Pictures Part 9

“Roofreprise Girl 1 & 2”, made 17.12.2002, original file size four times greater.

Drawing and decalcomanie, with electronic modifications. I needed this for a reprise of my “Under The Roof” image, but perhaps it can stand for its own.

And this is the reprise. Click here for the original. Hm, I guess the first version is still the best... The wood structure is taken from an Ikea Billy shelf. I hope they don’t own a copyright in this design.

Another episode of “Yuko Aoki As Angelika”; this time using the style of a first-person-shooter (see here for previos versions). The box Angelika is sitting on is taken from Quake I; the plasma gun is taken from Doom. The palace is Angkor Vat, built by the Khmer King Suryavarman II. The jade-dragon is Chinese, about 220 to 240 A.D. The warrior head is nearly four hundred years younger, from Japan, and made of terracotta. The marbled floor is based on a texture that ships with some Linux-versions. The sky is a CorelPaint flood fill. The chain, and the image of Yuko Aoki, are anonymous internet findings.

To make all the parts fit, I had to change the colors of the dragon and of Angkor Vat; they are more yellowish in real life. For the construction of the image, I used mainly The Gimp (but also Micrografx some times, and, as I mentioned, CorelPaint for the sky). It is a good thing that such a mighty image editor as The Gimp is free.

Note the cross in the middle of the image; I guess somebody who played first-person-shooters will feel a strong tension to move to the right to get the dragon in focus. I guess the player started with a 100-life-points-score. Maybe this is just the beginning of the game, or maybe he found some medipacks recently. He still has to collect more mana (and the weapons 5, 7 and 8). The dragon may be an end-level-enemy, since he holds a hostage.

I wasn’t completly satisfied with the 17.12.2002-version of “Under The Roof”, so I made another version, this time, under the sky. The painting is done with acryl colors. The stars and nebulas are NASA images, they are: NGC604, two times orion nebula (you can spot horsehead nebula in image 2), and M31 (Andromeda). I think of image 4 as the “official” version, but if you like another version better, never mind.

I think this is the final version of the current thread. The girl is an acryl painting, the sky is the Rosette Nebula, found in the Monoceros (Unicorn).

The final final version. To be continued? Why, maybe perhaps I should wait one or two days until I announce some image as being the “final” version of a thread. I won’t be able to ever again draw a comic, if a single simple drawing takes me a month. But I guess it is worth the trouble - this one looks nearly as good as the first Under-The-Roof-version.

I recycled the background, but repainted the girl completely. NGC 2237, NGC 2238, NGC 2239 and NGC 2246 are the parts forming the rosette nebula (the rosette nebula is a far distant object (about 5000 lightyears away), and first only disconnected parts were recognized (by John Herschel, Marth resp. Swift), therefor the somewhat crude numbering; NGC stands for New General Catalog).

This image is even more computerized than the previous. Only the outline is done outside the computer. All of the blue and red structures are Corel-Paint-Floodfills (the hair, for example, uses a “curtain”-structure being altered using additional transformations), and the light and the shadows are added using a tablett.

The main theme obviously is the play of red and blue. Another theme is the movement of bending backwards: watching some of my old pictures, I wanted to explore a pose of one of those pictures a bit further. I guess the girl is using some telekinetic powers to levitate that ball - but probably it’s just a trick and has some kind of natural rational explanation.

I can’t say much about this one. It just occured to me. Note how the picture gets a more optimistic mood if you turn it upside down.

The following three images are SVG-images. If your browser has trouble displaying them, you should try the Adobe SVG Viewer.

“47-star, printer-friendly black&white version”, made 8.7.2003, vector graphic.

I recently discovered the joys of vector graphics. Perhaps I will make more of them in the future. The above images are regular stars with 47 edges (why 47? Because 47 ist the last number of the first Cunningham chain of Sophie Germain primes, of course). Try zooming in (right-click if you are using Adobe SVG viewer and have a right-click-button).

You may remember the last image of gallery 8: an image of Xev Bellringer of “Lexx”, manga-styled. I don’t want to look obsessed with that theme, but my first version left me unsatisfied. Maybe I could do better. I decided I should first try an image of Xenia Seeberg as Xev without anything manga-resque, as a preparation. This is it:

As usual, acrylic colors, ink, and some computer work. Obviously I did some background-recycling. A few things bothered me with this version, mainly the flat colors, so I tried again:

I like the alliteration, but I still was not happy with the manga version. So I made another one:

Nice try. But let’s get serious: the task was to draw Xev Bellringer as a japanese comic heroine. I studied some mangas and animes again, and this was the result:

My graphics tablett came in handy, I doubt I could have done this with my mouse only. Now all I needed was some nice background.

It took me three graphic programms (Micrografx Picture Publisher, Corel Photo Paint and The Gimp) to make that background. Planet Water consists of a Corel floodfill with seven different filters applied to it. Planet Fire is just another floodfill (a bit of stretching and modifying, of course). The most difficult part was to create the horizon using The Gimp.

Another variations of “Numbers”. This one is also available as screen wallpaper:

„Der schöne Tod“ [“The Perfect Death”], made 27.8.2004, original file size 3247 x 2347 px

The idea for this image was wandering through my head for quite a while. I have no idea what it means; I guess it is about someone who managed to get a yacht and a beautiful chick and a nice suit, and now he navigates in his favorite landscape, and since things can’t get any better, he is ready to die, preferable in some heroic kind of way. But that is just my assumption what the title means.

The following images are in the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format. As of now (2004), most browsers don’t come with a native support for SVG; but many can understand and display SVG with the aid of an appropriate plug-in, like the Adobe SVG viewer. The W3C has also a List of SVG standalone viewers and plugins.

Inspired by medieval tracery, this is a quite simple version. If you note the dates of creation, this is the last one: after making more and more complicated versions, I made this as an introductory piece.

This one adds some color. Note that the bars and the colors rotate in opposite directions.

This time, I replaced the drop-shaped shapes with simple circles. With a “sexfoil”, the outer circles and the inner circle would be of the same size, which looks a bit boring and tensionless. With seven or more outer circles, the inner circles become increasingly greater.

To avoid using the full spectrum, I restricted this one to gold, blue and brown. I also discovered a way to avoid having the same radii for the inner and the outer circles, while being able to use six outer circles.

My masterpiece. It starts to repeat itself after 42 minutes. Some browsers allow to view web pages fullscreen (for example, F11 does this on IExplorer on Windows). This creates a screensaver-like impression; unfortunately, on slower machines, watching this animation fullscreen may also noticeably reduce the framerate.

„Himmelserscheinung I“ [“Sky Phenomenon I”], 3.11.2004, Scalable Vector Graphic.

Once again scalable animated circles, but this time in a less symmetrical arrangement. The animation starts to repeat itself after 15 seconds.

„Himmelserscheinung II“ [“Sky Phenomenon II”], 3.11.2004, Scalable Vector Graphic.

In this second variation, the background changes between an orange dusk–or–dawn—sky and a blue sky. One cycles lasts 2 minutes. Unfortunately, the constant recomputation of the background has a negative impact on the smoothness of the animation, so you may prefer to view this image in a smaller window.

„Himmelserscheinung III“ [“Sky Phenomenon III”], 3.11.2004, Scalable Vector Graphic.

This one has some delicate clouds added. This time, the computation of the background takes even longer, so unless you view this on a fast machine, it is probably better to view it in a small resized window.

Despite the fact that the computation of this background takes quite some time, its definition is rather short. The thumbnail above (itself a JPEG image of 1700 Bytes) links to a SVG file of only 854 Bytes (which could be further reduced by using a zipped SVGZ file). A complete list of those Bytes looks like this: