Conundrums

More and more it feels like my digital drawings are turning out cross-eyed girls. I look at this portrait of the Black Child of Quaran, and though I know she’s focusing straight ahead, the more it seems her eyes have gone medically wrong and crossed… a neural disorder.

This is the original picture in colored pencil that I made the digital copy from. I put this picture on the digital drawing board by uploading it. Then I put a layer on top of it and began tracing the original with my digital stylus using both the pen and brush settings. Of course, arthritis in my fingers messes that all up, making bizarre quirks in the picture that I must repeatedly erase and redraw.. So, I edited the picture with my AI Mirror app and rearranged the lines to conform to a realistic anime style. That widens the eyes and shrinks the nose, making changes to my drawing of up to fifty percent.

Here’s an intermediate step in the creation of a digital drawing completely from scratch, not tracing anything. It started from mere blobs of color in human shapes that I manipulated for a couple of hours. You can see I have not put in a background yet or added clothing. And the girl on the right is totally cross-eyed..

Here’s a variation of the same picture that I worked on for another hour trying to cure the crossed eyes. Better, but still a problem. One of my high school friends from Iowa pointed out the cross-eyed problem in drawings I had posted on Facebook. He suggested it was using the AI app that caused it. I experimented. And he was right. The inner parts of the eye, closest to the nose, will have the white parts shrunken or eliminated when the AI makes the eyes larger than the drawing I used it on.

I discovered the key to fighting that problem was to exaggerate myself, making the whites of the eyes larger so that they would appear more normal when the AI did its fifty percent thing and shrunk them.

You can see here the difference the exaggerations made when I edited the previous picture using the AI tool on the eyes and face.

But sometimes I sort of fall in love with the cross-eyed princess and decide to leave her that way. She’s kinda quirky and cute like that. And I don’t like feeling that the hours of work were wasted.