Cowboys And Aliens

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, (the mid nineties) Scott Rosenberg had just sold Malibu to Marvel and as Platinum Studios, he was flush with cash. With Ervin Rustemagić, founder of Strip Art Features in Sarajevo, he gotten hold of the rights to the Italian comic book Tex, a western comic book that was basically… a really good Western. His people were having trouble selling it as a movie, because, that’s basically what it was. A good Western. Why extra pay for the rights to a good Western when you could just make… a good Western?

So Greg Noveck (later to work for DC on films like Red, and now at Syfy Films) suggested a title. Cowboys And Aliens. And was asked to work it up.

With Paul Benjamin, the pair created five drawings and a bunch of character designs and details. With William Morris representing them, they got a cover image in Variety, the image of a cowboy on his horse with a large space ship overhead. The story in the magazine reported that this was an upcoming comic-turning-into-a-movie, but there was never any comic. That was just part of the pitch...!

Drawing a Tree Step-by-Step

Here is drawing trees explained with pictures. There are various ways to draw a tree. Many techniques and mediums are used to draw a tree. But, if you wish to draw a detailed drawing of a single tree, then here is a technique that you can follow.

Step #1
The first step is to capture the form of the tree. So, whichever tree you want to draw, first observe it. You can take a picture of a tree for drawing, or choose an existent tree near you. If you are choosing a live tree, then make sure you are sitting at eye level to it, and at a comfortable distance from it. This is for getting a good angle of the tree and good visual size of the tree. Then observe the tree, see the flow of it. Observation is an important sketching tip. So, observe - how its roots are? How its trunk leans? From where all the branches come out? Observe the main branches and the sub-branches. Also, observe the foliage and the details on the tree. However, when drawing trees don't go for too much details, but just capture the form and add some details to define the tree. If you want you can add depth to it by shading.

After you are done observing it, start drawing the shape of the trees using forms. Use a light pencil or draw with very less pressure on the pencil, because the form should serve just as guideline. In the picture below, for the visible roots, trunk, main and sub-branches draw the forms using cylinders. Place cylinders one upon the other, this helps to break the form and draw the tree in proportion. If you want, you can draw light circles for the foliage.

Sketching Tips for Beginners...

Given below are some sketching tips for kids and beginners. If you want to polish your skills, you can read sketching tips and tricks, for advanced sketching detailed later in the article. To get started with basic sketching for beginners, the equipment required are, a sketch pad, some 6B pencils, eraser and sharpener.
Before starting a sketching session, always draw circles, ovals and horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines on a sheet of paper. This will help you gain control over your hand movements.
Start by doodling stuff, like objects, gestures, nature, etc. The sketch doesn't have to be perfect. Just get your hand flowing on the paper, so that your confidence on your drawing skills rises.
After your hand movements become steady, start sketching with easy subjects like nature, still life and cartoons. You can always refer to books on these subjects for drawing lessons.
For the above subjects, first practice sketching the form, for example, if you want to draw a house, see that the proportions of the different parts of the house are correct.

After you get the form right, start shading or texturing the drawing. There are various types of texturing styles like smudging, hatching, cross-hatching, etc. You can buy some illustrated books, to learn basic texturing.

Advanced Sketching Tips for Professionals

Many times, professionals or students of arts and crafts get stuck in the vicious circle of perfecting their own art work. For sketching, three things are very important. First is understanding the sketching rules that apply to a particular subject. Second is observation, and the third most important factor is regular practice.

Equipment: It is important that you have the right equipment depending on the subject you are drawing. For architects, it is very important to master perspective drawings. So, things like rulers, technical pens, mechanical pens, etc. should always be kept handy. If you are a fine arts student, it is important that you master sketching subjects like nature, still life and portraits. For art students, basic equipment and a live subject (to pose as a model) are very necessary. If you are studying animation, make sure you have basic sketching equipment and a digital camera to capture moving subjects for gesture drawings and expression drawings.

Books: There are many advanced books for learning the art of sketching particular subjects. 'Perspective Drawing' by Ernest Norling is a great book for improving your perspective drawing skills. 'The Animator's Survival Kit' by Richard Williams is very good book for studying animation drawing. If you are an art student and want to learn anatomy drawing, refer to books by Burne Hogarth.

Observation: Constant observation is an important key to improving your sketching skills. Wherever you are, keep observing. The place can be a bus stop, or an airport, but observation will only make you a better artist. If you are facing problems sketching a particular subject, observe that subject more patiently and precisely. It is difficult to observe a moving subject, so you can refer to photographs or sketches of the moving subject. If you want to learn how to sketch people, then pay observe them and pay attention to details. When observing a person at a public place, observe a person subtly and do not stare at the subject for long as it is considered rude.

Practice: Practice, practice and practice some more, to get better at sketching. Practice is the single most important factor that contributes to good sketching. If you have difficulty at drawing a particular subject or object, practice sketching the subject. Always, keep your sketching equipment handy so that you can sketch at any public place like a bus stop, train station, airport, etc. Do not feel shy to sketch in public, just ignore everybody and concentrate on drawing the subject.

Guidance: Guidance is also important when learning advanced sketching. Show your sketches to your teachers or seniors in your profession, twice or thrice in a week. They will guide you in ways that will help you in getting the proportions and the form of the subject right. Keep asking questions if face difficulty in sketching something. If you are an art student, form a group with your classmates for sketching and seek their help if you are struggling with a particular form of drawing.

Holding a Camera the Right Way

We all can learn and relearn certain rules that we may have taken for granted in the past about photography. The most basic of which is how to hold your unit the right way. Holding the camera the right way will prevent a lot of errors on your part. First off, it prevents camera jitters which in turn will cause blurs in your pictures.

Small compact cameras are actually more difficult to hold than larger DSLR units. Whereas DSLR units have grips which your hands can be placed in, most compact cameras don’t. To add to this, some compacts don’t often have a viewfinder but a large LCD display which serves as the finder, so one will have to be careful not to cover it. LCD displays force the user to hold the camera far away from the body to see well which will be subject to more jitters since there isn’t a steady hold on the unit. Hands which aren’t propped on a body art will most likely jitter unnecessarily even if the owner hasn’t noticed it yet.

Photography Tips... Depth of Field

Depth of Field Photography Tips:

Some of the most essential photography tips for managing the “look” of your images center around choosing proper depth of field. In this article, we’re going to take a look at a few photography tips to help you control the depth of field in your photographs and the effects that it can have.


What is depth of field?

When you’re attempting to draw your viewer’s eye to your subject, composition is perhaps the single most important element. However, choosing a suitable depth of field is also a very powerful way to center your viewer’s focus on certain aspects within your image while making others less engaging. Think of the depth of field as a line of sight extending from your eye all the way through to the far reaches of your composition. This is “depth”. What we manipulate with depth of field is which elements of that composition are in focus and which are not.

Levels of depth

As we discuss photography tips for managing depth of field, it’s also important to understand its spectrum. When we refer to a shallow depth of field, we’re alluding to a primary subject (most often in our foreground) which is in focus while the rest of the composition is not. To the contrary, a deep depth of field typically refers to a composition in which all elements from the foreground to the background of the image are in focus.

Photography tips for controlling depth of field

Before we talk about how to control and manage depth of field in your images, let’s look at the functional elements of your camera that contribute to it. The camera’s aperture, or f stop, setting is the most important determining factor in arranging depth of field in an image. When we widen the aperture by using a smaller f stop setting, we allow a greater amount of light into the lens and thereby shallow the depth of field. This sharpens the focus on the subject within the composition in the foreground while blurring the background. Alternatively, closing down your aperture will increase focus throughout the entire composition from front to back.

The second way of controlling depth of field is manipulating the distance between the camera and the subject. It’s really no different from how the human eye works. When you move the camera closer to the subject, you lessen the focal sharpness on the background elements. When you move further away from your subject, the camera brings more of the background elements into focus.

The last of our photography tips for controlling depth of field surround the focal length of the lens you use. For any given aperture, as you add focal length to the lens, you lessen the depth of field. And again, alternatively, shorter focal lengths at a given aperture will increase depth of field. By using various focal lengths and aperture settings, you can drastically alter depth of field.

Photography Tips.

Portrait Photography Tips:

Capturing intriguing images of people is an art form and in this article, we’ll explore some basic portrait photography tips to help you achieve success in portraiture.

Composition and Setting

While we could explore hundreds of photography tips for getting better shots of people which draw out a subject’s personality or features, nothing is more important in taking pictures of human subjects than composition and setting.

When you are setting up composition for a portrait, there are a couple of things to consider. The first is how close you want to be to your subject and subsequently, how much of the frame you want to fill with your subject. Do you want to capture subtle details of facial expressions or interesting physical features unique to the person you are capturing? If so, then finding a way to fill the frame with the subject’s face or body is key. Take some time to think about why you want to capture an image of a particular person and what is intriguing and interesting about them. This will determine how you set up a shot.

This also leads into the next of our portrait photography tips: proper contextual setting. I have long had a fascination with trains and more precisely, the railroad employees who travel the rail lines along secluded paths throughout the world. I was able to find an engineer stationed with a rail company near my home and spoke with him about capturing some images of him. The man had a weathered and traveled look about him from his many years riding the rails. However, there would have been no context within the images had I not asked to meet him at a rail yard where the opportunity to tell the story of his years of service to the transportation industry was made real by the presence of diesel engines and rail cars.

Eye Contact


After setting up your shot, you can also experiment with the inclusion of direct eye contact versus having your subject look away from the camera. Direct eye contact in a portrait portrays intensity of personality while having your subject look away from the camera toward a distant spot can either draw out a feelings of contemplation, brooding, or desire. It can also draw your viewers’ attention to other elements of the photograph as I did with the railway engineer. Watching him stare deep into the composition at a long line of rail cars produced an image which reflected his great sense of responsibility for making safe passage across the country with hundreds of thousands of tons of speeding cargo and told the story of how this burden weighed on him personally.

Lighting

There are several photography disciplines in which lighting plays a critical role and portraiture is among them. Finding unique and interesting ways to light your subject’s features can have a dramatic impact on your portraits. Experiment with light from the side of a subject or from below his or her face to produce shadows which draw out the facial and body features which belong to your subject alone.