draw your favorite candy challenge

[Lazur]

Gave it another try.
This time, all done with a painter's logic, van Gogh much?
Made with rough strokes with the calligraphy tool, and used only five gradients.
This method is way faster and seems more effective on giving an "artistic feel" in my opinion.
Hope you like it.

[brynn]

I like the effect very much!  Yes, very van Gogh-ish.

[brynn]

I've made a good start on drawing some holiday candy (ribbon candy and a piece of peppermint candy).  The completed green piece will later be flipped around, and become the far left piece in the line drawing.  (The blue rectangle is just for contrast, since the highlights are so white.  No idea what kind of bg the finished image will have, yet.)

[Lazur]

Wow there are so many details in this on the right with the lined texture.
If the shape isn't challenging enough.

Looks like a good start!

[brynn]

Ok, I have the next piece of ribbon candy, probably, mostly done.  Although usually I see issues that need fixing, after I post the image.  But anyway, here's the next wip.

Blue bg, just for contrast, due to the light colors of the candy.  No idea about final bg/setting, yet. 

And again, the green piece will be flipped around as indicated by the outline.

Obviously, still need to add cast shadows    That will add a lot more realilty.

[brynn]

Ok, now I finished all the candy drawing.  Now I just need to flip the green piece around, add cast shadows, and decide on some kind of setting.  Probably will just be like a  table surface.  I'd like to put them on a saucer, but sort of dread making a realistic saucer....at least without looking around for a saucer to use for a model.....although maybe I cold find a photo....  Well, we'll see what happens....

Questions, comments welcome, as always 

[brynn]

Now have green piece repositioned, and shadows under candy.  There aren't any cast shadows, because the photos I used for ref are made under special lighting, to reduce the shadows.  So there's just a little bit of shadow under the pieces.

Still don't know about a setting, to finish.

Even using photo references, I still struggled with getting highlights on the peppermint candy.  And also on the yellow piece, because in the photo, it's white.  And the photo is not high enough res that I can see the reflections against the white color of the candy.  So I changed to yellow, and did my best.  So the yellow piece did not come out exactly photorealistic.  But I think is not so bad.   Not as good as the other 2 pieces.  But just ok.

Anyway, comments and questions welcome 

PS - Ok maybe I see a way to improve the yellow piece highlights...still working...

[brynn]

Now a lot of minor improvements to the yellow piece.

Questions, comments welcome 

[Lazur]

Sweet!

The blurring doesn't seem consistent though, parts of the green one looks more focused than the yellow one in the same distance.
Using clipping could make it all look sharp, to me it seems now if it was made with airbrush.
Was that intentional?

[brynn]

Yeah, the green piece has a very hard shiny surface, while the yellow piece has more of a matte (not so shiny) surface.  (Actually the surface of the yellow one has a tiny diamond shaped pattern sort of etched into it, that can't be seen from this distance.  But it takes away the sharp reflections.) The blur is approximately the same on the green and yellow pieces, but the reflections on the green piece are sharper, because of the shiny surface.  I tried clipping, but I wasn't able to get a realistic look.  Clipping made it look very vectorish, while the blurring give it more realistic appearance.  At least that's how it seems to me.

But maybe I could take down the blurring on the yellow piece a little.  When working with so many different objects, sometimes the blurring gets out of whack (by grouping, ungrouping, etc.)  I'll see if I can take down the blur a little bit.

[brynn]

I don't know if this is a bug or not, but I'll go and search Launchpad after I post this.  If you select 1 object out of a group, using Ctrl +click, the blur value is not displayed in the Fill and Stroke dialog!  You have to ungroup, to be able to see the blur value.  So I would blur my objects, then group then, just to keep organized.  Then later, I would select the group and see 0 blur value, and think I had forgotten it, and added blur, without realizing I was adding blur on top of blur.  So almost everything had double the amount of blur that I thought I had!

So I think it's better now:

[brynn]

Ok, I drew a little napkin under the candy.  And then when I was looking for a filter that might look like a wood finish for a table, I found one which looks a little like those granite kitchen counters that are so trendy here, these days.  And I tweaked it to look more like a real one.  And I added the edge of a dinner plate in the corner.  I guess I should add something to the other corner.  But I'm not sure what, yet.

The part I'm most concerned about is the napkin.  It doesn't quite look realistic yet, and I'm not sure how to do that.  I've tweaked the edges a bit, to make it look not perfectly flat.  I mean, even a brand new clean paper napkin would not be perfectly flat.  And I put some other shapes to look like some random shading.  But it's not working entirely.  Any comments or suggestions about the naptkin would be so welcome!

Oh, well maybe if I just move the napkin and candy over to the left, I might not need to draw something else in the left corner???

[Lazur]

Nice filter!

You can duplicate the candy and serve it on the plate?
Would be cool for the container challenge.

I suggest you to try adding a bit more shadows to make the shapes pop out.
Made a quick modelling with blender and rendering with cycles. 

[brynn]

Ok, now I darkened some of the shading, and added new shading on the sides of the yellow piece.  I don't think I can go any darker.

I tweaked the napkin some more.  It still seems too stiff to me, but I'm not sure what to do to make it not so stiff.  The layer with the granite counter filter has really loaded down the file, so it's getting hard to do any more edits.  It's over 2 mb now! 

There's no way to break down the file size by layer, is there?  I'd be curious just how much that filter adds to the file size.

The 1st attachment is the full size image.  But I'm thinking of cutting off the left side, as in the 2nd attachment (where I used scrolling to imitate the smaller version.  That way, I won't have to come up with something for the top left corner, in a file that's dangerously close to crashing Inskcape (on my computer)!  It would make an odd page size -- 800 px wide x 700 px height, compared to the full size 1000 px wide x 700 height. 

But I honestly don't think the file is workable any further, especially in the realistic style.  Maybe I could draw something for the top, left corner, in another file, and just paste it in....but it would be hard to do, because I would need it in the image, to tweak the lighting/shading.  Idk, maybe if I switch to the 64-bit version....  We'll see 

[brynn]

Darkened shading on green piece.

[Lazur]

Looks good!

For the filtered background, you can try to use a raster image instead -the Alt+B option.
Or export it to png and link it when imported back.

Maybe the paper needs a bit grainier texture.
Quick remix with gimp is attached.

[brynn]

Oh, that's an idea I hadn't thought of!  Export just the bg rectangle, and import back in.  Then I can draw something in top, left corner.

[brynn]

Wow!  I'm not sure how it happened, but somehow during all the tweaking, the yellow got washed right out.  So here, I've beefed the yellow back up.

Btw, it turned out to be the napkin that was weighing down the file.  I saved 0.27 mb by making the napkin an imported PNG.

Well, maybe that's a bit too much yellow.  I'll take back down.  Ok that's better.

[brynn]

And now, unless I suddenly see any glaring error, this is the final version.  Final size 2.03 mb.  Here's the PNG below.

And for the first time, I'm sharing the SVG file, in case others might be able to learn from it.

The reason I've never shared an SVG file before, is because I have considered it the only way to protect my copyright.  However, I've been rather shocked at how much can be done using a raster editor on my PNG exports!  So it seems the images will be used, no matter what preventive measures are used.

So I'm releasing this SVG, under the Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike-International license.  What that means, is that you can use my work, in whole or in part, to create your own work.  However, if you do that, you have to meet a few requirements.

1 - You have to give me credit publically, if you post your work which is derived upon my work, publically.
2 - You cannot claim it all as your work.
3 - You cannot sell your work, if it is derived from my work, period.
4 - You have to apply this same license to your work, which is derived on my work, publically.  That means that you have to allow other people to use your work, just like I have allowed you to use mine.  That also means you have to provide the SVG file (I don't know if that's really part of the CC license, but I'm making it part of my license!)
5 - If you don't want to give people this kind of permission, for others to use your work, you cannot use my work to create your own work.

More details at the link above.


The attached SVG file is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

[Lazur]

Svg provided?
Now that is a real eye-candy!

Also, that bent gradient made of custom markers is very clever!
Thought such solution would produce rendering issues but surprisingly it works quite well.
Would have never realised that from the png, so yes, it was at least good for me to learn!

[brynn]

Well, I'm glad you found it helpful 

Yes, very clever!  I cannot claim to have come up with the idea on my own.  I saw a tutorial several years ago, about it, and really forgot about it for a long time.  And I don't know if it's really very effective, as far as illustrating how the red and green stripes are raised.  Probably would be more effective if I had drawn the candy so that 1 piece fills up an A4 size page.  But I think the image looks better with it anyway.

Note that it doesn't work very well, to have any transparency in the gradient.  Possibly if there is a LOT of blurring in the image or object overall, it might work to use a little transparency.  I wrote a tutorial on it, a week or 2 ago.

[Lazur]

Hmm I can't remember if I saw that before.
You drew a radial gradient there, which doesn't bring out the benefit of the technic in my humble opinion.

[brynn]

Where is the radial gradient -- the candy image or the tutorial?  It shouldn't be radial.....although that might be interesting to experiment with....

[Lazur]

In the tutorial, it seems.

Just making an svg that will help cover strokes with a chrome fill. 

[brynn]

No that's not a radial gradient.  You didn't read the instructions, did you    That's the curved path with markers applied.