originality, paintovers et al.
polycounter lvl 11
A friend of mine who enjoys digital painting recently produced incredible works of almost photoreal quality. He really does draw well, so although I was surprised at his leap in skill, I didn't suspect anything. Not until someone else let me know in secret that he'd been painting over stuff. And that stinks of cheating/stealing to me.
Years ago, I used to think that using reference was cheating. Obviously, it's common practice, and even something that should be encouraged, a vital part of workflow, and today I'm constantly Googling reference.
It seems that if you made a Frankenstein of photographs or models, and then painted or modelled new strokes or topology around them, it'd be difficult - if not impossible - to catch.
What do you think of paintovers? Or building models around existing models? Is it okay, as long as you're not lying about it? Or is it outright fail? Is this some industry best practice that I've never heard of?
Years ago, I used to think that using reference was cheating. Obviously, it's common practice, and even something that should be encouraged, a vital part of workflow, and today I'm constantly Googling reference.
It seems that if you made a Frankenstein of photographs or models, and then painted or modelled new strokes or topology around them, it'd be difficult - if not impossible - to catch.
What do you think of paintovers? Or building models around existing models? Is it okay, as long as you're not lying about it? Or is it outright fail? Is this some industry best practice that I've never heard of?
Replies
Some concept artists make a basic scene in 3D, then do an extensive paintover, and that's totally cool. 3D is a great tool for quickly working out perspective. There's also nothing wrong with painting over a fully-developed 3D piece, as long as it's yours, or it's owned by the client and needs re-working.
Some artists do paintovers on photos, combining them into a larger painted piece. This is generally not a good idea. It can cause legal problems for the artist and their client, unless photo copyrights are secured beforehand. And the results generally look bad because the styles don't jive with each other, unless it's completely painted over.
In general, using reference is good, but tracing is not.
I've met a few very highly regarded professional concept artists in person and seen how they work, you'd be surprised by how they get from new file to finished digital painting.
The only time problems arise is when someone takes work made by someone else (usually without permission) and claims it as their own.
Unfortunately, I've had the displeasure of seeing people sneak into the industry by ripping models/textures from well known games and frankensteining things together to call their own work. With this method they usually ended up with derivative garbage during production. When called upon to make original artwork that couldn't be frankensteined, said people were hard pressed to make anything worth using. Suffice to say these types of people don't last too long in the industry before they are found out.
Imo, for illustration in your portfolio it isnt so much a good idea, but in production it is perfectly fine. Simply as speed is super important.
But when your practicing its still best to do stuff from scratch.
I'm "half-half" on this. I don't have a problem when Massive Black or Steambot Studio concept guys use 3d as a paintover base. But it annoys me when I see someone who I suspect uses Daz 3d/Poser as a base and successfuly land 2d mag commission, Ballistic/cgtalk promotion, etc. (my suspicion is based on the fact that the femme illos are polished but the male char ones by the same artist have shoddy anatomy, lighting, weaker design and rendering).
Using Daz/Poser is still legit even if the user doesnt admit to it. I just find it personally annoying. If they modeled their own base fine, right? It's ironic because I acknowledge that art assets in a production pipeline usually have more than one artist involved in the creation. Not sure why using Poser as a tool by others doesn't jive with me.
and with modelling over anothers one model, you will not get any work with that either.
however if you want to make a "youtube speedpainting video" with 1 million views, yes, you can do that. Infact, the average person doesnt seem to care wether its a photo copy or not.
What matters the most? up to the person to decide
I've seen 3D paintovers done before, but they've generally been paintovers of primitive geometry with some posed stock biped rigs for perspective and proportion, things they clearly made themselves. I think that's a great timesaver.
It's more that my friend seemed to have Googled a lowish-res image, screen-grabbed/copied it, scaled it up, blurred it a bit to hide the artifacting, and then used that image as the pose for his final painting and painted over that. It was still a lot of work, and in the end, the "original" wasn't there any more except that the values and pose were virtually identical - in effect, what Eric said: "tracing".
Sounds dubious to me, but it certainly saves time.
http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/product/59/The-Techniques-of-Dylan-Cole-3
The end result is a bit photochoppy in areas, but it really shows how you can combine painting and photos in unique ways.
If you need to block out a scene, a machine or whatever, mostly hard surface I can speak of as I haven't done too much character work yet. I say go for it, thats my opinion, also I agree with snowfly....not because you put together some photos, some 3D blocking and you try to paint over means that everything is gonna hold together harmonically, in fact I think it takes lots of skill to accomplish this in an outstanding manner. and match lights, color palette, shadows, textures and so on... in a way that you won't notice any obvious flaw and see the end composition itself holding together nicely.
Now I am not saying you don't need to know how to do everything by hand, I encourage you to do so, and to draw a lot... that way you ll have a better understanding of the principles and if you choose to use any of the above mentioned techniques, you'll become faster at choosing your approach to a specific piece and gain some time by doing it.
I am also big fan of dylan's work slum, awesome stuff, take a look at Andree Wallin folio, dude is insane like his style a lot, he does paint a lot and also uses some of the other techniques said before.
Where I work (ArenaNet) some, not all, of our concept artists use photos to block out their scenes or to come up with interesting ideas before painting over it all. It is sometimes obvious, and sometimes so different from the source material that you'd hardly recognize it. Whatever gets the message across clearly and quickly is game.
Usually it's not a problem if the artist is honest about what they're doing, but it can be a real fine line sometimes. I can see how some people might see it as "cheating," but artists have been using techniques to help their work for centuries going back to the days of using mirrors and things like that.
However, I have seen many examples of people who insist they used no photos when they obviously did, and others who basically steal other peoples ideas and compositions without much effort to make it their own expression... this is very bad! For better or worse, the digital age has given everyone the ability to (re)produce imagery, and there may be a time when our thinking of what is correct or not will be completely different from what it is today or what it was 500 years ago.
Is another concept artist who use photo ref in his digital paintings.
Having watched his videos though, he gets basic form, composition, and concept through pencil sketches, and then uses photo's for colour palette, as well as cutting up photo's for details and painting over them.
Whether or not you can really call it "cheating" really depends on the artist in my opinion.. If you watch some of Dylan Cole's other dvds where he actually paints entire scenes from scratch you can see he has the ability to do convincing matte paintings from imagination.
I think when you have the ability to get an at least similar quality result working from scratch as with hacking together photos and doing paintovers, it becomes much harder to argue that you're misrepresenting your abilities as an artist.
Edit: Also I don't include tracing in this, cause you aren't saving shit for time with that unless you have zero figure drawing skills.
I think we can all agree that outright plagiarism is a no-no, and paintovers can sometimes cross into that, depending on the intent, as discussed already.
Legally you only have to change enough of the image to make it significantly different than the original, so that is not really an issue.
Even if you were to assume that your copyright infringement is "small enough" to be legally defensible, that's a matter for a court to decide. No studio is going to let you open them up to legal action under the pretense that they *might* be able to win a case if they have to fight one.
For a portfolio, not so much.
I remember seeing someone's portfolio a while back, and they had a couple digital paintings of spot on portraits of celebrities. I was like holy shit, this guy is awesome. The I clicked on the image, and it showed the exact photograph that he had painted over, down to the smallest detail. I felt misled, and pretty much felt that a couple photoshop filters blended together could have gotten a similar result. I'm sure it is valuable for learning to paint color, but I'd never want to see something like that in a portfolio.
Same with perspective stuff, I'll use basic primitives in Maya, print screen or render them out into PS and use those as a base.
I see nothing wrong with doing things in this manner. It's my own creations, it saves me a lot of time and it helps me learn faster.
Taking someone elses work and tracing/using it for your own is a bit dubious though. I think everyone has their own working habits, you just have to find methods that work better for you.
Ah, my mistake. After doing some research, I guess there are a few different factors you have to consider for fair use, and how much you change the image is only one of them.
If you're tracing/painting over a photograph and then explicitly calling it a "painting"...is it wrong? Oh I don't really know. I think it makes you a bit of an asshole, though.
I can see the benefit in whipping up a quick model to use as reference for a pose, or using sketch up or something to get your perspectives for an environment, sure. Legit stuff, you did it. Not hardly putting more than lines down.
But painting right over a photo? Paintings are built up, every brushstroke, every pixel of color however it got there is part of the image. Painting over a photo gives you a A LOT of stuff on the canvas that you didn't put there. Sure it's still art...but I do think it makes you an asshole depending on what you're claiming thereafter.