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366 CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING Add a bright highlight: make a small, feathered circular selection up near the light source, and fill it with white (Figure 9-33). Figure 9-33. Fill a small circular region with white to add a highlight. Finally, add a shadow, the same way you did with Tux. There are two slightly tricky aspects. First, if your perspective drag handles end up off the screen, it can sometimes be difficult to get them back. Second, it s hard to tell from the shadow s shape when the perspective is right, so look at the box drawn in the Perspective tool for clues (Figure 9-34).
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CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING 365 Figure 9-31. Move the selection boundary toward the light source. Figure 9-32. Fill with the lighter color, using an appropriate layer mode.
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364 CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING Start by making a colored circle. Make a circular selection, and then fill it using Fill with FG Color or the Bucket Fill tool (Figure 9-30). Use a fairly dark color: this will be your shadow color. Of course, put your circle in its own layer. Figure 9-30. Start with a colored circle. Bring up the color chooser and make the foreground color quite a bit brighter (increase its Value by sliding the V slider to the right). This will become the lighted part of the sphere. You ll need a selection that s a bit bigger than the current circle, and feathered quite a lot. Your choice: either enable Feather edges in the Ellipse Select tool and make a new circular selection, or use the existing selection, enlarge it with Select . Grow…, and then feather it with Select . Feather…. For my relatively small example, I ll Grow by 20 pixels, and then Feather by 45. Move the selection toward your light source: in this case, I ll move up and to the right (Figure 9-31). Remember, you can move a selection with Alt-drag, Shift-Alt-drag, or by using the Transform selection tab in the Move tool options. Once the selection is moved, fill it with your new brighter foreground color (Figure 9-32). Then change the layer mode to a mode that looks good. Screen and Dodge are good for bright colors; Soft light gives a more subtle and darker effect.
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CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING 363 An understanding of perspective will help not only with drawing, but any time you have to make an alteration to an existing image. Getting the angles, warps, and shapes just right can seem impossible using LARTM ( Looks About Right To Me ), but is easy when you know how to draw perspective lines. The GIMP doesn t let you set up guides that aren t exactly vertical or horizontal to help with the Perspective tool. But that s okay: by drawing lines in a separate layer, as shown here, you can still find your vanishing points, and then let them guide you when using the Perspective tool. Then make the layer invisible before you save. In many cases (such as this one), the vanishing point is so distant, it s off the edge of the picture. That s perfectly normal. Sometimes old-world draftsmen (circa 1990) would stick a pin into their drafting board way off the work, and line up their guides with a ruler. Not so easy with a screen! But you can use the same trick you see in Figure 9-29. Make your guides smaller on a separate layer, and then scale them up to the proper size. By using vanishing points with the GIMP s Perspective tool and adding a realistic shadow, you can convincingly stick just about any object into even the most distorted background. Adding Reflections and Shading To draw Tux s shadow on the dunes, you had to have an idea of where the light was coming from. If you wanted to make an object look really three-dimensional, you d want more than just a shadow: you d want highlighting on the side of the object that faces the light, and shading on the other side of the object. Remember shading the box in Chapter 4? This is similar, but with curved objects there are a few other details involved. Rather than using Tux, I ll use a simpler example: I ll show you how to make a sphere. Note GIMP has a plug-in to make a sphere for you, in the Xtns menu of the Toolbox. But once you know how to shade a sphere, you can use similar techniques to shade any object. In Chapter 11, you ll learn more about how the Sphere plug-in works.
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362 CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING Figure 9-28. Perspective using two vanishing points. Note the guide layout is very different from single-point drawings. Not coincidentally, the box has been drawn so that the angle from it to the left vanishing point is similar to the angle the shadows follow in Figure 9-26. What happens if you copy part of the two-point drawing and paste it onto the Tux picture (as in Figure 9-29)? Figure 9-29. Centered on Tux (the focus of the image), the two-point cube s perspective lines show the relationship of Tux s shadow to the hiker s.
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CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING 361 Single-Point Perspective You probably remember your introduction to perspective in Chapter 4, when you drew the box for the tree planter. That was a reasonable introduction to single-point perspective (Figure 9-27). Figure 9-27. A classic example of single-point perspective: three boxes drawn with one vanishing point The point in question is the vanishing point. This is the place where parallel lines seem to converge in the distance. Imagine looking down the lane stripes on a long stretch of road. You ll note after some distance you can no longer distinguish them as separate stripes. If you can see far enough, the entire road disappears to a point in the horizon. Since there are three boxes in Figure 9-27, you can see what happens when foreground objects are offset to one side or another. But that tells you something else: the vanishing point does not have to be in the center of the image. Use any object (such as your hand, or the opposite page of the book) to block out two boxes. Now you have an example of a drawing where the vanishing point is offset to one side. This is similar to the effect at work in the Tux image. But in Figure 9-26, the point where the shadows converge is way off to one side. Why is that, and how do you figure out where the vanishing point should be? Two-Point Perspective In Figure 9-27, all the horizontal lines are parallel to each other, and so are the vertical lines. The only lines that have a different angle are lines that recede into the paper. This is a rudimentary illusion, but we can do better. How? By adding another vanishing point, as in Figure 9-28.
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360 CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING Figure 9-26. Give the shadow layer some transparency, so you can see the colors and textures underneath. Of course, sometimes you may need more work to make a shadow look perfect, especially if it s being cast onto a curved or irregular surface. But for most of your shadow needs, the Perspective tool combined with Blur and layer transparency will give you everything you need. Realism and Multipoint Perspective There s a little fib in the last section. Remember where it said to match the shadow angle of other objects in the photo? That s close to true but sometimes not close enough. The problem is perspective (the name of the tool you used to warp Tux s shadow to the right shape and angle!). If you look carefully, you can see the problem. In Figure 9-25, both the hiker s and Tux s shadows are at roughly the same angle. If you have a sharp eye, Tux s shadow will look just a bit out of line tilted down. However, in the final Figure 9-26, his shadow is rotated up a bit and somehow that looks more natural. Why is that? It s actually a nearly ideal representation of the effect of perspective. But it s easier to start any discussion of perspective with the most elementary version.
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CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING 359 Figure 9-25. With the shadow layer under the Tux layer, move the shadow to the right place. Note This is basically what the Perspective Shadow plug-in does. However, it can be hard to get the plug-in to work right; it s usually easier just to make a perspective shadow by hand. Transparency: Add the Final Tweak That looks pretty good but you re not quite done yet. Change the transparency of the shadow layer so that it s not completely black. Then you can see some of the texture and color underneath it (Figure 9-26).
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358 CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING Tux is cute and all, but he just doesn t look . . . realistic. The reason is the lack of a shadow. (Well, okay, maybe it s not the only reason.) Using an Object to Cast Its Own Shadow Start by making a drop shadow from the Tux layer. Now use the Perspective tool to drag the shadow off in the right direction (Figure 9-24). Try to match the shadow angle that you see on other objects in the same photo. Don t worry if the base of the shadow doesn t quite match the base of the pasted object; you can fix that separately. Figure 9-24. Use the Perspective tool to drag two corners of the shadow box in the right direction. Until now, the shadow layer has been on top of the Tux layer. Obviously that s not right. Now is a good time to move the shadow layer down in the layer stack. Then use the Move tool to move the shadow so that its base is in the right place (Figure 9-25).
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CHAPTER 9 ADVANCED DRAWING 357 Drawing Realistic Shadows Remember adding a shadow to the tree-in-a-box in Chapter 4? Did you find that you had to try over and over to get a shadow that looked good? There s an easier way to give a complicated object a shadow than by drawing it by hand. Just make a copy of the object s layer, turn it black, blur it, and then use the Perspective tool to make it point in the right direction. Pasting an object into a photograph is a great way to show this. First, make sure you know in which direction the shadows are pointing in the original photo. In Figure 9-23, that s easy because of the figure of the hiker. I ve livened up the picture by adding Tux, the Linux penguin. Note Tux was drawn by Larry Ewing using GIMP version 0.54. Larry has an excellent Penguin Tutorial page describing the methods he used: http://www.isc.tamu.edu/~lewing/linux/notes.html. Figure 9-23. Notice the direction of the hiker s shadow. Tux looks somehow artificial without a shadow.
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