Being
relatively new to using digital tablets and more at home with traditional
medial I have noticed lots of my skills are lost or don’t translate so well
digitally. One of my strengths is having
quick expressive lines, which let’s be honest is way too loose to create the
quality images needed.
I quite liked this 5 minute sketch I did at the pose workshop arranged by Shay (sketch starring Kit). The loose lines aren’t appropriate for concept art. Think I’m possibly influenced by Quentin Blake; I need to think how I can apply that in a concept manner. I drew this in class the other day which got me thinking
When I draw naturally I scribble in and imply detail, it’s
quite easy to blag bits and with appropriate reference could be more
authentic. I also watched a DVD tutorial I got with Imagine FX magazine (can't locate it now to say name or link to online vid if there is one), it was interesting to see his line of thought and work
process. Some interesting points were
that to look cool sometimes you have to push the reality a bit, even if a part
of a vehicle for example isn't needed it doesn’t matter soo much. I have wings on my thing (reminds me of the Thundertank…
Maybe it helps create lift for faster ground speed? It sure as hell can’t fly… And what are the
paws about?
See, it doesn’t really
matter until it has to be implemented in the universe (which I make up for this
vehicle project). He also stated that he
would draw semi-detailed images just to get a feel for the subject matter and
try out ideas early on in his design process (day 1). Also he mentioned perspective, he makes a
few guide lines after drawing the initial shapes – I found this a lot more useful,
also perspective comes second to coolness (getting pleasant balance can be
hard). On my pic the placement and
perspective is odd, but it displays what I wanted to show ok and has given a
little organic twist to the design in its asymmetry.
Anyhow I’ve been doing a little more “penning”
digitally. I have already scanned
traditional media marks in photoshop and made some of my own “traditional
brushes”. I have since making them
learned quite a bit to help make them more loyal to their traditional
counterparts. Much mark making in Photoshop
is done through clever textured brushes, along with using the lasso to make a
sharp selection edge, filtering and blending back (among many other ways). I’m currently looking into making manual
marks quicker. This somehow all combines
as you learn, and making brushes for your vision becomes more fluid and
appropriate.
e is an example of bad brush use, here I spent about 1 minute making a simple leaf and scattered it randomly. In my eyes it looks naff, but luckily lead towards the death of the diabolical image.
Here is some better use of custom brushes. Spending a little time experimenting and analysing other brushes is possibly essential to getting decent at digi-painting. Here I just used random foliage photos I took as a textured background. Using silhouettes from nature also seems to work well.
Above are a couple of examples – The square brush emulates
chalk in a way, using the negative of branches against the sky, using big
brushes and photos allows for more virtual detail and can hide a possible seam
if the texture repeats. You can also
zoom in the texture loads to make it less noisy and soften the texture somewhat. Here I’ve used a close-up of a tombstone and
some ivy.
One trick good digital artists pull off is hiding the photo
elements and making you believe it is all one… Is it cheating? Don’t think there are any rules.
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