Thursday, November 19, 2009

Deep thought and rainbow hues

"Just a beauty shot" today ... an almost abstract figure ... because I'm so short of time, I have to be out that door and gone in about 90 seconds! This piece was done in DAZ and Micrographx, and it was dead simple, though you might not believe it, to look at it!

The process is this: start with a Michael 4; add a hairstyle you fancy (the model arrives bald or buzzcut); don't worry about the face, because you don't see it in this shot. Pose the model and spin it around using the x,y,x "translate" controls, until you get just what you want. Import an abstracty background ... nothing specific, just make sure it's dark, so the it contrasts the figure. Render this ... open the render in Irfanview -- gamma down, and contrast up. Copy/paste it into Micrographx Picture Publisher 10 and apply two filters to it. One: on the Light Studio, pick "Rainbow" and jiggle the settings till you get exactly the effect you want. Two: in the Paint Studio, choose "glow wind" as the filter ... set it up to take effect on the "R" channel (as in, R-G-B, being red-green-blue), and set the intensity level at "1" ... save it. You're done. Seriously.

The effect is fantastic, and the total project took about five minutes. There are two tough spots in this kind of work: 1) "seeing" the picture in your mind's eye, so that you're not just thrashing around among your filters, looking for inspiration, and 2) knowing the software, so you can get exactly what you want...! Like they say to piano students, "prektiz, prektiz, prektiz!"

Jade, 20 November