Using a texture to paint

The purpose of this task was to paint using a texture. The example we were give was that of Feng Zhu again as he painted a smoking bug. He used ants as a texture to help paint.

I decided to draw and paint on my own drawing this time, and I'm relatively happy with the outcome.

 

 

The form also holds pretty well without Linework:

 

However I still prefered the image without colour:

 

 

And again, without linework it still works:

Using a Colour Swatch

This exercise was to try and create a painting using a specific colour swatch obtained from a source image.

This was the source image:

  

I then used this process (as explained by Max Leah):

http://cgamax.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/my-favourite-chocolate-bar-is-mars.html?spref=fb

To create a colour swatch for which I then painted this with:

Using this as a reference:

To help with my painting I altered my Photoshop Workspace slightly. It concentrates on the colour swatches, my reference image, and the layers.

50 minute Speed Paint

Another speed paint, painting night time light this time.

Without a blur on the background:

With a blur on the background:



1 Hour Speed Paint

A quick 1 hour speed paint to practice getting values down.

Steam punk Frog

This week's brief was for character design. We had to either create with Sculptris a 3D model, or draw a character.

Sculptris is going to require a lot more practice, so I decided to complete this one 2D.

I am not happy with this piece. I had the full motorbike in there to begin with. But I couldn't achieve the detail I wanted, nor the perspective on the wheels. Because it ruined everything else I decided to crop it this time.

I feel I've captured movement with the scarf and hat direction, though my frog seems lifeless. I couldn't achieve a decent texture on the skin without making it look too busy, and nothing I tried boosted the specular values without messing up the lighting completely.

Things I did like were my attention to detail on the leather goggles, and the shape of the frogs head.

Colour Exercise

This exercise was about using a base colour, and base shadow as a starting point. By using two seperate layers, both set to Multiply, and then paint highlights and details on yet another seperate layer on the ver top, colour in this style can be made very quick.

Original Linework by Niklas Jansson:

 

This is my final coloured image:

 

 

This is the desaturated image to help me get my tonal values more correct:

 

 

This is a little test I did to work out which way I had to move the colour picker to get a darker tone without saturating the colour.

Working with value and colour

So this post is of last weeks lesson, we learnt a bit more about getting value right and to help us we watched a video made by Feng Zhu.

We were then given the line drawing Feng was using in the video to colour ourselves.

Using a layer filled black on top of all the other layers, set to the layer mode 'Saturation', we can check the values of our paintings to make sure things aren't too bright or too dark.

I didn't go too far into the detail of this drawing, I could have brought out a lot more by concentrating on the main points, adding specular lighting, and sharper edges. Maybe even some horns or spikes would have looked cool. But to be honest I didn't particularly like the drawing.



This is where I left it:

And this is with the Value Check layer on. As you can see the armour looks darker than the skin, this is because the 'Local Value' of the armour is, and will be darker than the skin. As Feng Zhu describes, a black object compared to a white object(ie. a laptop) is always going to be darker.

As you can see, although in the colour image the armour on his left arm looks like it's brighter, but the light values are the same the top of his head as it reflects the same amount.

Light Values and adding Colour

So it's been a while since I've added something to my blog. I'm currently working on a few really cool things including a South Park animation, a FPS Game!, and a little bit of programming. So keep checking back and these will hopefully soon be here.

Any way. I've just finished this and I can't wait to share it with everyone as I'm pretty happy with the results.

Today we were given this line drawing produced originally by Jordu Schell:

We were then asked to shade it, and colour it. It was important that we got tonal value correct before shading, other wise it would have looked a mess when we coloured it. This was a very fun exercise and I can't wait to do another. Here is my final outcome:

Light Studies

The topic of the day (keeping perspective in mind), was Light. It was about how light bounces off different shapes etc. Provided with the reference image I've added to the bottom of this post, we had to draw the monster, concentrating on the shading we did, whilst picking out the light.

Silhouettes

Today's lesson was about learning the technique of drawing Silhouettes.

Not much to be said about this other than we were inspired by Feng Zhu, and that I found it very disappointing when I didn't produce work similar to his!