Grid Pix - Pencil #3

Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Mon, 18 Feb 2019

This is where it got good!

Although the pencilling was going to plan, I thought it was looking a bit pedestrian. It wasn’t giving me that sense of awe and wonder I got from 80s game covers or 70s sci fi novel covers. The pyramid didn’t feel ‘big’, the viewer didn’t feel small and insignificant.

The trick I came up with was to distort the image with the opposite of a fish-eye lens effect. I loaded a PNG of the pencils into Affinity Photo and used the Develop persona, and lens correction of -50%, which sort of ‘pinched’ the image in the centre. I then had to scale it up a bit to get the whole thing roughly the same size.

You can see at the bottom where the straight line of bottom of the pencils now curves up in the middle. The same effect has happened all the way around.

I now had the effect I wanted. The pyramid looked massive and imposing and far away and wondrous. Well, to me anyway. There was also a pleasing curviness to all the lines now, which made it look more than just a mechanical exercise in linear perspective.

» Ste's Illustration Process Blog

Tags: process, gridpix, cover, drawing, pencil, perspective, affinity paint

Follow up post: Grid Pix - Inks #1

Predecessor post: Grid Pix - Pencil #2

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