Project 01 - Marie Antoinette

I watched Marie Antoinette (Film, 2006) today. It gave me great insight into 18th century fashion. I took many screenshots of the film which I cannot upload due to the file size (even when zipped).

I also drew people from the film as it was playing as well as when it was paused.

I love this pose. Interestingly, the clothes look like 1930'sish America even though they're Georgian.

Georgian hair is great. It should come back into fashion.

There were very few good shots of maids in the film, I got this one though.

 This took about 5 hours in total.

It seems there are very few older maids in the household in both this film and in Pirates of the Caribbean. I might consider changing my Witch design to a younger lady.

Afterwards, I applied what I'd found out about hair, clothing poses etc to my own drawings:

I like the hair and the hat here

Because of how much more research I have into the royalty over the maids I'm veering more towards making The Princess my character of choice. 

Or maybe the Princess and the Witch are the same character in some crazy plot twist. That could be interesting but I'm not sure how I'll justify it other than "It could be interesting...".

Project 01 - Random Silhouette Generator

HERE is a link to my Random Silhouette Generator (windows only)

I made it in GameMaker: Studio 

Controls:

spacebar - generate a new silhouette

left shift - increase opacity

left control - decrease opacity

A compilation of silhouettes I generated using my silhouette generator

You can see how the generator has changed/ improved through the silhouettes as I was tweaking the shape placement, number of shapes, opacity etc...

The way the generator works is it creates a random number of shapes (within a range), the shapes then randomly turn into other shapes (for diversity), They then move their point of origin to a random x and y axis within the canvas, they spin around a random number of degrees and deform their height and width by a random variable (within a range) too.

Since the random number generator in game maker always chooses the same numbers, the software results in the same 'random' shapes every play, unless I change an argument or variable slightly between plays. Since then I've also added another variable that increases every step by 1 until it hits 11, at which point it returns to 1 again. This way, the player unknowingly has an influence on the generation of the shapes. Since it's almost impossible to time something to 1/120th of a second, the player should get different shapes every play. 

There is a 1/10 chance of getting the same first shape, but that probability reduces exponentially every shape the player makes and even then, it's not a big problem. 

Here are some more silhouettes

I like these silhouettes much more than the ones I painted in photoshop. They're more original and the way the opacity causes the shapes to darken in the center looks very nice. I haven't ever heard of anyone making a random generator for their silhouettes before.

Project 01 - traditional silhouettes

I've been playing with ideas about how to make my silhouettes interesting and unique

I've been quickly scribbling shapes to try and spark some ideas.

 Some more refined scribbles

These are some outlines I made as an alternate to scribbles.

I remember hearing somewhere that you can simplify the human body down to strait lines, S-lines and C-lines. I suppose there aren't any other kinds of lines though. Still, I went with the idea, exaggerating things here and there.

A silhouette drawing method of drawing shapes 'randomly'. The coloured lines around the outside show the silhouette.

These types of silhouettes look good. They all have a lot of potential and vary a lot depending on the types of shapes used.

Project 01 - Silhouettes

Here are some silhouettes I made in Photoshop. I'm still fairly incompetent with the software so they took far longer that I'd care to admit. In no particular order:

I particularly like the texture and form on these pieces

experimenting with different brushes

The shadows add a lot of depth to the images. A thinner brush looks nice too.

It's difficult to create interesting silhouettes whilst trying to remain loose enough that I don't consciously influence the outcome.

Project 01 - Research

The Georgian Era took place during the 18th century. The was a large wealth gap and famine was common, particularly for the poor. Pirates were common.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (Film, 2003)

Fashion of the time was for large hairdos, particularly for women, corsets, dresses, flowers, large hats, lots of makeup (for both men and women) and wigs, for those without the hair for an extravagant hairdo.

Marie Antoinette (Film, 2006)

 It is important to note that the image above is a recreation of royalty from the Georgian Era and may in fact be, completely inaccurate. Nevertheless, the image is at least, the public perception of what the Georgian Era may have been like so it is completely fine to use as reference.

An artists impression of the working class during the 18th century

Pirates of the Caribbean, Marie Antoinette and this image all heavily imply that alcohol was consumed as if it were water in the 18th century. Also, Horse and Cart was a common mode of transportation for the time.