LateNightHacking Louis Journal

Auth

I drew these sketches to try to illustrate what I was talking about.
(enlarge)

(If I sound pedantic, please don't take offense. I admit, I enjoy the technical details. Since we're not having a very interactive conversation, I have no way of knowing if something is already obvious or needs further explaining. That poor dead horse is likely to be flogged.)

(1) shows my first attempt - motion lines starting from where the elbow now is, and everything all over overlapping in a yucky way. The round lines around the pick work, kinda. The pick looks like it's spinning vertically, and with a side-arm throw, it probably should be spinning horizontally.

I did (2) next. I tried a slightly different arrangement, and things didn't overlap as much. This shows what I was calling a hammer throw - no spin. I tried for extreme perspective - you can see how foreshortening applies the the action lines just as much as to the solid objects. I also put in a line showing the path of Digger's hand. It kinda helps show why the action lines for the pick appear to start at her shoulder - that's where her hand would have been when the pick was released, and both have since moved on.

Next I did (3). I moved the action lines down so they don't overlap the arm, which helps. I also tried to fix the perspective on the pick, trying to make it look like it's spinning horizontally. I put the pointy end of the pick coming towards the viewer to see if I could make it look more agressive. I tried to add some round lines to make it clear which direction the pick was spinning. I realized I could make it look like the pick was spinning as it traveled by echoing the spin lines along the path. It looks promising, though the perspective needs work.

I found was that it was hard to incorporate extreme perspective and a horizontal path of travel at the same time. It would take an extreme fish-eye perspective to do that, and I'm not good enought to pull that off. That is, in order to get the pick significantly closer to the viewer than Digger is and yet have the pick move only left to right in front of the viewer, the field of view covered by the panel would have to be very wide (maybe even approaching 180 degrees). Squashing that down into a panel that usually covers maybe a 45 degree field of view produces a lot of distortion which is hard to draw correctly.

I did a couple more sketches trying to fix the extreme perspective of the spinning pick, and my best was (4). You could drop that in to (2) if you wanted a spinning pick instead of a straight pick. All I really did was try to fix the foreshortening, which mostly involved figuring out how to draw the pick and drawing narrow enough ellipses that touched and diverged in the right places.