Illustration: Super 8 Movie camera

This is based on my Super 8 Bell and Howell movie camera from the 80s. Might be the 70s to be honest! I LOVED that camera. It could do 18 and 24 frames a second, record sound and do single frame. So it was what I first started film work and animation with. 

It only took about 6 hours to finish and I left out some details, mostly the text and numbers on it but it still came out much more photo real than I was aiming for. It was black but I added a brown tint to the plastic body when I realized by looking at reference photos that the plastic often had a brown tinge to it. The Xray view that shows the vectors always make these things look much simpler than they seem when you are making them! 

Illustration: Lost in Space Robot

 

I have been pretty sick all week among other things happening and decided to do make an illustration just for the fun of it. I am not a fan of the TV show to be honest but I love the robot and I might do the spaceship and the chariot transport if I feel like it. 

I drew Robby the Robot a few years back, designed by the same guy, and was very happy with it. This I'm pretty happy with as well. I used 4 reference all of which differed in details here and there. So if this is missing or adds elements some purists don't like... draw your own. LOL

Infinity Designer - which is really the most comfortable vector drawing program I have used. Not sure what my style is with these things but there seems to be one. 

EDIT: Could not leave well enough alone and made the Jupiter 2

Another Damn EDIT: CThe Chariot, the thing they drove around in. It had curtains! 

Illustration: Bay Window, rue Wolfe

 

This was originally going to be a Krita project, showing how decrepit the bay window is on this building. The brick was all redone but the window is rotting away. I even started painting it but then decided on another direction and did the drawing in Affinity Designer. Designer is a vector drawing program, not bit map, like Affinity Photo of Photoshop. With them you paint with pixels but vector is more like building an image with shapes - almost like using cut outs for each part. Every piece is its own layer and the image can be made as large or small are you like with no loss in quality. 

So this way of doing it didn't make it impossible to get that rotting look but it doesn't really lend itself to that so I kept some odd angles to the bay but for the most part made it look much more attractive than it is. There is a small tree in front I drew, then deleted because it took away from the facade. I really liked adding the shadows and I think they give it a very natural look I wasn't expecting in a vector drawing. 

Vectorizer test

click to enlarge

Mike Luce did a test over at his blog with Super vectorizer 2 which I already but only used in a limited way. So I took a really old, super detailed drawing to see how it did turning bitmapped to vector.

As would be expected, the dot and line work looks pretty damn good. It did take some playing around to get there though. The doorway greyscale was done with grey chalk in original and the tones are a little too subtle to be vectorized, but still, not a bad look.

Affinity Designer does not vectorize bitmaps like Illustrator does (barely) so if you need an external program for that Super vectorizer is a good choice and very well priced.