Legacy LD5

Greetings, fellow Dome folk! RipRoarRex returns with new art; this time of the more conventionally-sexy furry variety.


If I may take a moment to reflect upon the hassle that was the process of creating this; to quote the great Jeff Stelling: "This is not a rant, but..."


...I must admit, I'm just glad this one is finally finished. It's come out very well based on my original idea, and I do think it's one of my best pieces to date. But then again, it bloody well should be, because it took far too much effort and time, way more than I had expected it to. As with almost every piece of art I do, the original pencil line drawing takes me a good few hours before I get a clean, well-constructed piece that I am happy with. From there, these more realistic pieces of mine generally take me about 5 days to colour in Paint Shop Pro 7 (that's not necessarily a full 5 days of actual work - I rarely get enough time, freedom or motivation to spend such extended periods on my art, but I can usually get enough hours in here and there to finish such a piece within 5 days). This one however took about 9 days of stop-start working. It also led me to inadvertently discover that Paint Shop Pro's maximum number of layers is 100; seems I abuse the facility somewhat, and combined with the original 1806x2478 resolution, this brought the .psp file size at one stage to as high as 16.2MB, causing the computer to run like shit and nearly crash several times (especially during loading and saving)! I was also not helped by numerous areas of pretty chronic difficulty:


Firstly, there was the gun. Those who are more accustomed to guns and drawing firearms (or indeed the milfurs out there) will probably already be able to tell that it's not exactly perfect, and indeed I'm not 100% happy with the way it came out. For some inexplicable reason, the drawing of the barrel relative to the hand and trigger became a two hour ordeal which eventually forced me to scrap my second draft (having pretty much destroyed my A3 paper with the rubber) and start afresh on a third draft. I simply couldn't get the size, shape or length of the barrel right, and basically had to improvise after a while. When I did finally get a gun shape that I was at least content to settle for, it seemed to be completely incompatible with the body and hand that I had already drawn. Correcting this would have required moving and redrawing the hand and that damn gun again, and that in itself would have involved tacking another piece of A4 onto the left-hand side of the picture because I had ran out of room. Things are cacky enough when you have an A3 drawing and an A4 scanner, without complicating matters by gumming up the paper with numerous flappy appendages! In the end, I just thought to myself, "what the hell is the point in me fannying around all day with this revolver when the only thing everyone's going to care about is the big stallion holding it?!", therefore I finally just settled for the not-quite-right version I had. I'm still not sure precisely what is wrong with it, but I'm not fully convinced by the combination of angle, perspective and tilt in the way I drew it. I had further problems with colouring it; the metallic effect I added on in later layers never seemed to look very convincing, and I had to delete it all and start again three times until I was satisfied with it.

Secondly, the sole of the raised hoof. That took 4 attempts to colour. I've no idea why. I wanted to give it a reasonably accurate dirty and rough facade, but achieving this seemingly random effect actually turned out to be an awkwardly precise exercise. In the end I basically ended up trying to replicate some random hoof picture I found on Google Images. It's not exactly how I wanted it to look, and again, the angle of the pose and view didn't help matters. I don't know why I give myself the hassle of these stupid angles!

Then there was the background. You might think drawing woodgrain is boring, but do you know what? You'd be... er... absolutely damn right, actually. It was boring. So boring that mid-way through doing it, I started to realise just how dull a background I was actually creating - wood, wood and more bloody wood. I had toyed with the idea of adding a few details to break it up a bit, but by this stage, the 'sod it' mentality was very much winning over. Therefore, I just carried on with the simple background and just fiddled with the lighting a bit until I was reasonably satisfied with it. I hope looking at it is not as boring as drawing it was!


There are other things that gave me trouble, and various bits which I had adjusted several times over at varying stages of the production process. In the end though, I just came to the conclusion that once again I was being far too picky, and just tried to get it finished off ASAP. I'm also still not convinced that my monitor is calibrated properly after all those problems I discovered last year; these days I've just taken to uploading the image to my mobile phone to see how it looks on there, then adjusting gamma, contrast and saturation until I reach a happy medium between how it appears on my PC and how it appears on my phone. With any luck, it'll appear on your screens in almost the same way it appeared on mine. If it does, I'll be a happy chappy.




Anyway, I've been told off for moaning about my art and being too much of a perfectionist before. Seeing as I've got my university finals coming up within the next fortnight, I don't think I'll be getting any more art out this month, though there are plenty of ideas in the pipeline. And yes, that includes getting back to requests.

I'll stop whining now and let you gaze upon yonder sexy steamy stallion. That's if you're even still reading this by now...

Lol!


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After a long day in the baking sun, Carlos invites you to cool off with him in his cabin. And if you like, he says he'll let you see his gun...












RRRex

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Just on a random note reflecting on comments I made on 'Skyra - Gravity' about the curious songs that I subconsciously end up singing or humming whilst drawing and colouring; here's some of the things I ended up with during the production of this piece:

* 'Let's Get Physical' - Olivia Newton-John (very appropriate)
* 'Mack The Knife' - Bobby Darin (whilst drawing the gun - seems 'weapons' was the theme of the day on this occasion!)
* The theme tune from 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' (largely the result of watching it on Virgin 1 having taken a break from colouring that f***ing gun. How amusing then that this particular episode just happened to feature the line "I suspect that even time travelers are vulnerable to the Colt .45"...!)
* The tune from the new 'Tastified' Pot Noodle advert (no particular link here, it just ended up in my head for ages... which was really bloody annoying.)

Lol!

Hrm...if I 'twer to offer kree-teeque on this one, I've got problems with stuff you didn't mention, and no problems with what you did. I think the background, hoof and gun are fine, except maybe that he doesn't jump out from the background enough, but I have problems with his fingers and head. His fingers seem way too long, kinda...creepy-spindly. And maybe I'm not much for horse muzz'l, and I know he apparently is pressing chin to chest, but his head is just kinda...funky overall. Meh, but the more I look at it, the more it doesn't seem to matter, though. Fingers still look spindly, though.

Yay! I actually gave real criticism for once! *ooof* And that's what I get...

I like your line work, I like your textures, I like your proportioning. The distinctness of the hoof is very nice, lots of detail there. I don't see anything that it particularly off.
content wise. I love carlos, cause I'm a bit of a hoof slut to add to my pawlove. but I like alot of things about anthro horse characters as well as the quadroped ones. Horses are just neat. win win. nice stuff rex.

9 days with reaching the max amount of layers possible? DAMN!!!

We can't say that these efforts were for nothing because, look at that! It's brilliant! Everything is wonderful, fully detailed as always, and you managed to do a very sexy hoof as well! It's always so impressive and I respect your patience for doing those masterpieces. You really should deserve an artist award or something.

Great work RRRex!

Oh, and I can understand you about the wood...

I dont know, its surely a fine craftsmanship and so, but it just fails to appeal to me in any way.
The head and face just doesnt look right, especially the nostrils, the chin, ... the upper part of the muzzle looks way to flat and the lower to hight. The belly seems off, too bumpy-bulgy, I dont know, the strange red rocket in his crotch doesnt ring any bell, and the speck has a good point with the fingers there too.
Nice details and theme, but not one of your best pictures imo.

Superbly drawn, as always!

BUT IT NEEDS MORE RAPTORS

Your point on the fingers was actually something I mentioned, albeit less explicity:



The extension of the index finger in particular was largely a result of the gun not matching up with the hand I'd drawn, and a desperate if somewhat lazy attempt to make it fit, even if it did compromise anatomy. I was just so fed up with drawing that damn gun that I didn't want to mess around with it anymore.

As for the muzzle, I appreciate that the lower jaw is definitely wrong. Too big, and the mouth doesn't really line up with the snout. I'd noticed that fairly early on in the colouring stage, but by that point, it's really damn difficult to fix it, so I left it, thinking it just wouldn't matter. In all honesty, I don't like the left eye (i.e. Carlos' left, as opposed to ours) - I'm still not sure it's positioned correctly, and the pupil never seemed to have the shiny glint that I wanted it to have.

Still, thanks for the pointers anyway, Dino.




I enjoy horses too, even if I find them very difficult to draw. Glad you liked the hoof too - I wanted this one to serve a bit of a dual purpose, seeing as I haven't drawn Carlos' soles before.




Yes... I hope it wasn't too boring. It didn't actually take as long as you might think, but it was still pretty tedious. Thanks anyway, DL.









Well I appreciate your honesty, Blue, and you of course have your own tastes. I must admit however that I'm rather stunned and disappointed by that reaction. I know it's far from perfect, but there's negative aspects you've mentioned that I can't say I agree with. I'm of the opinion that this is one of my best pictures because there are very few of mine to which I've gone to this level of detail and colouring depth, even if the form isn't 100%.

Could you clarify this comment for me?



In what way do you find it wrong?

In any case, you're entitled to your opinion, so thanks for sharing.





Yes, Diablo. Everything needs more raptors. (*whistles and makes the finger-twirling crazy gesture)

Lol!