Click and drag the pieces above to create your own toon portrait.

So I’ve been working on this little flash app for a week or so.  I just wanted to make one of those little avatar makers I keep seeing, like faceyourmanga.com and wii’s mii maker.  Only I wanted to be able to click and drag the pieces around and change colors without being limited by the app’s preselected positions and colors.  This is what I have so far.

Let me know if you spot any major issues.  Currently you have to be careful because there’s no undo.  (Lock your pieces so you don’t accidently move them while you’re working on other stuff).  I just cloned existing pieces and got creative for backgrounds and stuff.  Also, there’s no save yet, so you’ll have to take a screen shot to saver your work (printscreen and then "paste" into a paint program like ms paint or photoshop).

Feel free to post your results online, etc (and leave a link so I can see it out on your facebook / deviantart / flickr / etc account! :)

Here’s a couple I did this morning.  They’re random.  My goal for this project is to make toon portraits of all my friends on facebook (these 2 don’t fit that theme).

I had to custom create those little selection sqaures that let you change the size, rotation, layer depth, etc.  It was a little tricky –remember that big long post I made about having to work around AS3 not having a MovieClip.clone() function?  Either way, I think it’s a good starting point.  I was hoping to avoid having all the buttons and sliders like faceyour manga has and I think it worked out pretty well so far.  Hopefully I’ll find some more time to add a selection of reusable parts like hairdooes and faces and stuff.

BTW, if you rotate something and then try to resize it, it’s a little funky.  I’m hoping to fix that in the next release.

Enjoy,
~Danny

 

So I’m sure you’re thinking "well that’s a pretty stupid flash app," –and you’re right!!  It’s very small and insignificant however it involves a huge frigging workaround since AS3 doesn’t have a clone function for MovieClips.

Warning: If you don’t code AS3 this is going to get really boring really fast.

Okay so all I wanted was "newMovieClip = SomeRandomMovieClip.clone();"  I wanted to clone the frames, the timing, the current x/y location, rotation, scale, etc, etc.  I just wanted it to work but "clone" doesn’t exist.  It’s what you might call a huge frigging oversight in the language’s framework.

So I look up on google and found lots and lots of people are all having this same problem.  What’s worse is each time someone asked the question "there’s no MovieClip.clone()? what should I do?" they are met with answers that don’t help at all.  Like the following:

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I’ve been trying to get away from my computer during lunch to do a little sketching.  I’ve been attempting a SketchTaro-esk style.  Mark’s one of the people I spend the day sketchcrawling with.  He uses 100# paper, pen, ink brush-pen, and he puts more detail in the center and lets everything just fade out the further away he gets from the subject.  So I was, you know, "trying" to do something like that :)

This last one is a sketch while chilling at home:

Observations:

1. By skipping the pencil and going straight to pen, you have to spend a lot more time planning before you touch the pen to the page to make a line. Because of this planning, you end up drawing front to back, instead of back to front.  For example, with oil on canvas or just pencil sketching, you start with the background.  Things like the horizon are the first thing you make, then you put things on top of that, like the background, then the foreground, finally, any details.

Using the pen is much more like the Chinese Brush Painting we were doing a while back.  You start with the closest object first, and you go backwards starting with foreground, then background, and then distant background and horizon.  So in the last image above, I drew the front corner of the cabinet first, then the camera on the tripod and all the things on top of the cabinet second.  After that was the book case, then everything on the wall, then the wall itself followed by the things behind the wall (kitchen and hallway).

2. I thought pen would be great because it’s not as messy and smudgy as pencil.  I was very wrong.  Ink is just as prone to smudging as pencil AND it’s more permanent.

3. I was starting to get the hang of using the darks and solid blacks to push things into shadow and give things depth.  You can see this in the sapling I did above.  I’m not totally there but applying a lot of black is starting to make more sense to me.  It’s good for pushing the eye to see depth.  Of course I’m still looking closely at Mark’s work to get a better understanding of how he applies so much solid black so brilliantly.

practice practice practice.
~Danny

SF Sketchcrawl 21 was a bit of an experiment.  Rather than picking a starting and ending location, the start location was optional and the end location was the De Younge Museum in golden gate park.  Actually, at some point it was announced that one of the optional start locations was going to be the ferry building. (?!)  Here’s a map to show you what that would have been like.  4.4 miles.  it would have been a lot of ‘crawl’ and not so much ’sketch’.

So a few of us decided to just go to the De Younge Museum at the beginning of the day and spend all day sketching there, which worked out pretty well.  Here are a few of the more presentable sketches I did.

That last one is just me fooling around with the first sketch.  You should check out all the results from all the other sketchcrawlers on the sketchcrawl forums.  It was a big turnout, about 60 to 80 people. –oh There’s a photo of everyone here.

~Danny

I have this ink brush-pen that I don’t used often, but have always used for thick solid blacks.  However I recently discovered just now nicely it does these scratch grays.  So there are some experiments.  I miss the Chinese brush painting class we were taking at the beginning of 2008, maybe we’ll sign up again soon.