Programmer and drawing

Does a programmer need to be able to draw? I thought it was quite an interesting topic, under the cut there is a discussion about whether it is necessary at all + a cat drawing lesson for complete newbies from a programmer.


So, before you start creating a cartoon character, you should discuss the practical aspects of the upcoming project.

• You already have a sketch in your head (it doesn’t matter if you found it or thought it up, yourself or not yourself, just to be).
• You have some kind of drawing software. We will not draw on paper, so there should be at least a brush emulator. I personally used Adob ​​software, because I got used to it.
• Time, desire, patience.

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Here in more detail. Why do you need it? Do you often use pictures? I am yes. Often. And every time we insert another image / clipart / sample into the design of the site or program, we use someone else’s work. What is bad? Why is it good?

Briefly about the pros:

• You can quickly find a picture - saving time.
• daily consumers (for whom we are doing this) are browsing gigabytes of various kinds of images, will they appreciate long work properly?
• Everyone should be engaged in the business, for increase of speed of command / enterprise / society / state.
• Not images are one. A good website or program is not based on design. This is more than a set of images, so we give them a secondary role.

Actually, I hope the pros are not everything, but for me they end with these points.

What of the minuses?

• The image is the creation of another person. Absolutely different. His expression. Use in your works, blotches of others, makes this project more common and with each new blotch, deprives it of individualism. At the same time, ignoring progress and doing everything from zero is stupid.
• Copyright Damned copyright. They don't always play on us. Now more and more high-quality images are evaluated in monetary terms.
• The picture can be found quickly. But quickly find the desired picture is much more difficult. Much more complicated. You can find an acceptable or good replacement for several days, but you can only find the perfect image by creating it.

I must unfortunately notice that not everyone has the taste, while almost everyone has the money and therefore in 90% of cases we buy someone else's work, saving our time and doing the next template project.
I myself am a programmer, so I do not want to devote more time to drawing than programming. My goal was to learn how to draw small and medium-sized parts fairly quickly and with sufficient quality. And if speed is a matter of skill, then quality is determined primarily by software. I do not want to turn the post into a book, so I will write only about what I used.

These are Illustrator CS4 and Flash CS4, which are available in the trial version in the downloads section.

I always use an illustrator to draw sketches. I don’t know if it’s good or not, but it’s already a habit. There are very cool brushes in the illustrator. As it is known, the vector graphics editor stores everything that we have sculpted in the form of formulas, as a result of which all hand shakes, all irregularities and so on are removed at the creation stage. Scaling also happens without loss of quality (they simply increase one of the coefficients in formulas), which makes it possible not to think about whether the future image will fit into the site.

Last before proceeding

I am not a professional artist and therefore I do not use either a tablet or a touch screen, anything other than an 8-dollar mouse, the most ordinary keyboard and a 17-inch screen adjusted to maximum brightness (you can estimate colors more adequately).

So proceed to the outline.

We launch the illustrator, we create a sheet of any size (you can go beyond the borders, so don't care). We will draw a cat (something that will bring together programmers and artists). And we do it this way: you draw your cat, I own it, if I had one. That is, you do not copy my style. Come up with your own. Do not repeat, but create.

In order to create a sketch select the Paintbrush Tool and in the settings above select 1pt, 3 pt.Round.
Now let's try how it works. Move along the sheet and see that all small irregularities, at the drawing stage, smooth out and turn into lines of constant thickness.

This is what happened with my first draft:



This is 5-6 seconds of drawing.
Learn to forgive yourself your mistakes. If this is your first drawing, then it's okay if it doesn't work out. You can always fix it in the future. My sketches were simply terrible:



This should not stop you. My mistakes at the very beginning were that I paid too much attention to the sketches and later it was very difficult to correct them. The sketch should be flexible for future reference. Experiment and everything will be as it should.

When the final sketch is ready, select all that you have sketched, and insert a flash adob in the new document.

In the drop-down menu, select:



Since these are products of one campaign, they are coordinated well. Choose Modify-Break apart (ctrl + B)
and do it a second time. Our sketch from the formula equation turned into a set of piesels (actually).
In flash, I usually paint the sketches made. And since it is about color and you are (possibly) poorly oriented in colors, then kuler.adobe.com comes to the rescue

I chose hot colors for the cat. And it looked painted like this:

It is worth noting a couple of practical tricks:

In flash, the fill tool has a very useful setting - Gap Size, which allows you to paint over incompletely closed shapes. I am very pleased that you do not have to look through every pixel in search of a hole.
In flash, the brush tool can be unpleasant because it is not of a constant thickness: (on the left is a flash, on the right is an illustrator)



But this is also his advantage. With a brush it is very convenient to paint small lines, strokes and so on. I used it to draw a wrinkle near the eyes of the cat, to make the wool look uneven and to draw a shine in the eyes.
The next stage is the shadow. I act in 3 moves.
First, I draw a pencil over the drawing, separating the places that will be darkened.



Then I select the Eyedropper tool and suck out the color that will dim / lighten.
After that, I go to Fill Color () and select



Then I move the slider down or up, in order to select the clarification, I will or dim.
You should not make the color of the shadow very different from the original.
If you need to draw the shadows of particularly uneven objects, you should not waste time drawing each pencil. Another trick. Select the Selection tool, click on the color in which there are objects that we will color.



Select the Paintbrush Tool in the settings in the Brush Mode section, select the Paint Selection and now we can paint only inside the selected color without fear of getting out of the border.
My final result looked like this:



I thought that he was not at all like a cat, especially his nose, and I had to correct him to the following:

It was the final

Everything about everything took me 18 minutes of my free time. I do not know how much this work for a freelancer would cost me, but I must say that the process itself brought me pleasure. I give speedpeeting video:



If you have any questions, you can ask them by gmail: gflirtzarkua, because The author is not on Habré. And do not give or ask for invite.

On the author's site