Hey folks,
I thought I'd share with you my process of how I created the piece of semi-animated digital artwork below, for an NFT sticker that I minted on the WAX blockchain.
To be real with you, I'm still a beginner at all this. Previously I had no training at all in how to draw figures and faces, so in the past I was just tracing stock images. I noticed recently a lot of criticism in particularly various NFT communities about the use of stock images so I decided that I would go and learn and train myself to become good at drawing figures and faces from my imagination.
This trippy abstract clown 🤡 painting was my first attempt at drawing a face from scratch, with my imagination 😱
I did the sketch in Procreate, on my iPad Pro.
Yes, the good old spherical blob that most beginners start out with. I'm sure there are other techniques, but this was the method I was following from a Youtube tutorial about how to draw faces.
Now that's a bit more human, although his facial features do look a bit flat (he looks like someone, someone famous, but I can't quite place it - let me know in the comments who you think it looks like!)
I skewed his face a bit to make him look less flat, then proceeded to add in the clown features.
Now this was the point where I was gonna clean it up and make it all detailed, but it was late at night and I needed to go to bed. So I decided to take a photo of it to show my colleagues at work the next morning. However, to me it looked really plain, and real messy.
So I decided to add some background to it just to complement the messiness of the sketch. Give it a reason to be messy, like rebellious where I don't care what people think about it.
I am a big fan of trash polka tattoos and that is where inspiration from this style comes from. In case you are not familiar with the Trash Polka style, it is an abstract art style that mashes together many different styles (realism, sketch, polygon, etc - as many as you want). I had previously done a couple designs with the Trash Polka style where I drew a realistic face (attempted to draw 😅) but kept part of the sketch lines. I then put this into Davinci Resolve (a video editing software that is like Adobe Premier + After Effects, but has a free version that is free for commercial use) and realised that I can create an effect which makes the sketch lines look really interesting.
I wanted to see how it would come out if I just threw this sketch straight into Davinci Resolve, without cleaning it up. I like experimenting with stuff.
Davinci Resolve has this amazing nodes based effects generator, called Fusion, where you can basically program your own effects from scratch. I'm sure After Effects probably has a similar thing.
I won't go through the exact details of how I did it in writing, but I've detailed the process in my video below. Basically, in a nutshell:
- I load the image in, then open it up in the Fusion Editor
- I add in a Transform effect node, which is required for you to automate movement (positional and scaling movement)
- I add to this a Displacement effect node, which refracts the image based on a displacement map input into it
- The displacement map can be any black and white texture, but I used the built-in noise texture, which is easily accessible on the menu
- I then experiment and mess around with all the parameters. A parameter called "Seethe Rate" on the noise texture is what causes it to animate (i.e. the noise texture shifts and changes randomly as you play). This is the most important thing - EXPERIMENT! 🤡🤓
If you want to see my process in more detail, you can watch my Youtube video below (it's my first one so go easy on me 😅). Took me ages to record as well (had to retake it a few times) and edit it, but hopefully I will get better through time.
The pixelated digital type effects in the background was using the same method, except I added a Mosaic Blur to the noise texture and a edge detection effect to the output of it. I'm saving this for another video and post, so keep an eye out for it.
Aside from the rest of the animation, which was done using effects in Davinci Resolve, the eye I had to animate myself from drawing each frame individually:
Well that's that, and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them in the comments section below.
Since I'm new to this whole thing, I welcome any feedback (on the video, on the artwork, and on this post - do you think it was a good writeup? or is there anything you think I can improve?).
Also, if you notice anything "interesting" about this clown painting (and you'd like to get a closer look), let me know in the comments below what your findings are 🤡🤔👉👄😉