another reason on why I am vectoring

Compare with these two images to see the difference between drawing and vectoring:


At a glance, the obvious difference is the colours and the lines of the paper it was drawn on. Upon closer look, you can see the dirt left behind on the drawing whereas for the vectored one, you would see a transparent background (blue or white if you are using IE6) instead.

The 1st improved version (the one with my MySpace and Friendster URLs) didn't really make a difference other than the unwanted areas outside the drawn area removed. Unfortunately, the lines on the drawn area itself still appears.

Improvements include the eyes, the area below the ribbon, both hands, and the details of the skirt. Now it looks better.

If you haven't noticed already, I didn't shade (or colour) the skin or the faces on the drawings. The reason being that it would not look as nice like the one on the right.

I tried to make shadows on the character, but I ended up making the skin darker.

There are "watermarks" on all of the drawings and the vectored ones, but the ones that are hand-written look terrible and have poor size and alignment consistency. Using my other hand would only make it worse. On recent ones, I try to make it visible without it being too large and blend in with the background. I have tried to do it (or part of) on the drawing, but it doesn't look nice.

Also, with the vector, I don't need to create multiple copies of the same thing (original, scanned, edited, online) and save memory space.

The drawings were scanned at 300 dpi in grayscale, so the average drawing would take up about 1.2MB of memory space. With what I have already done, it's probably be enough to fill at least half of a CD.

For vector, the least detailed one would only take up 60KB while the most detailed woul take up 300KB only, a fraction compared to a scanned drawing alone. A PNG image of it (the one I use to put up online) with a width or height of 800px (whichever is larger) would take up somewhere between 125 and 275 KB.


P.s. I might have put up incompleted (and partially edited) versions of the vector drawing somewhere on this blog.

Comments

Unknown said…
hey there~ I just wondering~ Can you please explain about this vectoring~? I don't really understand on how it's done~ Using photoshop~? If so, please tell me the steps~! Onegaishimasu~! >.<

Anyways, I like your artwork~! So nice~! X3
It's basically tracing an image digitally. Since mathematical values are used to draw the images instead of pixels, its possible to enlarge it without loss of quality. Since I'm tracing it manually (including applying of the colours) and can be exported as a PNG image, you can say it's somewhat similar to photoshop.

I used an open-source program called Inkscape. You may not understand how to use it at first, but that's what I went through.

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