Sunday, April 14, 2013

More progress

Finished another piece and wanted to share the progress on this one as well.
Ok, so this time instead of starting with value thumbnails I thought I'd sketch it instead. Started on paper and cleaned up in Photoshop. 
Moved into rough values underneath the linework
 Kept refining the values and slowly trying to get rid of lines
 Eventually made some compostional changes and continued to remove linework
 Started blocking in rough color using overlay layers and color layers. Started by putting an orangy color over the whole thing first.
 Starting to get more specific with the colors, trying to pay attention to color temperature. This step can be the hardest when working from black and white into color. It's easy to let the dark areas become to desaturated.
 Still tweaking
 Still tweaking and trying to get the color temperatures better. Also now trying to be more specific about textures.
Kept playing with the composition and eliminating some things, adding others 
 Now I'm looking for more bits of interest to add to the composition and try to give places for the eye to rest. Overlay layers help give subtle gradients to the lighting.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

New Environment and Process


So this is the first time I've ever actually posted anything about my process on painting. I spent a good amount of time just analyzing my thoughts on this one as I went so I thought I would record some of it and share how this piece came about. 

 I started from a story board page from a project that I am currently working on. It's a pretty basic goal, Interesting shaped house on a interesting hill, surrounded by a dense structure of surrounding buildings like you might find in the favelas of Brazil. I have a certain fascination with the visual density of those places.
I first scraped the sketch and went in to try and re-evaluated the silhouette of the hill and maybe make something more dynamic. This was clearly a bit too much and not specific enough.

After trying a couple I wound up with a design that centered on the idea of a precariously perched hut on a hill. The shape ended up being more twisted rather then slopped. 
From there I played with value, just trying to get a very simple sketch going. I realized I was straying away from the original idea of this being some sort of large compound so I tried to make the sillhouette of the building not look like a small hut but rater a large structure. 

After more value painting I started to get more specific and eventually moved into color. I seatled on the idea that the surrounding buildings squareness would contrast the organic shapes of the hill. The piece still had some very bad perspective issues at this point. 

I cleaned up the areas around the hill a bit and tried to alleviate some of the issues with the foreground. 

After stepping away from it a bit I realized that my focal point was too dead center and the shape of the hill could be pushed more dynamically. So I tried to solve both problems by pushing the shape of the hill to the left and moving the focal point into a third. I also tried to be more specific with how I handled the rocks at this point, and tried to push the direction of the light more according to which way the rock faces were pointed towards. 

At this point I was starting to become satisfied with it (which was a big mistake) when I realized the area in the lower left could better use perspective to give more depth. When limited on time a great solution for this sort of thing is to mock up a model in Maya  to get some basic perspective going and then paint on top. Obviously, artists should have a good sense of perspective and be able to do this without the use of 3D software, however this method is a very good way to do the same thing quicker. 
  
The next part was simply screencaping the maya scene and inserting the buildings into the painting. Added a color overlay to get a basis for the colors. 

From there I started painting in the light source. Trying to pay attention to the direction of the sun and the fill light from the sky. 
I realized that my main building was now severely lacking in perspective and interest so I did the same process of modeling and painting on top for my focal point. 

After painting in the lighting I refined a bit more, tried to add atmosphere back into it and eventually add a bit of lens blur to the foreground to emulate depth of field a bit. 


Hope this gives some insight. I had a lot of fun simply thinking through this and taking notes. It was a good reminder to always question and think through the painting. Not to say that this piece is entirely finished. I'd like to go in and add a bit more life to it here and there but for now I'm going to move on to the next part.