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Production Info
Submitted by Guinea_pig on 12 May 2024
Let me start by saying that 4 years of art school convinced me I am not an artist. I don't have the X factor. I am more a copy machine. Other graphicians, such as The Sarge, can draw characters from their mind and have good results. I cannot. I can only improve or modify existing images, working from photo reference.
It seems this image, based on a photo, has caused some controversy, leading even a team member to rate it poorly. There seems to be a feeling that I cheated by using an image-to-petscii program as a base for the image. I feel like this image turned out exceptionally good. I have done many portraits in the past...this is my second PETSCI portrait. The first was pathetic. There are a few reasons this one worked: first, tight framing of the face to allow more detail. Second, mainly greys in the image. With only 16 colors, I knew I'd have to stick to the greys to create a good result. Other, better, artists can create a good result with other color gradients (like those commonly used in raster bars) but I've done a lot of pen and ink and pencil portraits. Greyscale is my strength. Portraits are very fiddly...an eye off by a millimeter can throw off the likeness entirely. As PETSCII limits exactly where each pixel can be placed, I decided to use the PETSCII converters to try and find the best alignment-to-grid of the photo. My many experiments taught me: it didn't really matter--I wasn't going to get a perfect portrait in PETSCII. On the other hand, I was able to see how some of the converters dithered tones and which base color worked best for the image. There was also a "happy accident" with the inner corner of the left eye. I thought the quarter circle character the algorithm chose was beautiful, and I kept that one character. Using a converter also saved me time from measuring where the facial features generally needed to be placed. So I used a converted image as an "underpainting," but an algorithm doesn't have a preference for an eye or a mouth...the background noise gets equal importance. Obviously as an artist of sorts, I have preferences and emphasize those. In short, I used 4 computer programs or so to make the portrait instead of typing bytes into a BASIC program. I doubt I could have had such good results if I hadn't had so much previous experience drawing portraits. Trust me, using a converter ain't a cheat, just another way to help an artist make decisions. In some eyes, this wasn't working "from scratch" but really, neither is using a painting app like Charpad or Petmate. Typing it in BASIC is "from scratch". The tools help shorten the process (in a perfect world; not sure that happened this time). Through painting on top of the base image, I blocked out the basic features, and reworked the eyes and mouth and nose several times until I decided I was going to get in trouble with my wife for spending so much time on this. However, near the end I noticed that some salient shading around the mouth couldn't be represented in a single PETSCI character as it would have to have 3 colors in a single block. I needed grey, white and red in a single character. Instead, I moved the horizontal highlight on the upper lip a little more to a separate character block. I did that for a few other shading features which is another reason this is more of an impression than a true portrait. I had to redo all of the hair, and at the end of it all, after uploading...I realized I had used the wrong palette! CSDB uses a much darker palette...I might have used even a different background color if I had realized my mistake earlier. Def use different characters...ah well. |
Production Info
Submitted by Guinea_pig on 8 May 2024
| I edited the source photo maybe 100 times and pixel-shifted it another ~60 times to manipulate a better result from the various image-to-PETSCII converters out there. I used two or three. One output looked good for the face, another for the eyes, another for the lips. Imported the good eyes output to Petmate, referred to the other outputs to rough out the image. Spent 20 hours finetuning it. Reworked the eyes several times. I think this is about as good as I can get it. |
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