Hi guys KerIn Gedge here and welcome to my artistic journey and today i'll be
taking you through probably the first hour of my current project which is the Butterfly Commando
um i can't really tell you well actually Butterfly Commando actually was a piece of music i wrote
years ago and i put it together using logic pro or probably Garage Band it was that long ago
and uh yeah i listened to it every now and then and it kind of conjured up images of butterflies
fighting in a horrific war and here we go um i've found a skull now this picture that you can see uh
on the screen it's actually a picture that i found on unsplash.com which is a
free stock photo website um i can't tell you who the author of this picture is but i will
include it in the link below so that they will get some credit for it so uh yeah i was talking about
butterflies wasn't i uh so what does skulls have to do with butterflies i think you'll find out
as we go now i have sped up this uh film a little bit which is why it's caught me a little bit off
guard i wasn't really expecting it to be this quick but never mind um okay so i'm just gonna
position it on on the page while actually i've already positioned it on the page i'm talking
um almost two weeks now after i did this particular part of the drawing but uh what am
i doing okay i'm gonna try and talk about what i'm doing because i want you to understand my process
by now most of you who are familiar with my art will obviously have figured out that i
am not what i would call an artist i'm more of a tracer i'm a person who gets uh
pictures typically photographs and i trace around them which is exactly what i'm going
to do with these skulls uh shortly um but first of all i'm going to blow them up
now you would have seen that i used the modified tool and i just got out the particular skulls that
i wanted i'm using adobe animate by the way but i'm pretty sure you could do this on photoshop
now instead of using the eraser tool to erase the edges out i like to just draw around my objects
as you can see i'm not doing a very good job of drawing straight not that this is exactly a
straight line it's more of an oval or a circle but never mind i'm going to draw around these skulls
for a bit and then i should with any luck be able to click on this little black arrow tool thing and
cut off the top part there now there's a couple things i don't like about this already as you
can see i don't you know i'm going to change the size of that skull there and ah this guy's missing
half his face so what am i going to do about that i know i'm going to select him copy and this is
really cool this part turn it around and now i'm going to join this half with the original half
and now i have a really creepy looking skull and if this actually belonged to a real human
being this particular skull they would be pretty freaky and especially if i do that but never mind
okay now hopefully my audience in the future like the people who look at the final product won't be
so keen-eyed that they'll notice that this is the skull of a incredibly deformed human being
all they will see is the main event which is going to be happening in the center of this picture
here we go yes i'm going to get rid of this red line and now i have the carefully selected
group of human skulls but hang on the sky over here has a bit of straightness to his skull i
don't like that i'm going to fix it how am i going to fix it i'm going to draw around it like this
and completely mess it up no i'm going to start again hold on i'm going to draw from here this
time i'm going to start from the top and i'm going to pretend that this guy has a slightly narrower
face and i'm going to cut off half his face just like that and no one is going to notice
so now i have four dead human beings well at least the heads of them i'll just move them
into the middle of the page here and uh that's pretty good if i don't say my so myself i'm not
sure about that guy who's second from the left it looks like half his face got taken out with
an axe oh who's this lovely person this is me well actually i probably shouldn't have told you
shut off the bat this is me i'm in a part of the south island there in new zealand standing on a
large limestone rock at a place called castle hill i'm sticking my chest out and sticking well
sucking my stomach in and i'm looking meaningfully in the distance and it's gone now bring it back
come on i think at this part in the drawing i know here we go i put it back now now ah look
now imagine that this man this sexy piece of me is standing on top of that skeleton
let's just uh fiddle with it a bit now obviously we don't want all this background stuff
now when i first started out on this i had this idea in my head that this particular picture had
way more definition than it did and i for the life of me i could only find this particular photo on
my brother's facebook in fact i think it might have been a picture that he took with his camera
it became my profile picture and therefore the picture is
very small and as you can see it's incredibly granulated and there is hardly any definition
and i searched and i searched and i searched and i could not find the original large version of
this photo so we're just going to have to make do with what i've got and again i'm not going to use
the eraser tool whenever i use the eraser tool i find that i don't very rarely do a good job
so i'm just going to draw around and cut out the background until we are left with an incredibly
what's the word i'm looking for handsome specimen of
human manliness standing on what will be the remains of my fallen victims
but uh let's come back to that later so while we're watching this incredibly boring part of me
butchering my surroundings uh just talk a little bit about my background with art
i'm not really much of an artist i always wanted to be unfortunately
whenever i put a pen to paper i can just do little squiggles and cartoons
but i've never really been able to draw anything particularly realistic and it wasn't
really until i started using adobe animate to make my harmonica tutorials
that i started developing new techniques or rather discovering techniques i'm not going to pretend
that i invented the technique that you're watching uh but i certainly came to it by myself i didn't
learn this by watching other artists i just figured out over time that
you can actually trace over things pictures of things by using layers so you create one layer and
if you look at the top of the screen you'll see that the picture the sorry the picture is in layer
3. so if you were to put the picture there and then use the layer on top of that to trace over it
you can then zoom in and trace over it again and then you zoom in and trace over it again until you
end up with what i guess would be a very intricate stencil of the thing that you've drawn and then
you zoom in even further and begin to fill in the colors that you would see within that stencil
and that's how if you've been watching my channel for a while now you'll see that in the early
videos all of my pictures my fingers a lot of people have commented on my creepy drawn fingers
uh they are very what's the word uh creepy uh but as time went on my pictures actually oh sorry
just checking that the audio is still recording my pictures actually got quite realistic my harmonica
and my other instruments now i wouldn't say they look almost like like photographs but they are way
better than the original pictures in fact i have actually managed to use this method to draw some
incredibly realistic pictures uh but in the end what's the point if they look realistic
you might as well use a photo i wanted to have a kind of effect that said hey i drew this and
even though i traced it it's still a nice feeling at the end of the day and people still think
you're cool when they see it so anyway here i am i'm now floating in nothing i guess it's the
void oh hold on the magic arrow has carefully placed me on top of this munted human skull
which is rather exciting so basically you got the impression that this dude oh what's this well this
dude has just conquered these guys but whoa oh my goodness it is a giant butterfly now again
this is a picture that i got off unsplash which is uh the free photo stock photo site uh in fact
i actually upload photos there myself whenever i go on holiday i take a bunch of photos and
again i'm using the modify tool to um turn this picture into something that i can
why did i just cut that butterfly's butt off no no that's right it's the wings that i want that's
right i'm not really interested in the butterfly part i just want the wings now originally i went
to unsplash now this is the problem with unsplash you can't always find exactly what you're
looking for i guess a lot of the more serious photographers are going to sites where they can
charge people for the use of their stuff and biggers can't be choosers so i'm just going to
have to go with the wings that i find i wanted a monarch butterfly monarch butterflies are very
common here in new zealand but and i guess you know they mean a lot to me because i've
kept swan plants in the past and had many chrysalises hatch on my balcony but um not
with this drawing so i decided to in the end go for the wings that were at the very least
um angled the right way so that when you see what i'm about to do with them this will all make a lot
more sense i have no idea what i'm doing in this part of the video it is a bit silly um but there
we go i guess yeah again i don't use the erase tool because it just looks terrible when i do
that's funny when you zoom into a lot of these pictures you will see that
they lose a lot of their definition but it doesn't matter when you zoom back out
um i kind of lost my train of thought now now i haven't scripted this video i'm just talking as we
go so um it will get a bit awkward at times this is one of those awkward moments where i have no
idea what to say next because this particular part of the drawing process is quite boring i am still
just trying to cut these damn wings out and it is very late at night it's nearly midnight and
my children are in bed and my wife is asleep and i'm in the living room talking to myself
if this was live at least i would have the illusion of actual people that i could talk
to even if i don't know them but no i'm just going to pretend that this is like a live stream
even though there are no real people watching now this wing is actually quite funny because
i noticed it has this funny knobbly bit on the end which i'm going around now it's kind
of cool but i would love to know what the actual function is of that part of the butterfly's wing
and i think i will never find out because by the time i finish cutting this out and moving
on to the next part bye bye flowers i will have forgotten what i was talking about and
true to my word i can't remember what i was actually talking about at all
now it appears i have deleted the wings now why would i do that after spending such an inordinate
amount of time cutting them out oh that's right i'm going to paste them there and now
we are going to zoom back in and i'm going to carefully place these wings onto my human
back and or voila just like that i am not just a little man standing on the head of a dead person
i am a butterfly commando ready to conquer the world as i have already conquered these
skulls this part was incredibly boring so i sped it up so you didn't have to watch it
i think this part of the video actually like in real life seriously took something like
29 minutes just cutting out this stupid sword and i have to say it's not a stupid
sword i found this on unsplash again and as you can see it's very jagged
it's very scary looking and i would say that it does not actually represent a sword that was ever
used by any actual human being but probably from some creature and another dimension that came
here with the intention of making a human shish kebab but i don't think it was very successful
so it ended up being photographed by some person on unsplash again i don't know who that person was
because i forgot to get their name before i started talking to this microphone but if you
look in the description below i'm hoping that i would have been diligent enough to include
the link to their unsplash profile and just like that with a little bit of tv magic we have
finished cutting out the sword we're shrinking it down and i i think originally i wanted to give the
butterfly a gun but i couldn't find any real guns and i thought well a sword is kind of cooler so
now that sword is still way too big so we're going to bring it down a little bit more
now you notice i was talking about the definition of the photograph of me a little bit earlier
doesn't really matter when you zoom back out it actually looks okay it's only when you zoom in
that you start to notice now i don't really like the way i'm holding the sword i am actually right
handed and so it does make sense from my personal experience that i would be holding it in that hand
but there's something kind of like it almost looks like i'm trying to take a pee with the sword and
that's not exactly the effect i'm trying to go for so hopefully me from two weeks ago
is going to figure that out in a minute and move it what am i doing oh yeah that's
right i wanted to put this part of the sword behind my pants but it just still looks a bit
funny and i mean look at my hand you can't even see the definition of my fingers
uh the person i mean the people looking at this painting they're meant to believe
somehow that uh i'm actually holding that sword with my magic butterfly powers but
no i know i've got an idea why don't i move the sword and put it in the other hand
are you going to do that for me are you going to move it into the other hand come on past me do it
hurry because that just looks stupid no i've got a feeling that i'm going to take my time
anyway i can kind of sense that i'm coming to the end of this video and i have no idea what
i've been waffling on about but um i would like you if you've come this far to consider
watching the next video because in the next video i'm going to begin the tracing process
so this is just the setting up of the original material this is the part where i
basically put all the elements of the picture together
but my next goal is to create the stencil that i'm going to fill in with the color
so that it will end up looking more like a portrait of the butterfly commando
and eventually i will add a background and when i'm finished with all that i'm going to make
a time lapse so that i can turn the 30 odd hours that i've spent drawing this picture
into maybe 10 minutes of footage with some cool music i might even put the actual
butterfly commando music in the background now that's just the second stage the third stage
is going to be me actually attempting to paint this now i said before i am not a painter i'm not
a drawer but i've figured i've kind of reasoned that i can use the same same stain the same
stencil process that i've figured out digitally that i might be able to transfer the same stencil
that i'm going to create onto a canvas which i will then attempt to paint and that would
actually be quite a feat now i don't even know at this point if that's possible or if i'm going to
succeed but as you can see i'm holding the sword properly i'm standing on the vanquished skull of
some poor human victim and i'm going to save it because that's all i've got time for today
so tune in next time and hey don't forget you can join this group of mine on facebook if you
would like to meet other youtubers so thanks for watching and until next time stay tuned