JohnSnr

I wanted to create some illustrations for others to colour, which apparently is a thing, so thought I'd start with a floral mandala but I need more practice!
 

Should do a bit more to the flesh but it will do for now.

Did a bit more to it afterwards.

Just because...

I found a photo of this cover, low res and couldn't work out how many colours they had used, so a little artistic license. But thought I'd re-do it and limited the colours to the obvious ones. Drawing all the lettering is always fun.

Great. It looks like you could pick it up and play with it.

Great. It looks like you could pick it up and play with it.

1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900, the Mille Miglia winner that year with its sister car finishing in second place. My last vector one for this year. 
 

My favourite as a kid with its art deco looks and having the speed record of 126mph. Back then I didn't realise it was one of a quite a few class A4's. Designed by Nigel Gresley and built in 1938 by London & North Eastern Railway in Doncaster.
I'll likely shrink it down a bit so there's more sky above the funnel but have left it like that for now so it's easier to work on and see the details.
The outline's without the background otherwise it looks even more of a mess.

Mad Max Fury Road.

I thought I'd deleted the daily progress outputs but still had them hidden away so as a one off I thought I'd post them. The first was an evening and a day. Sort of interesting I guess but they uploaded sorted by day name, my fault it's the way i named them. i think I put them in order, or close enough.




 




 



 

 
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I'm not sure it was worth the bother but something in it might be of use to someone!
Photorealistic Thoughts and Tips.pdf

Some do it well but it never looks like the real thing or a colour photo of the real thing, there's only so much you can do with a b&w being the underlying image. You wouldn't mistake that for a colour photo. Anyway my real point was that I'm not going to try and colourise something on the fly in vectors. Even more so if more than one is working on it, it just wouldn't work.

I fancied doing something shiny, not too easy but not too complicated either, 2 weeks max, so decided to see if I could get this done. Shame it turned out to be such a horrible movie. There was too much background on the photo I used so I cropped it to something a bit more interesting.
Who needs fancy pants gradient meshes when there’s the pen tool
Sorry about the equally horrible compression.

Really good but don't understand how the main underlying body matches the outlines, I'm sure it does though.

First one done. Might do some top tump style cards based on them, not sure yet.

I wanted something more than a standard product shot which practically everyone seems to do. They are great for their intended purpose but I don’t find them an interesting subject and they are just too easy. So this was from my folder of things I might want to do sometime.
Subjects that on the face of it seem fairly simple aren’t necessarily less work, this took at least 4 times as long as the Porsche.
Back to the complicated/slow ones now.

My main complicated drawings are taking ages so I thought I would work on a few easier ones at the same time. This is the first to be finished.
For me Gulf Racing is the most iconic colour scheme in motor racing and I’ve been meaning to do a 917 but never got around to it until now. Unsurprisingly there aren’t a whole lot of overhead shots of it so this was based on photos of the 1:8 scale die cast model by Amalgam Collection. Very high end, about £10k but bespoke can apparently cost up to £120k. Not something to let the kids play with. 
On the Porsche 917K’s public debut at the 1970 Daytona 24 Hours, John Wyer's Gulf-sponsored team finished 1-2 in the race. The winning number 2 car driven by Pedro Rodríguez, Leo Kinnunen and Brian Redman broke the distance record by 190 miles.

A not so low polygon version of Whistler's Mother by James Abbott McNeill 1871. Which was actually called "Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1", not many people know that.
 

A lazy day, I couldn't be bothered to do anything proper. So did this while watching/listening to the The Mandalorian episodes.

Had a break from a new "proper" drawing,. Another V for vector, nice to do without having to think too much.

I think for me if I do photorealistic I have to either do it properly or not at all. If you instantly know it's a drawing then it's not photorealistic and saying it is when it isn't doesn't change that, it's there in the name. The longer it takes for people to decide the better you have done. Which is why it normally takes a silly number of hours even for something that seems really simple like the box. Breaking it down does take a lot longer than you'd imagine. Of course it could just be that I'm slow. 

This doesn't count as drawing as it's so easy and just a bit of fun 😉I keep meaning to do some classic mac icons but updated however I'm not sure what style to do them. Coloured versions of the originals or more fancy (anti-aliased) /skeuomorphic.
Today I was messing around with just one, the Mac, which seemed like a sensible one to start on. The first is the System 1 style which came, unsurprisingly, with the first mac's the 128k and then 512k. It was a challenge to do 😂All the icons were monochrome which makes sense as so were the screens. The second is just a recolour of the first just to see if it looked ok or not. The 3rd is system 7 style, they showed them grey for some reason, probably low colour. Then the final one is a skeuomorphic one. I didn't bother with system 9 as they went 3d by then and aren't particularly pretty. Also I think they dropped the classic mac icons by then as the power macs had replaced them.
I might do some more as even doing some skeuomorphic style ones aren't exactly taxing. 

I was one pixel off in each direction for the computer, should have measured at actual size.
 
 

This is the last drawing I’m going to do in AD, mainly as I’m so fed up of the layers panel, I’ve just had enough of it. Perhaps it’s only me but I must waste so many hours during a project because of it. I’ve a few in progress which I may possibly finish off sometime but will probably just start them again in something else. I’ll do some more styles and start on some brushes instead. Anyway…
This was a sort of a quickie. I was really more interested in drawing the Ektachrome box but really had to do the camera too, well sort of. I couldn’t find any decent quality references so normally would have given it a miss but decided to try anyway even though it was taken with Mr.blurry cam and only about 2k square. Of course I couldn’t find the fonts for the box so used the closest and edited them. The markings on the camera body are the regular Braun font, Akzidenz Grotesk. The digits and text around the lens are hand drawn guesses as it was just too blurry and so are fairly dreadful if you zoom in, so don’t!
 

Yes you can use snapshots but I prefer a separate backup file rather than having backups in the main. If the main somehow can't be read neither can your snapshots plus it's easier to look through them. The scripts copy the specified file to a specified backup folder (which must exist) and suffix the file name with the time stamp. I'm normally only working on one thing at a time but you can duplicate the lines to backup more than one file or duplicate the script for each project if you want. They work on any file, it doesn't care about the type AD/AP/AI/PS/XLS/DOC.. anything.
The first is for MacOS, backup.command, you need to make it executable. Open terminal and type "chmod 755 " then drag the command file on to terminal to complete it, press Enter. To edit it right click and select "open with" and use whatever, say textedit. At the top set the full path and file name to backup for SourceFile and the folder you want to backup to for BkupFolder, it's pretty obvious from the ones I have set. Double click to run it.
However running it will open the Terminal, and you will have to close it which isn't good. So you can use Automator to create a Mac Application that executes the script and that you can double click, add to the dock, etc.
Open Automator application Choose "Application" type Type "run" in the Actions search box Double click "Run Shell Script" Drag the command file in to the input box below the Shell: /bin/bash line on the right Click the Run button in upper right corner to test it. File > Save to create the Application. If you put in your dock it won't bounce, it just does it, don't keep clicking!
I'll post the Windows later on when I'm on my Win laptop.
 
 
Backup.command