This will the most image-heavy post in a long time, since it contains a lot of really rough sketches from my different sketchbooks. It's gesture-drawing, learning about environments, some character and creature design, portrait-practice, figure-drawings from a figure-drawing class I like to attend and a water-color-painting from street-festival in Berlin. Enjoy :) The above figure drawing deserves its own space, since I was not 100% responsible for the outcome. A very experienced and humble dude at the class showed me some of my mistakes, after I asked him for advice. He was super-nice and really helped me out a great deal in understanding how light works on the human form and get better results with my lines. In the result he erased some parts and drew over them, which was super-helpful. Thanks again for this if you read this, I forgot to ask for your name, that happens to me all the time :( The above painting was done in the Dunckerstraße Berlin. I tried to remember the stuff I learned this week and apply it. It was a lot of fun :)
Check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ7WHuvdsjI and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-2MnmBQAic both are jewels!
7 Comments
Hey guys, I did another still-life yesterday and wanted to share the process I used yesterday. 1) establish the rough composition 2) Lay down the base color of the objekt. Not the color of the shadow-side or the color in the highlight but something in between. 3) create another layer above your object (i.e. the lemon) and set it to be a "clipping mask". That way you can't paint outside of the pixels of the layer beneath. Now brush in the shadow-shape. The color is not important, you can change that with ctrl+u (or cmd+u for mac) which opens the "Hue and Saturation"-adjustment-menu. 4) now ad another clipping-mask and add reflected light where-ever you see it. Reflected light is where 2 or more objects are so close to each other, that light bounces of one object onto another one. Often these bounced lights have taken on the color of the object they first touched, because it absorbed all the other colors of the light. That way bounced light is often more saturated than direct light. 5) What has changed? Only something small: occlusion shadows. The places where 2 or more objects touch or are really close together, the light has a hard time getting in and out of. At those spots "occlusion shadows" occur and they are often the darkest part in the picture. Brush them in with a soft brush and erase out what you don't need. 6) Ok, this may seem like a big step, but the foundation is laid and all I do now, is to look more or less carefully and paint in what I see. I used mostly the soft and hard round brush that comes with PS and 1 or 2 custom brushes by the great and powerful Shaddy Safadi. http://www.shaddyconceptart.com/download 7) Add silly stuff. I hope you have fun trying this process ;)
and I brought home some water-color paintings. I feel like I am still a beginner with these and sometimes struggle to find the right color and value. But it was fun nonetheless and I hope I learned something hehe. Some of them aren't finished but to me they work because I just wanted to get some more experience and experiment. I use a Pentel Waterbrush and Windsor & Newton Watercolors in a Bösner water-color-sketchbook. Hveragerði Hveragerði was our first stop. From there we did the Golden Circle tour, saw Geysir (which is in fact a name, not a thing but all other geysirs are named after him) and Strokkur (which is a geysir, that erupts almost every 5 minutes!), the big Gullfoss (a waterfall) and some other beautiful Icelandic scenery. Skaftafell The next big stop was Skaftafell at the Vatnajökull national-park. I had some issues to find the right colors and keep the shapes together. Although it is not the most colorful I kinda like the one in middle. Austurland The weather wasn't too great here so we didn't stay very long in the Eastfjords. But it was enough for one painting. The Fjords kicked my butt, I just couldn't make it work the way I wanted. But the big stone in the foreground, a bit left from the middle, I quite like. It has some nice bounced light and the values seem more or less correct. Not that it looked like that in reality, though ;( Vestfirðir The Westfjords were beautiful and we hat great weather. We actually could get out in short pants and t-shirts. Látrabjarg This wasn't painted on site, but after doing some studies and then taking time while staying in Reykjavik. It was fun do work on these and the result is showing the effort. Probably my favorite of the bunch. But still, I am not saying that I am good at water-coloring ;) the local beer tasted okay. I tried to paint my red pencil and pocket water-color-set in the can. on the plane back just some random woman sleep on the plane.
It was really frustrating doing some of these, others were more fun. All in all I liked the experience and I will keep doing them. At least on the next trip ;) Hey guys,
at work we started a character design challange, in the line of "the skillful huntsman". If you don't know about it, here is a link to explain it a bit more. http://designstudiopress.com/product/the-skillful-huntsman/ In a nutshell it means, that you take whatever fairy-tale you like and redesign it into another setting. I chose the tale of the fisherman and his wife, because it had the perfect constallation of design-problems to solve: a protagonist (fisherman), the antagonist (his wife), the creature (the fish), environments (his fishing-place, their hut and whatever it evolves into), props (his fishing-rod). On the moodboard I collected reference images for fishermen, old happy guys, space-suits and a butt-kicker when it comes to quality of the final illustration. I started with doing some thumbnails to get some interesting silhouettes. Check Feng Zhu's and Matt Kohr's to learn more about the process. Matt Kohr: http://www.ctrlpaint.com/videos/remix-your-thumbnails-chop-and-warp Feng Zhu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yKxY0KKrak Next step would be refining and then breaking up the big shape into smaller and smaller shapes for design. Buuuut that has to wait... as for today I will go on a 2 weeks holiday with my girl to Iceland. I will take my water-color-sketchbook with me, so hopefully I will have something cool to show when I come back. L |
This is my blog. I will share information about workflow, my insights into image-making or just general thoughts and rants about being an artist. Archives
February 2024
Categories |