From the 80s

[Ashfordbloke]

These are all pencil drawings from the 80s, except one. I include my rendition of my favourite Boris Vallejo picture.
I would be interested to hear critiques!

 

[29wordsforsnow]

These are all pencil drawings from the 80s, except one. I include my rendition of my favourite Boris Vallejo picture.
I would be interested to hear critiques!

They do look great. Good catch of the anatomy, and 80s fashion.

You could try to increase the contrast with some digital post-processing.

 

[Ashfordbloke]

I tried using Ohotoshop to increase the contrast, etc. The issue, I think, is that they are 40year old pencil drawings and I need a light box to update them.
I used fixer on some work I did back then but these were not "important" enough!

 

[29wordsforsnow]

Looking at the brightness gradient from top to bottom, did you use a desktop lamp?

A cheap substitute for a lightbox: place a big bulb lamp underneath an opal glass pane and take the pic from above. This way you can avoid the brightness gradient, and don't cast a shadow on the paper.

 

[Ashfordbloke]

God idea! I might spend some time sharpening them up (as in redrawing the shading, etc.) and try the photographs again.
Thanks for the idea!

 

[ElectricBlue]

God idea! I might spend some time sharpening them up (as in redrawing the shading, etc.) and try the photographs again.
Thanks for the idea!

I wouldn't touch the originals. Try to get the best reproduction possible (sometimes a simple scan on a multi-purpose printer works well) and do any touch ups digitally.

 

[blurhead]

This peeked my interest, especially as the first one really reminded me of the kind of drawing I would do !
(probably shows how much I am stuck in that timeline).....

I tried some things in Pixelmator (similar to photoshop) to try and bring out the details, but alas they are very "small" in quality (as in lack of pixels) and also quite blurry.
They seem almost "ghost" like.

Could you maybe re-scan the actual drawings at a higher DPI ?

I am wondering if these are scans are from way back then when there wasn't the quality scanners around ?

 

[DomRick]

These are all great, thanks for sharing. My favorite was the last one with her swinging her hair back. Boris Vallejo is a great artist to emulate. Best wishes.

 

[RejectReality]

Try "Reduce Haze" in Photoshop if the version you have includes it, and see if you like the results. Then maybe "Reduce Noise".

Probably best to do a selection on just the subject for those two operations, so you don't get a lot of artifacts on the background paper.

Then fiddle with the brightness and contrast.