Aragorn torso

[Aveal the black sheep]

Finally finished a decal ...thanks to the awesome tutorial by Ed I have been spending huge amount of hours playing with Illustrator. This is Aragorn's torso from sets 9472 or 9474, my first completed work.

I am pleased with it but i'd love to hear other people's opinion on it.

Here it is

Hope you all like it, and stay tuned for some more decals, next time probably from one of my own sketches.

[Gandalf the Purple]

This looks very good, but the real thing has a tad more wrinkling.

Great work!

[Aveal the black sheep]

This looks very good, but the real thing has a tad more wrinkling.

Great work!

Actually I did it on top of a image from the fig,so it's the exact number of wrinkles :P one thing I couldn't reproduce is the end of some lines,it's thin sometimes not like I have them. If someone could help me with that i'd be much aprecciated.

But thank you alot for your comment=)

[NickAb]

Hello and congratulation on first decal design.

Decal looks pretty good. But here are some recommendations: stitches usually have round ends, you can set stroke ending to be round.

To fine tune wrinkles you can use stroke width tool. Check this adobe tutorial where stroke width instrument and profiles are explained.

Have fun and make more.

Edited July 16, 2012 by NickAb

[DarkKnight7]

Looks like a great recreation of the real figure...good work! As stated above, I would just maybe utilize the line customization features in Illustrator (rounding of ends, adjusting thickness, etc.) and you'd have it perfect! (One of the perks of Illustrator that I wished Inkscape had!)

Looking forward to your future creations!

[Aveal the black sheep]

Thank you for the support,more work is on the way :) A special thank you NickAb for that adobe tutorial, really really usefull. I'll post a update of Aragorn when I tweak the paths to their right form.

Cya

[Puck]

Nice job! I was going to buy the figure just for the torso...but I guess I don't now! :)

Cant wait for the update!

Edited July 22, 2012 by Puck

[RaincloudDustbin]

Much better but I can't do decals well anyway!

[Aveal the black sheep]

Here it is updated :) thanks NickAb from the width tut

Also decided to try and make his face as well. Beard is not perfect yet, how would you guys handle it?

Cheers

[Emperor Krulos]

Looking good.

Regarding the stubble. I'd first check to see how Lego solved the issue. I'm currently experimenting with stubble myself. I took some photos as reference

stubble reference

• The thief (top middle) has very uniform stubble. It's not as pronounced, but the adventurer Jack (bottom right) has too.
  
• The insecure Dino team member (top right), the knight (top left) and the spacemarine (bottom middle) seem to have had uniform stubble, which was then moved using some sort of jitter.
  
• The pharao quest gunman (bottom left) seems to have a repeating pattern. It might have been airbrushed with a irregular stubble pattern.
  
• The spacemarine (bottom middle), the pharao quest gunman (bottom left) and adventurer Jack (bottom right) also have a line of thicker stubble on the outside edge.
  
• All stubble is round. The diameter varies from 0.15 to 0.25pt.
  

My current approach is to define the shape of the stuble, like drawing a beard on the face. Then fill the face with a stubble pattern and clip that to the shape I want. Then I move the stubble that has been cut off, because Lego stubble never seems to have half-stubbles.

Of course you could just use an official face as guide and trace each dot, but that seems a waste of time.

Hope that helps.

[Edit]

Just noticed that you were asking about the beard not the stubble. I think the beard is fine as is.

Edited August 15, 2012 by Emperor Krulos

[Aveal the black sheep]

Thanks mate, you got it right :) I said beard but really meant the stubble.

I'll try the method you mentioned cause yes,tracing each one would be a pain.

Cheers

Edited August 16, 2012 by Aveal the black sheep

[NickAb]

Check

. It might be helpful in automatizing the stubble dots creation of different size. Just use a beard shape with black & white gradient instead of chicken image, sometimes it produces excess dots, but they can be easily deleted. Also it is sometimes unstable, some experiments needed, maybe temporary increase size, adjust gradient few times, etc.

I've added a video tutorial on basics of creating face stubble using Inkscape http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D71CVOOH-3c.

My pronunciation is no good. So I also added subtitles, but youtube got some bug, so subtitles are not available at the moment.

Edited August 18, 2012 by NickAb