would soon no longer be able to control, I knew there was one thing I must do while I was still capable of independent thought and willpower. And that was: draw a picture of it!

So the first thing I did was to take a quick picture using my laptop's camera. It didn't have to be high resolution. Then in Illustrator I traced over the things I wanted to keep—the background, my chair, and then me. The plaid shirt had an interesting pattern on it with the various folds and stuff, plus the orange t-shirt that was underneath it. I drew some of my face, but I wanted to emphasize the robo-fist and deemphasize me. I wanted to be shadowed with the glove in the slotlight.

I did some basic coloring using Live Paint in Illustrator, and added some interpretations of the shadowy tones on my arm and fist. Then I brought it into Photoshop.

Next I started using various adjustment layers. I made the background dark and my head even darker, ignoring the texture there (I could have blurred it a little, since my head isn't shaved, but I didn't care). I made holes for the eyes in the adjustment layer so they'd be visible and then picked an odd color for my eyes. And then as a minor callback to the last entry on my eye colors I made the two slightly different tints. I also decided to just make the eyes look a little closed or droopy, that they didn't have to be perfect. I added some other adjustment layers to alter the color a little bit to make things look sharper and more electric-blue tinted. Then I decided I wanted to have some glittery sparkles surrounding the glove.

So I looked at various tutorials on such things and found one that worked, although the sparkle density made it look more like galaxies rather than sparkles. You can see a few sparse sparkles as light spots on the cuff of the shirt, which is what I kind of was intending the whole thing to look like, but that's not how it came out. On the other hand, I kind of liked that. The galaxy sparkles affect the color of the background they're against and the upper half of the background is darker than the bottom. It looks like it's an arc coming from my fist to the doorframe, but that line continues to the closet behind me. The effect was whiter galaxy sparkles below and more orange, solar galaxy sparkles above. And I was OK with that. Oh and the few red dots where my nose sort of would be (but really is below and to the right) is nothing but sparkles, not red flairing nostrils. There was also a "background dust" layer that the sparkles illuminate to give the overall thick glow that's behind the galaxy sparkles.

But something was still missing. I decided I wanted an electric glow along the glove. This time I just improvised. I selected the glove to generate a path around it and did a line stroke in blue. Cloned it twice and did a distort ripple effect to one and a distort zig-zag effect to the other. It included my hand as well as the glove, but that was OK. I did the same to the strap. And I think it worked nicely as an electric mad-science effect.

The odd or ironic part of this is that the things that were hand drawn were the traces that look pretty realistic. The stuff that was all generated by effects looks hand-drawn. Actually, there is one element of the picture that I did not generate myself and that's the texture of the glove which is from the actual glove image. I wanted the patterned look and it would take too long to half-ass it so I just used that directly. It took longer than intended, since I was distracted with other things to do, but I'm satisfied how it turned out. Here's the line drawing which includes facial details not visible in the final version, and the full size version of the final image.