Art: Charcoal Slenderman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBpC5iIKcUU&feature=player_embedded
Been enjoying the song today. Check the Music page, I think I have another Paramore song in there.

Hey there, finally got my phone camera to take a good pic - my scanner's busted, but I finally got a good looking set of pictures. Lighting in my room kinda sucks right now, I think we're using a bulb of slightly too low power, plus, well, phone camera.

Anyway, so let's start right off with the picture:

This is the largest capture I have - click it for full-size!
I've done a little photo-editing to try and recapture some of what the camera lost, which was primarily contrast and brightness. As such, some of the middle greys here are slightly lighter than drawn, and the lightest greys got pulled into the white. In general though, this is an accurate capture of the image.

So, a couple details. First, this is pretty obviously Slenderman. I'm not that huge of a fan of the whole little Slenderman mythos that's become so popular - I enjoy the basic original concept, but I'm not so sure why he's so popular. However, his basic structure, being a figure perfectly content in shades of grey, and being made up of large blocks of black and white without many particularly fine details, made him a perfect candidate for experimentation with the new medium this is done in: charcoal.
Well, okay, charcoal isn't new. It's just new for me, I'm not reinventing the wheel here LIKE THIS GAL DID (this is a cool thing on dA). This is still a new thing for me though - I've never worked with charcoal before, so it's been a great little learning experience. I've decided to try out a bunch of mediums looking for what I could use for some Avatar World art. I also want to learn the basics of a variety of the more traditional Asian artistic styles, at least those on paper/canvas. The primary things I want to mess with as well are watercolor painting, at least understand the basic tenets of ukiyo-e, and, probably the greatest after this charcoal work, ink wash painting (link).
I will admit that the nature of my charcoal stick had a bit of an issue - it didn't work great for a think shape I had to fill in since the filling-in process broke the lines. You can't see it really because I covered it up a bit. You can see the evidence: damn thick tentacles. I thought the tentacles wouldn't be so bad, but I was dead wrong - they were the worst by far. The smudging bugs me a bit cuz it gets my fingers all dirty, but II really like the effect. It did exactly what I wanted it to do for the face/head!

So hey, now that I've talked about the concepts and stuff, here, I'll show off some alternates. I'll just show off smaller versions, but I have larger versions of any of them if you'd like to see.

This is actually the base image, exactly as photographed, before ANY photo editing. I like keeping these around for knowledge.

This got my Posterize (aka color reduce) treatment, and was pretty accustomed to it. It''s less ethereal/misty, but some of the shapes are thus a bit more harsh and menacing. I like the tentacles a lot, but I definitely prefer the face of the base or contrast-shifted one.

This is the base image with the Despeckle filter over it. It smooths it over and it looks neat, but I think it loses a lot of what made the charcoal image so distinct.

Hey look, it looks like it could come straight out of tremulus! Okay, yeah, it's a Despeckle filter plus a Posterize. But it does look quite a bit like several of the tremulus pieces.

Anyway, I think that's all I've got for now. I'm gonna be goofing around more with the charcoal, and I certainly might not stop to post all of 'em. Gonna be makin' sure to post 'em up on Twitter though!
That should be all for now. If you have tips on using charcoal or on what you think is cool about various kinds of Asian art, help me out!
End Recording,
Ego.