Dec
7

A Scanner Darkly

By lauren // Art, Art Tips // 2 Comments

I’m not refering to the movie with Robert Downy Jr and Keanu Reeves per se. What I’m talking about is the style in which the movie is done in.

For my graphics design class, we did a project called “A Scanner Darkly.” What does this mean? Well if you haven’t seen the movie, a the look of scanner darkly movie looks like a motion graphic image -sort of like a comic book. It looks pretty realistic but in some cases you can see where the values of the colors break up. For example you can see where the shadows start, the middle tones, and the highlights in a harsh line. Let me show you what I mean.

This is Robert Downy Jr in A Scanner Darkly. It’s a pretty good movie if you ever get the chance to see it but this post is about the art technique haha. You can see here clearly where the shadows are, the middle tones and the highlights. It’s not very blended – or blended at all actually – but it still is appealing to the eye and it looks like Downy.

I really like the end look of this technique but I had some problems starting out. For my project, my teacher printed out a tutorial she found online for us to follow and we had to find a picture of good quality to turn into a scanner darkly – I ended up doing two.

The first step in the tutorial was to make a black outline, which I didn’t do (brilliant right?), because the picture I had didn’t have a lot of black to make an outline but rather a lot of dark browns.

TIP: If you don’t know how to do something and read a tutorial on how to do it – actually follow the directions.

It was weird starting out because it looked like bunch of peachy, organey brown blobs of color all over the place. This is the photo I worked from – it’s an image of Kandee Johnson, a make up artist, and I found this on her Facebook page. In this image, she dressed up as Tickerbell from last year when she was doing Halloween makeup tutorials.

Isn’t this photo so pretty? It was kind of colorful so that’s why I chose it…plus I love Kandee! haha she’s and amazing makeup artist and person. Anyway, haha, heres the end product:

This looks low quality because I had to take a photo of the printed version of my project with my phone. The PSD version is on my flash drive with is with my friend whose borrowing it. I tried to lighten it up in Photoshop to make it look like it does in person haha. Anyway, my teacher really liked the outcome of this but when I did the outline (I went back after I was done and added it because I was afraid I’d get points taken off haha), the line under her jaw, near her hand, wasn’t needed because the colors already make it look like there’s a outline there. Plus that line just looks really crappy – it’s not smooth at all haha.

This method of art reminds of me Vectoring which is pretty much the same technique…like I don’t know what differences there are between the two really. So I watched a lot of vectoring videos on Youtube when I did this project and I looked at images people did on deviantART. I’ve noticed that eyes are very nicely done in vector. So I decided to give it a try!

The original photo is not mine – it’s from a photo I found on deviantART and I can’t find who took the image =/. So if anyone knows, it’d be appreciated if you slip me a name! haha

So I’m not 100% happy with how this turned out – the colors around the eyes look a little to blocky for me but I do like the eye lashes and iris. =) I had some trouble with the iris because it just looked so bloby and not like an iris at all but it turned out pretty good.

TIP: With this kind of technique, it’s best just to keep going with it rather then stopping and starting over because if you’re not use to this kind of technique and more use to realistic (like me) then it’s going to look so wrong at frist but in the end it’ll turn out the way you want.

So in conclusion, this technique as a pain in the butt for me but I got an A on it anyway hahahaha Here’s the link to the tutorial my teacher had us follow for this project: A Scanner Darkly technique tutorial.

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2 Comments to “A Scanner Darkly”

Keira Norena March 5, 2011 at 4:10 PM

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lauren March 5, 2011 at 4:48 PM

Thanks for the comment =)

A Scanner Darkly

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