A photo I took last night at the Dia de los Muertos celebration at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.
UPDATE 4/18/2009:
The high resolution version of this image, a favorite of goth MySpace hotlinkers nationwide, is now available on flickr.
also of possible interest - some photos of the late Yma Sumac at the 2005 Day of the Dead
Yma Sumac on flickr (I wish they were better quality)
There's a few important things worth knowing about the humerus. It's 2 5-eye-lines long. Its shoulder ball joint lies in a different plane to its elbow condyles. The ball joint is marked by a notch through which the biceps tendon passes. The inner condyle is the large one - noticeable on most people.
Here's a small gallery of images of the humerus.
You can have a lot of fun with camera mapping. Here's a Maya camera mapping tutorial I put together. I find, however, that setting up an accurate Maya camera projection is more confusing than it should be. Using the default settings introduces a misalignment between the rendering camera and the projecting camera.
UPDATE 7/26/2010
from Human Structure and Shape by John Hull Grundy, first published in 1982 in hardback by Noble Books in Chilbolton, Hampshire, UK. You may be able to find the entire book through rare book finders or the internet, but few copies exist, the author is deceased, and the book itself is out of print. It's on eBay right now for $795.
UPDATE 8/12/2009
Artistic Anatomy: Proportions of the Pelvis
/UPDATE
The pelvis, like the skull, and the ribcage, is a major bony structure that doesn't change much regardless of the pose a figure assumes.
Here's a gallery of different views of the pelvis, as well as some other bones, including skulls.
A standard shader has a boring color falloff. Most painters, when rendering a surface which turns away from light, will identify (or invent) a reason to introduce a shift in the hue of a surface as it darkens. One way you can do this in 3D is to map a color ramp to light falloff.
Understanding the scapula is an important step in the process of understanding the shoulder girdle. Here's a little gallery of photos of the scapula.
If you paint a monochramatic gray underpainting and colorize it by simply multiplying it by a base color, you'll get a dull image. Even if you hand pick and paint every color in your image, if you rely only on the luminosity slider, you'll have the same problems. You see this luminosity slider reliance a lot, especially in the skin tones of the work of beginning painters.
When a form turns away from light it usually experiences a hue shift. This often happens simply because the fill light is a different color from the key light. Regardless of why it happens, however, it usually looks better when it happens. So when you paint or light 3D, identify or invent a reason to shift the hue warmer or cooler, and sell it.
Here's a related link:
Avoiding Ugly Color Falloff in 3D
UPDATE 7/30/2009
While looking at a Blackbird spy plane on display in the bright sun, I was struck by just how detailed was its metal skin. Here's a small gallery of reference photos of possible interest to matte painters.
The rib cage, along with the skull and the pelvis, is one of the important, fairly unchanging bony structures of the figure. If you can capture the spine and rib cage, and then hang the shoulder girdles (the scapulae in back and clavicles in front) off of it properly, you've gone a long way toward defining the form of the upper body. Here's my simplified conception of its form.
A good way to set up a nodal point pan and tile is to camera project a series of images onto the inner surface of a sphere from a projection point in the exact center of that sphere.
I saw on one of my favorite blogs, boingboing.net
that one of my favorite comic artists, Jaime Hernandez, co-creator of Love and Rockets, has a new 700+ page anthology of his work on sale, Locas, courtesy of Fantagraphics Books.
I've illustrated this entry with a piece of Jaime Hernandez's original art I bought a few years back. I love his draftsmanship and economy of line.
If you work with pixel addresses instead of the pixels themselves, you can smear (or ray trace) now, and decide which image it was you were smearing (or refracting) later.
The 2D digital displacement map techniques in programs like Photoshop and Shake confuse many users. You need to supply these programs with separate red and green displacements, not just a gray displacement.
I was curious to see to what extent 3D computer graphics could integrate with 2D digital work. I was especially keen to acieve styles in 3D that had a "Non-Photorealistic" (NPR) quality - more illustrative or painterly looking. I found I could get some interesting results by modelling 3D primitives in a fairly crude way, and then selectively blurring certain edges (such as the interior edges in these marshmallow fluff couds.)
I thought another promising direction might be to use Painter to fake together some rough "paintovers."
It's not "real" painting, and it's not real "NPR," either, but I see potential in the end results, especially for still images in a print context, and I may explore more along these lines in future.
Learning artistic anatomy? The spine is a good place to start.
Poser has a mode that displays skeletons. The skeletons are not perfect, but they are good enough to use as a muscle anatomy learning tool.
When you need to composite soft-edged or motion-blurred 3D CG (which has been rendered over black) over a background, and you don't want matte lines, you will get great results if you use the 3D element's alpha channel as a holdback matte
Many compositors think of an alpha channel as a "clipping channels" that trims a foreground element from its original context and places it over a background. When they get soft-edged 3D CG rendered over black, their composites always exhibit matte lines. Here's one way to avoid those matte lines.
UPDATE 6/17/2009
There are 3 basic methods for creating outlines around alpha channels and other hi contrast images:
A Well-planned Gradient Map
Simulating 2D Metaball Blobbies with Photoshop
The Exclusion Blend Mode
Exclusion Photoshop Blend Mode Killer App
The Multiply Blend Mode
(illustrated in detail below)
Sometimes it's handy to turn black and white images into smooth outlines. Here's a little recipe for doing just that.
UPDATE 6/22/2009
With later versions of Photoshop - simply let the black and white artwork be a layer mask between two colored layers.
/ UPDATE
A compositing technique called a key mix borrowed from the visual effects industry can turn a black and white alpha channel into 2-color artwork. What's more, it captures the subtleties of antialiasing and grays more easily than does Photoshop's magic wand tool.
The idea is to treat the black and white artwork as a key intended to mix two images of flat colors.
Artists struggle over getting correct colors, yet often neglect to get correct values, in spite of the fact that of the two, values are more important than colors at revealing an object's form.
UPDATE 5/6/2009
Convert a photo to Lab space. Scribble all over the a and b channels. You can still easily understand the photo. Scribble all over the L channel - now the photo is incomprehensible.
/ UPDATE
A level camera creates vertical lines that are vertical. An upwardly tilted camera creates vertical lines that converge to a vanishing point high above.
It's hard to imagine how to stitch those together. For a good intuitive grasp of what goes on in nodal point pan and tile work, try this simple experiment in Maya.
Julia Sweeney's latest one-woman show, Letting Go of God, opened this weekend at the Hudson Theater in Hollywood. I was lucky enough to get tickets to her sold out performance this afternoon, which included an invitation to a party afterwards in celebration of her show's premiere, and of her birthday, which also falls today.
I took my digital camera to a decent plastic skull and made myself a stack of worksheets. Whenever I get a free moment, I grab a sheet and draw what's on it. I try to slip in at least 10 a day.
See that plastic box in the upper righthand corner? It's a disarticulated skeleton. I plan to visit every major bone in the body. Just as an exercise.
UPDATE 10/1/2009 - old link replaced by new one
The skulls are here on flickr if you want to try the same thing yourself.
