Dice of Crowns - Playmat Painting (Large Images NSFMobile)
polycounter lvl 12
So seeing as the last time I put together a major piece of art for this project I was already too far along with most of it to implement any significant advice. I've got the time and the space to start early this time though. The idea for this is to give players a space to roll the dice on and areas on the mat to place dice and tokens as their turns come and go. I don't personally understand why a table isn't suitable, but I am assured that these things are beloved in the tabletop community, so I'm going to do my best to make this the finest piece I've turned out. People have paid money after all, gotta deliver.
I've got my base sketch done and I'm inking it now.
I'm not especially great at lighting, and this is a piece that's going to succeed or fall flat based on its sense of depth. if anyone has any advice to give, as always I'm listening and ready to implement.
I've got my base sketch done and I'm inking it now.
I'm not especially great at lighting, and this is a piece that's going to succeed or fall flat based on its sense of depth. if anyone has any advice to give, as always I'm listening and ready to implement.
Replies
There is a downside to doing it this way and that is, if you're trying to get something super saturated, you're probably not going to get it in 1 pass because if you don't match the local value to the saturated colors value, then that color doesn't possibly exist and because you are hard locking value, saturation takes a hit. The easiest way to fix this though is to just create a saturation layer set any color with 100% saturation (its only taking this value) and start painting in where you need more saturation with a low opacity brush.
The part about clipping mask is actually something that can be done a multiple different ways in photoshop, but I chose to use the clipping mask method out of ease of use. Basically when you're painting you want an easy way to have mask selections so when I paint in colors I basically just box them in with a hard round brush on their own layer. This allows me to box in with colors that have high contrast (in your case really gawdy blues or purples) to make sure I'm staying within the lines. I can then use adjust hue saturations (ctrl or cmd U) to change it to the color I need. Then when ever I want to paint anything varying colors on that piece I set the layer above to clipping mask and it will lock it to just the mask. There are a lot of other clipping mask tricks but those take a bit more time to explain. Another great thing about this is you can find the base mask really quickly for the object so say you wanted to pop the hands out in terms of saturation like I described above, you can ctrl or cmd click on the base layer and it'll always give you that mask selection so when you're painting above the luminosity layer you'll still be "in the lines."
I'm going to be spending the rest of the day watching videos on painting with light sources in mind and trying to drum up a color palette that's more complimentary than monochrome like the last effort.
I'm actually visiting glacier park so I didn't have too long to do this but I spent around an hour total with the process breakdown. I hope this help explains a bit about what I was mentioning before.
Six days
Wednesday's update Still filling sections in. I'm hoping to have everything filled in by Friday, giving me the weekend to tackle cleanup.
Five days.
Thursday's Update: Base colors are done and I'm ready to start messing with the saturations.
Four days.
Three days.
Thank you so much for the advice though TeriyakiStyle. I've thrown an orange layer over the top of the scene and it's way more unified now.
I understand the principals of what I'm doing: laydown color, paint in the hot spots, and add shadows for definition, then clean it up. Knowing it and applying it are proving difficult to sync up.
Sunday's update. Top set of candles and the straps on the gauntlet. Need to separate the hands from the table top, brighten them up? Something. Not a lot of brainpower right now.
I actually missed the color theory class in college and looking back there are few thing I regret more. I never even knew what a histogram was before today. If anyone had asked I'd have made a joke about a time travelling photocopier.
What else should I know going forward? Like, how are quick masks done? I know they're used to constrain a form but how do you choose what to constrain? I've got an ocean of potential materials in this image. Where do you start or stop with that. Also everything I work on up close feels great, but once I zoom back out it loses all meaning. How do you fight that?
So, that was kind of a long rant but I'll point out the 2 things which I'd watch out for next time. First is the use of equal portion of high contrast colors. Purple and yellow fall on opposite sides of the color wheel, are as far apart as can be when looking at the value of a color and when blended produce a very unsavory greyish tone. Generally speaking, the reason why everyone uses blue and orange for light(golden hour colors) in nearly every piece you'll look at is 1: its natural to our eyes because it occurs a lot in our atmosphere, 2: when blended its a saturated warm brown grey and 3: the values of the colors are close enough that it doesn't mess with local value separation of objects. If you look at Teriyaki's piece he is using predominantly orange (because its a warm environment) and the metal reflections from atmospheric bounce light are blue. Also, notice his ratios, very very orange heavy while just a touch of contrast blue. When its closer to 50/50 like in your piece the colors fight a lot, and I can tell that you decided to just mute all your saturation to minimalize the conflict of colors, but it still feels off. I found a piece on artstation really fast that shows a bit more harmonious piece with yellows and purples to give an idea of ratios that might work. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1RvQZ
Second, and this is more of a meta process than execution advice, but always have a reference of color and value before you dive in. Nearly every pro I've seen do live demos will end up color sampling from an unrelated blurred image that just has the raw pallete they need. Feng Zhu will often times just dump images into a scene, motion blur them and erase parts out, copy interesting parts and mess with blend layers till he gets a dirty canvas of colors before he starts. When I was watching James Paick paint in class he would often times do something fairly monochromatic, and then use overlays of pictures or the pattern tool to pump in spots of color.
When the great master's of old used actual paints they would repaint the image several, sometimes dozens, of times to expirement, but not having the leisurely time they had to produce work means you often have to resort to a shortcut. This week in fact I was out taking stock photos of the northwest and nearly half my photos were only taken for color pallets.
I hope that you stick with this piece, even after your deadline man. Getting this exactly to where you want it and finding a process that works for you will level you up like crazy.
A great deal of the scene's colors are already on seperate layers. I might be able to seperate that out into masks. I already have a big one for the arms and their personal junk, separated from the table and cloth. I think I understand now how dropping in garbage colors just to build those masks early on could have saved me a lot of grief. Honestly when I do turn this in I don't want to see it again for a long while, but maybe I can get around that by taking it back to just the line work and redoing the color from there instead of trying to keep pushing the garbage I have uphill any further.
I'm not going to be able to spare the time to review all
these links in full tonight, but over the next few weeks maybe. I've got another project or two lines up after this one. It would be good to roll into them will all the things I've learned from this one arming me.
I finished the piece at about 4am so I am incredibly burnt and am in dire need of sleep, but all I can think about right now is what am I going to paint next. So don't worry there's going to be something else and soon. I'm bandying a few ideas, but it needs to be relatively simply and primarily concentrating on rendering forms. Unless you have a tutorial or something that would serve me better at my current skill level?