Making Of:

I played with this one in After Effects and made an animated version.

Ideation and reference photographs

A lot of my ideas hit me when I least expect them – in the shower, when I go for a walk or when I’m just daydreaming in a coffee shop. This one was no different. It was maybe a week or two since I got the news of my friend’s death and I remember I was still working on my portrait of her. I was browsing through the photographs of her I have on my computer and when I saw these two, the idea just got in my mind.

The photographs were not taken by me, but by another friend of her’s named Sasho. I don’t know the guy personally, but the credit here goes to him.

At first my idea was a bit different – I was thinking about classical angel wings (with white feathers), I didn’t consider to paint a bird (or anything else but her and an environment) and wasn’t sure about the background – if it’s going to be night or day, or sunset. I even thought about a more sci-fi/fantasy environment with two moons and a purple sky with bright stars.

Defining the idea

Having a rough vision/idea of what I want is what is most important, I think. As long as I got that, I’m fine, I can just sit down and define it in my sketchbook. So how and why did I come up with the idea of the wings? Well, my main inspiration was actually a character from the Diablo video game, an angel called Tyrael:

One reason to go with this wings is… well, they are cool and different. I like different (sometimes). The other reason is much more pragmatic: lighting.

I had to go with the lighting on this picture – first, because I liked it – it defined the facial features of the model quite well (in contrast with the second photo, where flash was used, flash always makes photos look flat). Second… well, I’m not good enough to change the lighting on a photo and keep a good likeness with the model. I think very few people can actually do this well. So I needed a way to explain this particular lighting in the piece. If I went with the classic bird wings idea, they would put shadow all over her face. While with this fancy and glowing wings I can: 1) explain the light source on the left part of her head; 2) paint waving hair on her right – that would explain both the shadow on her face and the rim/bouncing light on her features and the edge of the face – hair is transparent and soft, so light would come through it.

So all of a sudden the thing started “working” and I got encouraged to continue.

Value and color studies

I think this is the first time I actually did real value and color studies for a piece – I wanted to clear the idea as perfectly as possible. I knew things will change eventually, but I didn’t want to just paint stuff randomly, then erase what wasn’t working, then repaint. I really wanted this piece to be perfect. Eventually, I did maybe about twenty value studies and about twenty in color.

With value studies I tried to see how I’m going to make the viewer first see the girl, tried to see whether the wings are too overpowering, to see how I’m going to “guide” the eye of the observer through the painting.

As you can see, this studies are very rough – all I need at this point is to know where to place what, the pose of the model and most important of all – the values in the picture. What value should be the dress, and if it is say, the lightes value (a white dress), would it fit with the skin (which is also a light value) and the rest of the environment? What’s the value of the foreground hilltop she’s sitting on compared to the hilltops on the background? I didn’t need any details in here – that’s just pure design. It also helped me to define my idea even further – I had this crazy vision of the eagle to be all made of light/magic and to emerge from her wings. And the reason why I chose this horizontal format is because i wanted to give the painting a more cinematic, epic feeling.

Eventually I went with a more down to Earth picture with a real eagle. The red color is usually a middle value and fitted nicely with the rest of the image (against the very bright value of the wings and the dark of the rocks the angel is sitting on). It’s also the color of passion and always manages to attract attention – just like what my friend was. A truly passionate person.

The painting process

So after I’ve done all this preparations and design decisions, I started painting. The biggest problem I faced was the anatomy of the model, since I had to do the stretched arm and her leg/foot from imagination. I took photos of myself and asked friends to take pictures of themselves posing in similar poses.

Here’s my ex girlfriend posing for me on her webcam while I’m doing quick sketches.

Eventually I ended up with arm from my ex girlfriend, hand from another good friend and a foot from on of my flatmates. I had to adjust them to fit the angel and make them her’s. A hard task for my skill level, indeed… so I made some horrible mistakes, like a way too long arm, huge foot, etc. When you look at a painting for a very long time you just don’t see the mistakes… Now I just laugh at myself for not seeing them, they’re so obvious. See for yourself:

At some point I also made another crucial mistake: I stopped looking at the reference images… Somehow. I just got so much into it. So i lost the likeness a little bit.

The shape of the hair against the shape of her face is quite wrong. Also her cheeks are way too big.

Another funny thing is the arm – a lot of people, including some pro artists somehow didn’t notice it was too long… I don’t know how that happened. So I had to change this when the piece was near complete.

Finally, I had to also change the position of the eagle – it’s initial pose suggested it would land on her arm… Which considering the size of the bird doesn’t make much sense (it would literary crash her arm). So the eagle was repainted from scratch.

Finishing touches

After I made those critical changes, all I needed to work on was the wings, add more detail, work a more on color mixing around the image and make everything fit. Here’s the almost-final image without the finishing touches:

And again, the final picture:

Final Thoughts:

I really did my best with this piece. I wanted it to have a little bit of drama, I wanted it to have a certain feeling to it, and I’m glad that in the comments I got people have notice just this – the emotion.

As far as symbolism goes – the golden Ankh on her neck- an ancient symbol of eternal life, for I will do my best in the future to make her immortal through my work, with all the abilities I posses. Again, the striking red dress symbolizes her passion, the flame in her eyes. The eagle symbolizes freedom, while pose of her hand and fingers are very much inspired by The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo – just a suggestion for her divinity. The mountain environment is because the Mountain was where she felt alive the most and where she died (in an accident while climbing).

I hope you enjoyed the piece and reading about it’s creation process.

(click on the image for larger version)

It’s been one year since the world lost Radi – the girl who had more than everything I could ever want.

She died in the mountains – her greatest passion, the place she felt alive the most.

Now she’s my Mountain Angel. Rest in peace, baby.

The first reason is, I already have some decent skills in drawing and illustration, I’m already educating myself online in the arts. The skill level expected in the illustration module is below my own, so I expect that I wont learn a lot of new things and will be too easy. On the other hand I don’t have much experience with video editing in general and its a subject I find interesting. I will be challenged and probably will struggle to create things I (and my tutors) like. But that’s fine – if you’re struggling, failing and having a hard time, you’re doing it right.

The second reason is, I am a person interested in pretty much everything, and I have no intention at all at this point to go in one certain direction, to put myself in a box, so to speak. Some people are like this and that’s fine – “I want to be a logo designer, so logo design is what I do 90% of the time”. They become really good at the only thing they do and make a lot of money. But that’s not me – I want more than this, I want to explore, learn and become better in as many fields as possible. I learn new things even if I have no reason to do so. And well, one never knows – maybe video will really attract me and will choose to concentrate on it and make a career out of it later on.

The third reason for me not to choose the illustration module is… the illustration module itself. I believe the tutor went in the wrongest direction possible with this one. To understand why, just ask yourself the question “what is illustration”. I’ll answer it for you – it is essentially a drawing or a painting (very stylized, very realistic and everything in between), sometimes a photograph that tells some kind of a visual story. So yeah, Rembrandt and Caravaggio were also illustrators in a way, when they painted their religious paintings – they told people stories from the Bible.

Anyway, there will be no photographs in this particular module, it’s all drawings and paintings. Now, the problem is – there are no drawing classes. Last year we had something called a drawing class, but it was a joke and not even a funny one. Most people in the class can’t draw and paint. Even worse, some of them have no interested in this. That’s fine – I’m not saying that they should – but to illustrate things beautifully, to really do it well you have to have many hours of classical life drawing behind your back. To my surprise some people disagree with this – they think one can do good illustration with  no drawing skills. And this is so wrong…

I challenge you to find me a professional illustrator, a really good one, dead or alive who doesn’t draw on a regular basis, who never did a classical life drawing. I dare you to find one. Or better yet – look at this illustration portfolio. And if you don’t have good drawing skills, just try to copy the illustrations there. Or to do something as good as the them. If you don’t have excellent drawing skills, there is no way in hell you can do it. The artists who made them are professionals and they draw every single day to get to this level. They know color theory, they understand lighting, proportion, spaces, anatomy, composition and they have worked very had for many years to achieve this, and they are still learning. Art and design are not things you learn for a few years – you never, ever stop to learn and study.

Now, of course sometimes some people can get some mediocre or decent results in illustration without being able to draw well. Sometimes it’s even “good enough” to get a one time illustration job. Some good icon designers have no drawing skills at all, but that’s different – a good icon is a good idea, aesthetics and a lot of psychology. Software nowadays is powerful enough to compensate if you can’t draw a perfect circle. But even then you have to have at the very least some understanding of perspective and lighting – otherwise it won’t work.

Also, some people might say that the goal of an illustration class in a graphic design course is different, is not to teach students to draw correctly, is to make students draw in some “illustrative style” that doesn’t require good drawing skills. I say this is nonsense.

Why? Because you either do things right or don’t do them at all. Otherwise you end up in a sea of mediocrity. And that’s certainly not something I want.

In loving memory of Radi Slavcheva. Miss you, baby.

Painting a proper smile is always a big challenge.

A quick portrait of a friend of mine.

A very quick self-portrait.

Another self-portrait. I may work more on this one in the future.

Day 2

28.05 was a lot about typography. The two talks that were most interesting to me were by only one person – David Crossland. His first talk was on Google’s font initiative. He is the author of one of the fonts there and it was quite interesting to hear his story. As it turns out, he was (or still is? not sure) a post-graduate typography student in some university in England. He designed the typeface Cantarell as an university project. Then he was approached by Google, offering him $6000 for the typeface to become free (as in freedom). He obviously agreed and now his typeface will probably (and hopefully) be adopted by many websites. His second talk was on how he actually created the thing – using only open source tools. Actually, only one tool – FontForge, even tho in the beginning he tried to first create the basic parts in Inkscape (but turned out that wasn’t the best approach).

Another interesting talk was on designing typefaces for African languages by Denis Moyogo Jacquerye. I never thought that they speak like 2000 languages in Africa, but as I imagined most of them are only being spoken. I was also interested to see that the langs actually combine both Latin and Arabic features in some cases.

Day 3

I got so pissed off of myself for oversleeping again and missing Jimmac‘s talk… Thankfully it was recorded, but still, it’d be great to watch that guy explaining his icon workflow. Anyway, at least I made it for Ton Roosendaal‘s talk on Blender – for which, unfortunately wasn’t enough time, so he had to rush through most of it (a technical problem in the beginning was the main reason).

I should say that I adore this guy. Not in the fanboy “OMG TON FTW!”-kind of way (believe it or not, there are a lot of true teenage fanboys in the Blender community). I just find him a very inspiring person, somebody who actually does things, makes them happen and works his ass off to achieve huge goals. A man of action, a tough guy, but also a guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously – no huge ego or anything like that. The Blender Foundation (along with the Blender Institute, but it’s sponsored by the foundation and both are being ran by Ton) is one of the wealthiest Open Source foundations, but it also produces great work. More on that later. If you’re interested in Blender or why I like Ton you may want to watch this interview with him. Now just to brag a bit:

(Don’t ask me why so serious, I really don’t know ;-) The two other guys are Pablo and Soenke from the Durian team).

Speaking of the Durian team, the guys behind the third open movie, there was a workshop with four of them – the pictured above Pablo and Soenke along with Jeremy and Nathan. For the unfamiliar this means that I had the opportunity to get some advice/lessons from some of the best Blenderheads alive – which is, pretty good (look at their portfolios, google them or whatever to get an idea). Unfortunately I don’t have much knowledge and experience myself to ask some not-too-stupid questions, but they were nice enough to show us some basics (luckily everybody was just a beginner, some of the people on the workshop had never actually used Blender, so I wasn’t alone). It was quite furn, Pablo demonstrated how to model faces using… um, a reference?

For those who don’t know – in reality, one would place an image of a head in both front and side view in the background and model the 3D mesh on top. Pablo actually used Nathan’s shadow – it was quite hilarious. We really had a lot of fun and I learned a some things. Thanks, guys.

Next talks that made an impression to me were Alexandre Prokoudine‘s digital photography on Linux and Darktable. This guy is like a machine – he’s participating in like a million projects and he does great job. Multi-touch support in (Ubuntu) Linux by Steve Conklin was quite interesting and made Jeremy dream about animating on a multi-touch screen. No photos unfortunately. I missed the next talks since I had to do something else, but I was back for the Inkscape for everybody discussion/talk. Shared my Inkscape story, acted a bit goofy telling them I miss a native Mac version. I think after this talk we took a group photo of a lot of people who attended (certainly not everybody – some people were gone somewhere, some didnt want to be in the photo, etc). No idea where to get it, but I’ll find out soon.

Finally at 20:30 the fun begun – a sneak peek at Sintel – the third open movie (aka project Durian). I really hope there is a recording for that one since it was truly hilarious in the beginning – Nathan made the crowd to “woo” and “boo”, asked.. heh, interesting questions, etc, lots of laughing. You should see it, I’ll post a link when the talk is online. Then they actually showed parts of the movie, explained the process of creating it – technical stuff, not so technical, etc. It was really, really interesting and I have to tell you – that short movie is really professionally made, despite the low budget. Really great stuff. They expect it to be ready for SIGGRAPH, which is in the end of July.

Then we went to two pubs, had some good time until… uh, four in the morning. Nathan turned out to be very cool person, we talked quite a lot (on very geeky and not so geeky topics, even stuff like feminism), walked around to find a cathedral (no idea what it’s name is), went back to the pub, etc. It was pretty cool. We both agreed that Brussels has an unique atmosphere and feels somehow at home. Even for an American, which is quite interesting.

Pictured: happiness

We were with the MyPaint developers, here is a picture of me with Martin Renold:

I look quite creepy on this one…

Anyway. After almost no sleep I got to the final LGM day today. Few short talks and discussions (the most interesting one – where is the next LGM going to be, its not decided yet but my bet is Asia), lots of  thankyous, applause, woo’s,  hugs and so on.

Until finally, here I am in the hotel. Last night in Brussels… I’ll certainly miss it. LGM was truly a great experience – met lots of cool people, some of which I never thought I’d meet. Learned tons of new things and not related only to technology or design at all. A huge thank you for the staff and everybody who was there.

And a small suggestion to the organizers of the next meeting: for Christ’s sake, no vegan/vegetarian-only meals! :P

Today the actual conference started – about 200 people. Considering that most of us are total geeks I was surprised to see a good share of women in there. Of course I overslept a bit and missed the Welcome talk in the beginning, but except that – everything went great. The talks were all very interesting except the too techy ones. Believe it or not, Python was probably the most common word for the first three hours (at some point I was expecting KainX to storm in with a sword and a massive slaughter). And lots of slides with code. Too much code for a presentation in some cases.

The talks that were most interesting to me were… oh, well.

One of them was by a Argentinian graphic design professor. She talked about how she and her students used only open source software to create their stuff (which was pretty cool, by the way), into what problems they ran – purely technical or political, etc. On my question whether or not she’s afraid that after her students graduate they won’t be able to find jobs in companies/agencies because they don’t use the Adobe/Corel stuff, she replied that she is. But she’s encouraging them to use proprietary software from time to time so they’ll be able to work with both. We also agreed that the basic concepts of computer graphic manipulations are the same, the difference is in UI and other small things that are more or less easy to overcome.

We had both a workshop and a talk from an… actress. Helen Varley Jamieson, a very nice woman, she presented her thing – UpStage, which to my understanding is something like an online (streaming) theatre with creative people playing roles and… uh, lots of things. Just check it out :-) Of course part of her story was how free software helped her and her friends build the website (they’re using flash for some things tho).

There were two guys from the Fedora design project. I don’t remember their names, but they were funny – both very nervous and with very bad English. It was pretty cool to hear the story how the community made the pro designer hired by Red Hat leave and took over his job :-)

In the end three guys from some school in Rotterdam told us how they migrated the Arts course on open source. They even made the students (who were previously Win/Mac users) use Gentoo, simply because of the “culture shock”. The students actually did some pretty neat things… I was quite impressed.

Another thing that happened during one of the breaks – I accidentally (trying to find a spot with stronger wifi) met Jonathan Watt from Mozilla. Since he is working in the SVG team we had a talk on what things I miss and want to see implemented, etc. We had a really nice chat, in the end of which he actually said I helped him with my suggestions and examples of what I can’t do with SVG right now, so I was and still am very happy.

These are the highlights from today. I’m looking forward for tomorrow – some very interesting talks on Inkscape, Google’s new hosted fonts thing, Ghostrscipt, other typography/layout stuff. Stay tuned and if you want more updates, follow me on Twitter.

I’ve always wanted to attend this conference – although right now I’m with a Mac, I’ve been using Open Source software for as long as I have a computer (I used to use Linux and then FreeBSD as a desktop for 5-6 years or so), I’ve done some of my best works using Inkscape/Gimp, and I’ve been toying with Blender for some time now (tho I can’t produce any serious work yet).

I read the draft program and it seems like its going to be a lot of fun – the Blender (and Durian) team are going to talk about the future of the software, the third open movie Sintel, there will talks by  people from Inkscape, Gimp, Krita, Scribus, an app I’m very interested in – MyPaint, even Mozilla. There will be discussions, workshops, talks on so many topics – from color management to open standards (like OpenRaster, I’m very interested in this project as well).

It will be a huge information overload and, thats just great – almost as great as the fact that I’ll be able to meet some very big names. I’ll try to cover the whole thing here as much as I can, sharing what I think is most important. I guess I’ll also tweet a lot during the event so if you have a Twitter account you may want to start stalking me!

And he asked me to improve on it. We talked about it a bit – basically he wanted to keep it simple, black/white/grey with only the lips in solid red. He also mentioned soemething about a statue/sculpture. I tweaked and experimented with it quite a bit and here is the final result:

Obviously it’s not 100% anatomically correct, but that wasn’t the point anyway. I used Illustrator’s mesh tool for the dress and the body shading, then painted over and added marble-ish texture in Photoshop. The shading on the face is mostly painted, because I just couldn’t do it properly in Ai. Unfortunately the file cannot be exported to SVG again, but I provided a high res, layered PSD for Raster to tweak it and play with it if he wants to.

The illustration will soon appear on e.org :-)