Art Dump + Posemaniacs.com

Howdy everyone~!

So I'm feeling much better now that I'm over the sore-throat-can't-breathe part of my upper respiratory infection. I'm waiting till the day i'm no longer coughing up Pantone 393 and unable to hear out of my left ear. S'all good though, cause spring is fucking here! You will notice that for the next month i'm probably going to be pretty jubilant for no real reason -- it's 'cause spring is my favorite season and watching the world turn green and smell good after being gross and bitter cold for 5 months makes me all kinds of excited.

So, art!
Did some art of Storm (revised classic outfit). Just started as a little 2"x3" doodle and kind of spun out of control from there.

Also became privy to a site called posemaniacs.com which is basically a huge virtual database of poser models for artist ref. I found out about it about a week ago on from two different blog sources (on the same day, no less). i gotta say, I think it's a great idea. I hope it ends up being one of those things that tears me away from having such paranoia about using references when drawing*.

Just to get used to it, I did a page of gesture drawings to see what would come of it. They have a section for gesture drawings on a timer, so you end up with some really neat pose ideas that would be nearly impossible to re-create with a live model.

Here's my first CC on the site from just thumbnailin' some random stuff: There needs to be a timer for people who take longer than 1:30 to do a gesture drawing. I am a snail when I'm drawing. I can't win the speed race to save my life. I understand the technique is to build speed and looseness, but what I end up from anything less than a 5 minute gesture drawing looks more like someone was trying to create rough thumbnails. You can get around this by going into the random pose option and timing it by yourself with either your clock or a desktop widget, but it would be nice for it to be streamlined into the application.

Here is my guilty pleasure I've found from random poses: There is some shit on that site that is absolutely unreal. As in, there is no reason you'd ever need the pose. But, hey! Ask and ye' shall receive! (This image is NSFW)

Wow. I mean,... wow. I included the number of the poses they came from, but just for ease I'll link them up here:
BatDerp - SS Chick - Dr. Manhattan - Cirque De Soleil

As well as being entertaining, I think I actually learned more by clicking through random until I got to the really bizarre poses because I wouldn't have had any reason otherwise to try and grab people from those angles. I added in the private parts just because it's hard for me not to think about how they are in relation to the character so its easier for me to just jot em' in as a landmark reference than to try and ken-doll it. I blame 4 years of drawing naked folks in college.

So, here's my unwanted opinion on the site having just found it and not having lots of experience in turning it into a fruitful time-waster:

Pros!

• Low Memory Usage and easy to use interface. Very WYSIWYG and user-friendly. Since it is based in Flash it takes less than 5 seconds for me to load on my cable connection.
• Tons of poses - 650+ base poses made from almost 20,000 separate images. This is a godsend for someone who sees a pose they like but need it just slightly from a different rotation. More than you will ever need, and thank the gods for that.
  
• Lots of the poses are made for comic-book artists, so there is a lot of fun, dynamic stuff available for anyone looking for things from the mundane to the omfgEPIC.
• Gesture practice for people who don't have the money or the local resources to go to a live model. Yes, doing drawings from live is preferred but if you're like me and local sessions happen only 10~15 times a year (for about 30$/4 hour session at that) this is a much more reliable way to get to them. Also great for me since I work non-set retail hours so I never know when I'd be able to make any local sessions anyway.
• Again: totally free. If you want to donate (and you should!) it's available, but its not a requirement.
• Also has a section on hands and faces, so if you need to cross-ref landmarks for drawing. The hand viewer also has some sort of 360' viewer set-up for low-polygon models like torsos and feet which I can see as being an amazing asset. (As of now, it's only in Japanese but that may change.)

Cons :P

• While there is a pseudo-English version of the site available, most of it is written and coded for Japanese/shift-JIS native users, which I can see as being a pain in the ass for people who (a) don't know enough Japanese to navigate and/or (b) don't have the character set installed on their particular system.
• You can't adjust the lighting, and that is a pain in the ass. in my thumbnails above, the woman in the lower-right corner suffers from shiny-plastic-failure because she was rendered in poser without what looks to be any sort of texture-map effects at all. The nice side-effect of the application is that it doesn't take forever to load on slower systems/connections, but it also means that you have to deal with really random, plastic-looking 2-source lighting.
• The source they used for the muscle mapping (a poser default? I don't have the application so I'm not sure...) is mostly accurate -- up to a point, that is. Because it isn't nearly as advanced as something like ZBrush, the texture wraps to whatever point it fits on the male/female as a whole 3D object, as opposed to be rigged up to squash-stretch in specific areas. This isn't a big deal if you have some knowledge of anatomy and how the muscles work, but I can see this becoming a really easy pitfall for a beginning artist to fall into. They may have fixed this problem with more recent releases of poser, but whatever version the PM.com webmaster is using does not have this advanced rigging set up for the models.
• lack of flesh mechanics! I don't mean this in the idea of heaving boobies or bouncing-ass animated .GIFS. There are a few poses I've encountered where soft, fleshy areas smoosh into other soft, fleshy areas. Instead of smooshing together or extending, the 3D model just cuts into itself. This is another possible non-problem like above: if you have some knowledge of anatomy and how the muscles work this ain't a big thing, but I
  can see this becoming a (another) really easy pitfall for a beginning artist to
  fall into.
• I've already started recognizing a lot of images online (DA, illustration blogs, flickr, etc.) where people have used this tool** and not given it credit as a resource. This isn't a fault of posemaniacs.com, but I do think there should be a certain level of transparency when you are using a reference, especially if you're image has garnered a lot of attention.
• It wouldn't be me if I didn't say this: Wider availability of body shapes available in future releases, plz.

I hope this was somehow mildly entertaining / informative. My left ear is still trying to have me dead right now so I'd better get a movin'.


* - I don't currently use refs when drawing, and it is basically fucking me over -- thats a big thing for me to admit, that something i've been trained to see as cheating/evil is not that at all. I used to be proud about my avoidance of it, but its caused more bad than good in the long run.
**- we're talkin' you could line up their art and a pose and pretty much have it traced