I’m not an artist – well, I am, but not when it comes to paint or colored pencil on paper. I’m a decent enough guitar player (rhythm and bass), I’ve written music, produced music – and using a game program called “The Movies” I’ve made music videos (and a couple of short films). I’m a moderately talented writer – Click on the “[show]” on Suzysunshine’s pirate page to see the back story I wrote for her. My Star Trek themed fan fiction story has passed story and (at over 177,000 words) is approaching novel size. But when it comes to drawing something with a pencil – I’m hopeless. Oh sure, I used to draw a pretty good car or airplane (I had a fondness for drawing Ford Mustang Cobra II’s and the Navy’s Blue Angel’s F4 fighter planes). Then I took a drafting class in high school and all natural ability was completely and permanently driven out of my head. Fortunately, someone invented Photoshop…
Here is our favorite pirate, Lillythanne. She’s wearing her new steampunk inspired outfit, sporting her little monkey friend. This is the outfit I made weeks ago just for this ‘Steampunk Lilly’ picture (here’s the links to part 1 and part 2 of this story, for those who might have missed it). Of course, in this picture she stops about mid calf, which means I had to find a full length picture with a pirate wearing a long dress with a magenta bottom. I scanned countless pirate pictures and finally found the magenta dress bottom – with magenta boots! Fortunately, black fancy boots were easier to find, and using photoshop I layered this picture over the bottom of the dress, layered the black boots over the magenta, and even layered the rest of her cane over it all to finish up the full length picture. All so I could get this…
This is an “Expansive” (a.k.a. Expensive) portrait background, meant for multiple pirates – all of whom would hopefully be chipping in to pay for it. Wasn’t going to happen for me though. Photoshop produced almost the same picture the game would have generated for me, had I spent all the poe and dubs I had at the time (and then some I had borrowed too) — except Lillythanne wouldn’t have cast a shadow in the game picture, and the ship wouldn’t have been named. It’s a nice picture, but I thought this one would be pretty nice too…
I like this picture because it has Lillythanne standing next to her ship – right where you would expect a proud new owner to be standing. You don’t take a picture of you with your new car by standing 20 feet away and having it in the backround. You stand next to it – proudly.
Wait! you don’t stand next to it – you get in it and take a picture…
That’s more like it – standing on the deck of her nice new steamship, a head of steam building up in the boiler ready to steam out of the harbor. Except there’s no option to use steam power (how about a new boiler stoking puzzle? Not sure how you would do it, and you’d have to have a supply of wood to burn). Anyway, the pictures are pretty much finished (although I might rotate Lillyth’s hand so it appears to be grasping the railing) and it’s only a matter of deciding which to add to Lillythanne’s YPPedia page. And in case you don’t know the most obvious drawback to this method – this picture will never appear in the game…