Articles by Vyoma

When an artist represents himself or herself in their medium, either as a painting, illustration or sculpture, it is called as Self Portrait.

It can be quite daunting and for those of us who are modest, it may see feel narcissistic. But trust me - I just tried it out. It is a challenging task yet a good creative exercise. As an artist, when you are trying to portray realism to the faintest extent, you would want to be able to capture what is called familiarity. Even when the ‘portraits’ of people (or even things) are distorted like in caricatures (see Tom Richmond’s works for example), the key is to capture the familiarity.

We have been observing ourselves from the day we became self aware. There will be very few who have not noticed some of the features of themselves in the mirror. A Self Portrait is just an attempt to capture the familiarity of oneself.

Here is my first attempt at a self portrait. I believe I have caught some of my features - I can see a lot of changes required, but I am going to let this one slide. I would do more attempts in future.

This was done in GIMP, using Wacom Intuos3, over a span of roughly 15 mintues. Before attempting this, I just peeked at myself on mirror, and tried to take a mental note of the features. After that, I opened up an new canvas in portrait layout and started with a new dull brown layer. This seems to be a better approach than face a blank white canvas. Then, I started out with rough form and kept refining it on new layers - going through with a smaller brush each time.

• Software: Inkscape (or Adobe Illustrator)
• Level: Intermediate
• Subject: Genie Lamp

By the end of this tutorial, you would be able to create a vector artwork of a Genie Lamp. You should be familiar with the tools of Inkscape or any of the other vector editor you use (like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw).

Base Shape

Use the ellipse drawing tool and create two of them one below the other and overlapping. Align them so that their centers are exactly above each other. The blue ellipse is the base shape of the main lamp body. The red one would become the stand of the lamp. Create two more ellipses (green) on either side of the red one. Use the subtract operation to chop of this area from the red ellipse to get the base shape.

Use the pen tool to create a roughly trianglular shape on the left (or right - your choice). Note that the tip of the triangle pointing outside has been chopped off and it is actually a four sided polygon (green). Use the node edit tool to curve them as shown above.

Create two more smaller, concentric ellipses and tilt them a bit. Subtract the inner ellipse from the outer.

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• Level: Intermediate
• Subject: Horse Head in profile

This tutorial should get you going on drawing horses - the head specifically.

You should be able to reproduce the results either digitally or using pencil, pen, paper and a good eraser. If you would like to study the results, you can download it at the end of this tutorial.

Basic Shape

First, try to imagine and breakdown the seemingly complicated head of the horse. You will notice that it is sphere for the head, a cylindrical protruding to the muzzle and another much smaller sphere for that area. On the profile view, it becomes circles and a cylinder. The neck too is a cylindar and on profile, it would become a rectangle - but to make it interesting, I twisted it a bit.

With the guide in your minds eye, draw these rough shapes to gain confidence before moving on to actual sketching.

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I wanted to do a colored version of the illustration, Too Old For Halloween.

I grossly under-estimated the amount of effort this would take.

With the amount of detail, and my choice of color palette - added to that the two sources of light, takes up quite a bit of effort to paint.

As you can see, I have approached this from back to front. And on each of those level/layer, I detail them with a fat/large brush to a fine/small brush.  Stay tuned - I will finsih up painting by detailing the two main characters, and perhaps adjusting some color levels.