Musings on the state of Personal Portraits

A recommendation to have a look at You Are Art ("Photos on canvas & Contemporary pop art portraits") landed in my inbox last week, and got me thinking about what happened to personal portraits.

People go to heritage buildings and castles and wow at the (often enormous) portraits of famous and not-so-famous people. Way back when, personal and family portraits were the thing to have and to adorn homes. Huge portraits for equally huge estates.

Then the camera was invented, and suddenly everything got squashed down. Real estate got pricey, and we no longer had room for a big portrait, especially when you needed that room for your big cube of a TV. Thankfully, TVs are slimmer now, though quickly reaching the size of the personal portraits of yore (fortunately, they are also now in Hi-Def and not a pixellated mash).

With the advent of the camera, real spaces came into vogue, and fantasy spaces -- places in the imagination -- suddenly had to step up and be more aesthetically pleasing. Maybe because they were harder to appreciate because they weren't real. It took artistic ability to make, say, a portrait of real castle be more of an attractive possession than a good photograph of the same location. You could have a fantasy castle, but what to include? Sometimes too many details and elements put it into the category of a garish mess that can be stressful to look at and take in.
Take for example, this scene from the hidden object game 4 Elements -- great for a hidden object game, but trickier to properly hang in someone's home.



And still, there's something about a well done portrait that can surpass a photograph, even if the portrait strives for a high level of detailed realism (animal portraits are sometimes done in this way).
So where are the realistic portraits of real people? Or even artistically touched up portraits of real people? -- Especially of yourself? We marvel that historic "others" had them of themselves, so why don't we wish the same for ourselves?

Time and cost are the most probable factors. In terms of "cheap" do-it-yourself, you could use Photoshop and put yourself in any number of images, replacing the face with yours, and thereby suddenly be in fantastic costumes and settings. But if you wanted a more realistic depiction of yourself in the rest of the piece, it could be a lot more work. For example, you could probably easily overlay your face into the picture below (a screenshot from the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion mod, Hentai Mania), but do you really have astonishingly athletic abs like that?



So, suppose you really, really, wanted your own portrait. And you really really can't draw worth beans (or want the portrait to be "beyond critique" by having it done by a "real artist" instead of yourself). What then? The obvious answer is to get someone to draw you for you.
You Are Art, which can transform you from a photograph into something artsy, maybe into a popular artistic style, like Warhol or airbrushing. This is a fairly simple route because you already know the style you like, and the translation will typically fall comfortably into those guidelines.

For something more free-form and complicated, and open to a broader continuum of like-dislike (such as you in a fantastic yet artsy setting), digital artists like Catherine Somerlot have been doing it for years, with such gorgeous pieces as this one:


Solstice Queen by ~photopixie on deviantART

d'artiste Digital Artists Master Class - Character Modelling 3 - by Ballistic Publishing

In the last days of October, while I was on a brief trip to Germany (Eh? You didn't know I was away?) Mr. Alan Halsted of Ballistic asked if I would like to review their upcoming Character Modelling 3 book on this blog.
My focus has mainly been on fantasy computer game art, and I have not in the past sought out such books, but his mention of a KillZone 2 focus (the making of the coolest character, the Helghast Sniper!) really piqued my interest. So of course I agreed.

The day after I got home, the book arrived.





For collectors, there is a 200-copy-only Limited Edition, and naturally I received for review the typical slipcover copy. If you've never had one of these books in your hand, I must say it's built to last and meant to be a permanent addition.
The book itself has a fairly thick cover, and the pages are full-cover gloss of good thickness, not the slightly thinner cheaper stock you sometimes get when you order art book reprints from extreme discount outfits. And it comes with a sturdy cardboard slipcase for added protection.
The book was also separately wrapped in plastic when it comes in the slipcase, and the shipping box was longer than the slipcase by about two inches, which means the box might be a bit banged up during shipping, but you won't get any dented corners.

A bit overkill, maybe, but why not? -- Software quickly becomes obsolete, and with them, some of the more technical knowledge imparted by the professionals featured in the book. But their insights on process (like how to approach complex parts like hands and fingers) may well be timeless.

And these are professionals. Not mere expert artists but industrial-strength veterans who work for prestigious firms such as Industrial Light and Magic (Giovanni Nakpil); and who have earned such titles as Art and Animation Director (Jan-Bart van Beek) and Lead and Modelling Supervisor (Cesar Dacol Jr.).

Is this book for you? If you're solely looking for artwork, it got a nice mix, but you'll have a better time playing the game or finding artwork elsewhere, such as with Ballistic's Expose or Exotique series. This is really more of a textbook. Some of it is commentary, some is general advice, while some sections read like technobabble. Are you using ZBrush? Would you understand this?

"Transferring Detail: We avoid using envelopers with sample options. We turn off Front Range so that virtual envelope only takes in data from inside. This way back bias controls a 'push out' of that envelope if set to a negative number like -1 or -0.1. We usually end up with two separate bakes for the normal map. One with bigger 'push out' back bias..."



That said, there's an interesting option for artists who are on the edge of understanding it all; who like to have a more hands-on experience and play around with the possibilities; or who would benefit from having all the details: (from the press release)


Exclusive Offer
Ballistic Publishing are pushing the educational possibilities for 3D artists even further with d’artiste Character Modeling 3 by making two of the featured tutorial characters available as downloadable high-resolution models. What better way to understand the 3D modeling process than by looking closely at the final meshes of these renowned character modelers? The first 500 customers who pre-order d’artiste Character Modeling 3 slipcase edition and all Limited Edition customers will receive a download link allowing them to start exploring the models in the book. The featured models are Giovanni Nakpil’s quadruped creature, and Cesar Dacol Jr’s Pond Guardian creature.




If you're still not sure, you can page through the 208 pages with the online book previewer to see the mix of finished artwork and the in-process snapshots.