Catch a Falling Star

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.

The Angel with her Puppy… this was made from a puzzle picture I finished on the Tap Color App. It is basically a redrawing of the puzzle picture in a more cartoonish anime style. Using digital tools I didn’t have to be satisfied with a straight-up copy of the original picture.

The Angel with her Puppy 2… I made some big changes. I used photo-shopping tools to copy a more realistic face onto the angel. I also gave her bare legs, something I like to draw, especially on children with their soft and subtle shadowing. The dog was fun to draw too in both pictures. The angel wings were in the way of drawing the dog, so I put them on the girl’s headdress instead, making her a little more human.

A Sylvan Tea Party in the Butterfly Bedroom... This one is harder to explain. I wanted to picture naked innocence between a male faun and a female fairy. I was even going to put fairy wings on the dog. But I finished the nude figures in ways I wanted to preserve, so I didn’t put horns on the faun or wings on the fairy and her dog. Those things may come later. I have about seven versions of this picture, and am not yer satisfied with any of them.

Ashlynn and the Blue Wall… I decided to daydream while drawing a little less here and just do a portrait of the girl from Instagram.

Yes, I know her manic smile looks somewhat crazed. But in the photo she shared with me, she was perfectly cute and pleasant. I didn’t realize I overdid the expression until I posted it the last time.

This girl was also sweet and pretty. I messed up the eyes in the first version of this picture, making her look cockeyed. I worked hard to fix that.

This is the same girl as in the picture directly above. Different dress, a different pose, a different day, and I got this one right the first time.

She’s a teenage swimsuit model, and in my opinion, a future supermodel.

This bumble bee portrait was made from a background taken from a puzzle I put together and a digitally hand-drawn bumble bee.

This is a picture done from an anonymous post on Instagram of a solemn-faced girl.

This was done from a picture of a girl modeling for a catalog. The clothes had a pattern on them that frustrated me, so I turned the clothing white.

This is a digital re-drawing of a picture I did in colored pencil of Blueberry Bates and Mike Murphy.

This is, I think, a girl. Maybe the same girl as picture number 2 above. She’s a cutie and the photo looks like the face of the other picture more than my drawing does.

So, there’s some potential Paffooneys to tell stories about in future posts.