I wonder what would happen if you were to stick in a linear actuator force feedback system into the pen. Like what valve is using inside of their new controllers. (they are like a rumble pack but capable of really subtle exotic vibrations).
I tried the controller at GDC and it would be rather interesting to see applied to drawing tablet technology.
Hey guys So i've been trying to tackle shading skin since all my past skin shading has fell rather flat.
And to add to the knowledge bank, sorry if this is basic knowledge,
Also please correct me if there is something wrong with this, I'm pretty sure i've goofed somewhere;
What I've learn't is that the darker areas are almost always more saturated than the lighter areas, and in the dark areas it is usually redder while the brighter areas it's more yellow.
Now here's me trying to understand why...
Skin has subsurface scattering, subsurface scattering means light enters the surface and gets "bounced" around before exiting at a different angle.
Light consists of many different wavelengths, e.g. red, green, blue, etc...So when light enters a surface the wavelengths are either absorbed or reflected. We see the wavelengths that are reflected.
Since skin is a "translucent" material and has subsurface scattering, the yellow is the initial wavelength that gets reflected it is near/at the light source (the lighter areas). Meanwhile the rest of the wavelengths are absorbed and bounced around. Exiting at a different angle, which means not near the light source.
Now the saturation bit i'm unsure about, maybe it's because the light is being bounced around. So we see more of the red wavelength?.....
Muzz: Thank you so much for the excellent advice. Sorry for the late reply, it means a lot to me and I will work hard on my fundamentals, admittedly they are a subject that i'm aware are very important, but hate working on. But for the sake of my art I am willing to push past my discomforts on working with them. Thank you very much for the feedback!
Daew: Hey man I'm the last person who should be trying to help out on color, but I can tell you what I remember from people who were smarter than me. You've got the general idea with the warm peach, but from there you can give your character cues to the environment as well as subtle hue shifts by using yellow/red/blue.
- Desaturated yellow is used on surfaces angles or pointed toward the sky, where the light from the sun makes the skin seem more opaque.
- Clay red marks points where the skin is flush or rich with blood. These will be mid points between your light source and shadow.
- Navy blue-gray, to varying levels of saturation are used for either your shadows, or purely as bounce lighting with some muddy browns taking their place as the shadows. This color represents the blue sky reflecting off the earth and back up onto your figure.
I can't give you any of the science behind it, or specific colors as I've never learned any color theory beyond BLUE+ORANGE: SUMMER ACTION FILM! WHat you have so far is a good start but I'd push your reds and their saturation further to punch your forms apart. Example being the girl's left forearm blending a bit with her bicep and shoulder. Rim lighting will also help with that.
Good luck and someone else who knows more please step in and help Daew out!
EDIT: Here's a link to a blog roll of a guy named Qiang-Huang who's knocking out incredibly rich paintings like they aint no thang. Check out how he's handling his lights and shadows, especially when one object is nearing another and bounce light gets involved.
Andrew, Glad it helped. Can't wait to see more progress!
While you guys both have the right ideas and are correct with your analysis of skin, i might chime in with a bit of info that will make it all make a bit more sense. In fact i don't think that painting is too far off the mark, really it is just missing some specular highlights from the oils in the skin and some texture and that's it. You can push it further but really it's the rendering that will take it the rest of the way.
If you want to know why saturation goes up in the shadows due to filtering, there is a first cause question that needs to be asked first. "what is saturation?".
I think there are a few definitions but the one that is most useful to me is that saturation is a miss-balance of RGB.
Our eyes essentially work in RGB, and while we are taught that colour has a range of wavelengths, our eyes can't tell the difference between wavelength yellow or if the eye is simply getting red and green photons hitting it at the same time. This is wonderful simply because it means that RGB is close enough to our eyes that learning how it works will solve most colour problems we will come across. It doesn't address things like Rods being more sensitive to blue/green in low light, but things like that are more edge cases than anything else.
So that means we can learn how RGB works with colour and it will be very close to the system our eyes use.
Hmm what are you having trouble understanding? I'll see if i can explain it better. I work with RGB everyday so I'm not sure what parts are hard to understand.
Edit:
Actually might as well link the source from why i use RGB sliders, though there is the added benefit of it actually being effective in working around colorblindness.
MIND BLOWN. Holy crap that break down was insightful. That's a whole lot to take in at this hour, with as little sleep as I've gotten, I'll be processing that for a good while to come, thanks Muzz!
Thanks Stinkhorse and Muzz, That was really informative!
And that linran link I'm pretty sure i've read it before but didn't understand it so just dismissed it haha. I'll read it more indepth this time! thanks Muzz!
Ok so here was a quick paint over from stinkhorse's feedback, I agree that the forearm was getting lost but I think that was because I tried to add a bounce light and it lit up her arm. So the value between her arm and her body lacked contrast, blending the two together. Also looking at it now there are a lot of value issues but I'm going to move on.
Yeah - I find that one way to avoid excessive painterly bounce lighting is to remember that light and photons are not powder. In other words, a white light is not adding a white coat on top colored objects, but merely just revealing their local color.
Ironically tho, this very same powdery effect seems to be very widely used when it comes to painting objects under a bright blue sky. It is quite popular, but I personally can't help myself and notice it every time I see something painted that way. Can't unsee the powder !
(Now of course atmospheric perspective is a different subject altogether. But it is still not powdery chalk either )
Pior: in regard to the blue-sky highlights, that is more of a grazing-angle reflection which is going to reflect the color of the sky, and not so much illuminate local colors. Even matte surfaces will do this sometimes.
I think I might be a chalk addict. I just love the look of it on a piece, thought that might be me mistaking a misunderstanding of how light works for a stylistic choice.
Are are three pieces from the individual I most associate with this style, Hyung Tae Kim. The shadows show extreme desaturation in some cases and just like Muzz pointed out the terminator between the areas facing the light source and the shadow all have intense saturation.
This stuff is pretty confusing to start with but it makes a lot more intuitive sense than the colour picker.
StinkHorse: Yeah man, i actually kinda like the look of it as well when it is used in a specific stylistic way. Hyung is someone who has gone down a very narrow rabbit hole of breaking stylistic problems and ended up with something aesthetically pleasing.
However there are actually two ways that you can end up with kind of that effect. With a rim light it could be so bright that it is overexposing, and thus pushing it to white.
The other effect at play here is specular reflections which one everything but *metals reflect the light exactly as it receives it. Often when a light is at a rim light angle it will sit on top of the lit areas desaturated that part of the image. And not to mention that every material has Fresnel which means that planes facing away from the observer will have a higher specular.
Makkon actually said this in a post just before.
This photo is both overexposed and has a crazy amount of specular reflections happening at the same time, so it's a good example.
I think this is all correct anyway... most of this information comes from my own studies.
this thread is fantastic, and I must say, holy wow for linking that Linran post, I feel enlightened and far less afraid of the RGB sliders now.. tons of really awesome advice going on in here, keep it up fellas!
Alright, on to round #4 ! Since painterly rendering is being discussed here (I still have to through all these crazy diagrams you guys linked ... heavy stuff !), I thought I'd do a very simple color pass on the earlier sketch, just to bring across the point that not *everything* needs to be rendered and modeled. Less is more ! This was also a chance to reinstall Manga Studio for inking.
However, I am realizing that I am still facing a feedback problem. (In passing I need to thank everyone who helped pinpointing this in the posts above - this stuff has been nagging me for a while and only now am I able to consistently recognize the cause and symptoms of this odd feeling of discomfort.)
The problem is scale. It is becoming obvious to me that there is something inherently wrong with how zoomed in one needs to be in order to have any kind of accuracy when working on a digital cleanup pass. It's actually a common trait that is pretty easy to notice among all the youtube timelapse videos of artists sketching and inking digitally, everyone does it. No matter how nicely the MS inking brushes behave, I still have to zoom in this much in order to finely control what I am doing :
... and then I need to zoom all the way out again to check the overall results. Then zoom back in. This is madness ! I didn't quite realized how crazy it was until I took this picture. It's like drawing directly at 1:1 scale, which greatly affects the proper judgement of proportions - thus obviously holding back the overall dynamism of a piece. Muzz, if I am not mistaken I think I can see a bit of that in the painting you posted at the beginning of the thread. What do you think ?
Now here is the scale that Adam Hughes works at for a comic book cover illustration :
This is pretty much worlds apart. He can always see the whole drawing at once ! That seems like such an obvious thing. Now of course there is nothing wrong with rendering details while zoomed in ; but when it comes to finely refining the overall contours of a character in order to bring it to life within the space of the page, I think problems are bound to happen if one cannot see the big picture. Bad perspective distortion, inaccurate overlaps, alignement problems ... you name it.
So, this is my next step : trying to figure out a way around that. And of course I need to find some time to read through all this RGB madness
Hello guys, I'm just going to weigh-in very quickly here - mostly anecdotal stuff, because I've agonized over digital sketching for a while now; I used to blame anything from myself to the hardware and everything in-between because it just felt WRONG somehow.
Well, I'm pretty much over it. I've listened carefully to the testimony of artists such as Dave Rapoza and Stjepan Sejic, who sketch digitally with nearly as much free-form confidence as they do traditionally and concluded that it's probably a matter of confirmation bias run rampant within an insular community; let's face it, artists online today are often shouting at each other from opposite ends of an enormous echo chamber.
What do I mean? Well, pencil and paper is the default method of getting drawing done for most of us. We didn't have a tablet/stylus when we were young, bright-eyed doodling maniacs; drawing was more fun for most of us back then, further compounding the issue. How are we supposed to see this clearly when we have such strong, positive associations with the act of traditional sketching?
To be honest, I don't know, but I think we're far too eager to attribute our digital difficulties to the tangible differences inherent to the medium. Just out of curiosity, how many of you would still be complaining about your digital sketches tomorrow if they were suddenly Luke Mancini quality? I think that the honest answer for most of us would have to be "well, it depends on how it feels to draw those sketches".
I watched Peter Han's dynamic sketching two or three months back and was pleasantly surprised by how easy the exercises felt on paper, but when I tried to replicate these exercises digitally I couldn't draw a straight line to save my life, I MEAN IT, and I couldn't draw circles either - not with nearly the same confidence/dexterity. So, I made myself a quick template on which to practice these fundamentals and my 'line quality' has been improving steadily ever since; I do the exercises every day, and they take more than an hour to complete.
Above are some 15-second gestures I knocked out just now for the sake of this post. I remember really resenting these exercises just a few months back, but better dexterity means more confidence making deliberate marks, and now these are more relaxing and enjoyable for me.
Above is the template I made after watching the Peter Han video.
I think it's difficult for us to shake our convictions about the 'digital disconnect' even if we've mostly drawn on a tablet, simply because manipulating objects in a paper/pencil, or frying pan/spatula dynamic relationship is an interface we've all experienced to the point of ingrained intuition. The only way I can see to compete with it is practice; Dave Rapoza and Stjepan Sejic have taken steps towards reducing this dissonance - and I am seeing results myself, so maybe it's just that simple.
(I realize this is all speculative with very little, and almost exclusively anecdotal support - I'm not trying to be contrary, merely suggesting an alternative hypothesis; I'm not trying to derail the thread either.)
Pior, yeah i think the scale thing is certainly a problem and yeah i think you are right. On that original image i think i had those problems happening all over the place, so that is something that i need to work on for sure. Interestingly enough i feel those paintings mostly happen at the painting stage for me as i zoom in a lot more than when I'm sketching.
I think this is actually a large part of the reason i never enjoyed cintiqs compared to an intuos is because of how close your head is to the screen, and that it feels like a much lower density screen because you are closer. I wonder if a high density cintiq would be part of the way to solving this?
I'll also mention that like Makkon i use an art pen with the large flat nib, but I'm not sure it really changes anything for me. it has a massive felt tip that i should give a shot. It makes a pretty paper like noise so it might change something?
Have you ever tried to have two photoshop windows open at the same time? I've known about it for a long time but i might try and do it for a week and see if my sketches get any benefit from being able to keep an eye on the whole without zooming out.
Dado Loving the stuff you are doing man, good tips too. I'll try and drop by tomorrow and drop you some solid feedback !
WSLaFleur:
Glad to see you on the forums man!
I think the idea of doing daily excersizes like that is certainly a great way to up those motor control skills, another one I've seen is doing a figure 8 and see how many times you can go around it without going too far off the original loop.
That being said i don't really agree with your conclusion that people just haven't been able to get to the same skill level because they don't have time. I mean it's not that digital drawings are in anyway inferior, but it's very easy to make the argument that digital has a much steeper learning curve than traditional to get nice lines, and as Pior has been saying it does largely seem to be a force feedback issue.
Maybe that might change with new tech, but until i see examples of people as deftly doing super complex lines without mistakes like we see often in traditional i think I'm on the side that digital sketching just isn't natural, and certainly not because of confirmation bias. which might I add isn't here as far as i can tell, this entire discussion began because someone was impressed at someone Else's impressive lines and wanted to know how they did it.
But thanks for the post and i hope you keep posting dude.
WSL, thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts !
I can fully relate to what you are talking about, as I pretty much went through the exact same journey about 2 years ago. I ended up feeling quite comfortable with the medium after months of intense practice ; at the time I actually decided to use a regular tablet again, and it sure had some clear advantages. After all, art is just as much in the eye as it is in the hand ! However I think I was in a very different state of mind back then compared to where I am now, in the sense that I was 100% focused on the quality of the final result and was willing to brute force my way through things no matter what, just like you did - which is without a doubt a great quality to have, especially in a production environment.
I am actually pretty happy with some of the work I produced back then, like this, this or this (and dozens of other sketches and concepts that I unfortunately cannot show ).
However I think I am in a very different state now compared to then. While I too dig the work of Rapoza and Sejic, and Luke is awesome (great guy too ! very nice to talk to ), I cannot shake the feeling that their approach and processes are quite laborious. Maybe different artists have different levels of tolerance to a brute force approach ? I hope I am not being lazy by saying so but I think I want to focus mostly on the sheer pleasure of mark-making, rahter than seeing it as something to fight and overcome ... causing wrist pain, eye strain or mental fatigue in the process.
On that subject I think Dado is on to something when he mentions "brain-consumption". There is something extremely satisfying about being in the zone while working, and I think that this is what I am going after. I am not in a hurry though ! And yeah Dado, I have been closely following your LoL thread - you have excellent work in there. I was recently watching your bomb handling zombie video recently too. I am keeping tabs on you !
Muzz, yup I do that very often, even dedicating another monitor to this purpose. It allows for a constant self review and can do wonders for the balance of an image. Sci-fi painter John Berkey actually did something similar in his studio setup, using a setup of mirrors allowing him to see his canvas from a distance while working on it. HowevercI think this relates more to the final steps of an illustration than to the earlier and more gestural stages ...
So much to think about ! But that's why it's so good
WSLaFleur - I'm going to have to agree with Muzz, while it's certainly true that a hefty amount of time and effort can help you muscle through the problems associated with the digital medium, I think they are still very real problems - not a result of confirmation bias. Personally, I spent a long time on the opposite side of the fence - feeling that digital was largely superior to traditional work, and I avoided traditional mediums for quite some time as a result. It wasn't until years of working with digital, and eventually gravitating back to traditional for the sake of experimentation/study that I came to realize how limiting the digital medium can be. Obviously it can be an immense benefit as well and regarding some things it does have huge advantages over traditional, but I wouldn't consider sketches or timely/accurate lineart one of the things it excels in. And as pior has mentioned, these problems can persist even after spending years in both mediums.
I also think the simple fact that everyone does art a little bit differently - we each have our own methods, ways of problem solving, or interpreting what we're putting down while we work - means that pinpointing the (potentially problematic) differences between mediums can only be a benefit to making sure the practice you do is worthwhile. Of course spending tons of time crunching away with a specific tool will probably result in more confident usage of that tool. But as is the case with any sort of practice, it will be more beneficial if you do it after careful consideration of your goals and how you can achieve them. For someone who relies more on tactile feedback while sketching, implementing some quick tweaks to the process may speed up their progress significantly, compared to if they'd simply continued going to town on their tablet with the standard Wacom pen. Honestly, I feel like anyone with skill using a tablet will only understand more the differences between digital and traditional mediums. That acknowledgement may even be part of the reason for their success, as it allows them to more effectively muscle through it, and practice in the right ways.
pior - I've got no further crits for you, I've never used a Cintiq so your toolset is a little different than anything I'm able to experiment with at the moment, though I agree the zoom issue can be a huge annoyance. For real, sometimes it's a nice benefit to digital (painting/rendering details, as you mentioned), but it's one of the main reasons I'm constantly flipping my canvas to check for when things look "off", it's just so hard to see it all together when you're zoomed. I will also note that it's super cool to see you here in the 2D section chiming in on your experiences, I appreciate it!
Muzz - That's an interesting idea, having two photoshop windows open at the same time. Though it's a little hard to tell from your image - do you have the Navigator window enabled? I don't think I see it, seems to me enabling it and adjusting its size may accomplish roughly the same thing?
I've got to say it's a relief to hear everyone talking about this disconnect. Every few months I'll have picked up a pencil and paper to show someone an idea in a rush, and find myself just relishing the feeling of swirling out shapes with so little effort.
And also, no offense intended, but it's great to hear everyone so openly discussing their struggles and efforts to move forward with their craft. It's very human and very relatable. Most of the time work is posted complete and refined and there's no hint that the artist beat themselves to death to make it happen. You're going to give a lot of up and comers hope and energy to keep on working on their own stuff which we all need from time to time.
im not at the same level as you guys here, but i still want to comment on the zoom issue.
kind of early on i had a teacher telling me that, that its always important to zoom out continuosly during the painting process to see the whole piece, to get composition right and not focus to much on details.
since then i made it a habit to zoom out often, and i also fight the urges to zoom in to fix details. i try to do them as good as i can from a zoomed out view, and i forced myself working like that for so long that it feels natural now. i try to work in a 1:1 view constantly except when i zoom out super far, just to see it as a thumbnail. rarely i go in over 1:2 (or 50% in photoshop) to fix details.
i dont know if this helps, but i also have a pretty lowres photoshop canvas. 1500 x 1500 px usually. that way i cant zoom in too much without the pixels getting visiable.
i also have a question about the whole light-shadow-saturation-thingy. maybe it has been adressed but i coulnt make it out.
when i pick colours on the hsb slider, i have to make sure that the darker colours are more saturated to look the same colour as the lighter ones. why is that? should i care about the hsb sliders at all or are the just skewing my perception? i feel the same is true for any painters wheel. like you have to make sure to make the darker colours has the most saturation?
the thing about having most saturation in the terminator line, does it only go for skin and such, due to sub surface scattering?
ehm i guess im pretty confused by all this, if anybody knows of a good painterswheel that minimized this kind of headache i would be grateful.
well i feel that every painting is a constant struggle not letting the darker areas look to washed out, so i must be doing something wrong. when im done i almost always see that the piece could be improved by pulling in the levels or saturation sliders, which to me is a failure since i dont want to rely on photoshop magic to make something good looking.
I think this might just because our brain works in relatives instead of absolutes. When spending a lot of time on a piece, working on it inch by inch, it is almost impossible to stick to the bigger scheme of things because we just cannot grasp it fully at all times. Of course I am not just talking only about zoom factor here, but also color choices. This is why an artist like Norman Rockwell not only worked from life, but also always took the time to do a thumbnail color study for each painting - that way he was able to always stick to his master plan for each picture. No random color picking around the image for that guy
It's all about establishing a palette beforehand - if you know in advance which colors the lit areas and the shadowed areas are supposed to be, then there is no way things can get dull later on
This is why anime can be such an awesome reference. The technical limitations of the medium force colors to be separated by a harsh boundary, but that doesn't prevent rich tones and subtle material properties from being achieved.
An strong, established palette will always be better and more useful than any crazy blending technique
Aaand here's the final. I tried to implement all the suggestions and remarks mentionned above, the most important one being to work fully zoomed out *at all times* during the design stage, without paying any attention to the way lines connect at the pixel level (because that's way beyond the accuracy range of tablets and cintiqs anyways).
The zoomed out approach was beneficial and allowed for a more relaxed work session, but it also highlighted the core limitations of the medium. Pixels on a screen really *are* freaking big, and it was really shocking to see how visually inaccurate step #3 shown below turned out to be when I got to inspect it at close range. (It was drawn with a hard pixel brush using the "pencil" Photoshop tool)
Step #4 consisted of finally zooming in and simply tracing whatever came from #3, without really having to think about it at all. It was actually a very quick step taking only a few minutes, since there was no guesswork involved (hence no zoom in/zoom out dance whatsoever). And of course from there, painting is very straightforward since the lineart is here to guide everything.
This was fun ! And it caused very little frustration besides maybe the inaccuracy of the display/tracking at step #3. It goes to show that discussing these kind of things with fellow artists goes a long way, and is more beneficial than months (years ?) of brute-forcing through an uncomfortable feeling It's still seems kinda crazy to me to see that such lineart required 3 steps (#2 #3 #4) as opposed to just one on paper - but at least it makes the process very gradual and smooth.
i also have a question about the whole light-shadow-saturation-thingy. maybe it has been adressed but i coulnt make it out.
when i pick colours on the hsb slider, i have to make sure that the darker colours are more saturated to look the same colour as the lighter ones. why is that? should i care about the hsb sliders at all or are the just skewing my perception? i feel the same is true for any painters wheel. like you have to make sure to make the darker colours has the most saturation?
the thing about having most saturation in the terminator line, does it only go for skin and such, due to sub surface scattering?
ehm i guess im pretty confused by all this, if anybody knows of a good painterswheel that minimized this kind of headache i would be grateful.
Actually this is a mathematical issue in HSV. Essentially using the value slider is mixing the colour with white or black, whereas light in reality keeps the same saturation value as it drops in brightness. HSV as a model is nothing but an intuitive interface to colour, but it doesn't map to how light actually works. It actually has to do with the fact that we use such a limited range of value to represent an image digitally, and so we run into issues with channel clipping.
Also yep the saturated terminator thing only happens with SSS. SSS is a combination of light scattering and filtering with in a thick translucent material.
Of course this is all the boring technical side of things, which for some reason I'm a total nerd over, if you are having trouble understanding from this direction really just getting your hands dirty and sampling colours from photos will help out a lot just make sure they aren't colour graded, and also try and learn a bit about photography and exposure.
What made this stuff really click for me was actually sitting in a dark room using an ipad as a light source and changing the screen colour to illuminate other objects.
Pior: Thanks for showing us all that stuff, it's been very interesting, and it's been causing me to change up a few things as well with my drawing. It's been a really interesting read.
I'm still not convinced that three passes are actually needed, as some of my best sketches digitally are one pass, but the main thing is finding a workflow that's fun and makes you want to create .
Muzz : Yeah, I really wish I could jump straight to final lineart but I think that the 3 passes are a bit of a tradeoff for using a Cintiq, as it is really quite imprecise when working fully zoomed out. I am not exactly sure why actually - it could be a combination of the screen resolution not being high enough and the magnetic digitizer being much less accurate than it seems ? The lines just don't connect ... Now this can actually produce some interesting loose results, but that's besides the point of course. I am happy to make this tradeoff as long as long as it doesn't take too much time ; and it's always better than the crazy wrist pain I am getting when attempting to use a regular tablet
On a side note, this makes me wish that some brand could produce a fully pressure-based input panel, relying on pressure points for both pen pressure and X/Y tracking, as opposed to the current combination of a pressure report coming from the pen and a magnetic interpolation coming from the panel (if I am not mistaken). Just like the Nintendo DS, actually ...
Anyways, I just did some RGB sliders exercises in order to determine the resulting colors of certain surfaces exposed to a given light, as follows :
- Spotlight selection mask
- colored objects under white spotlight
- colored objects under red spotlight
- colored objects under white spotlight (= sun) + a blue sky ambient.
Calculating all these RGB colors was actually really straightforward, and much more satisfying than trying/hoping to pick at random. As soon as one starts considering colored objects for what they really are (that is to say, physical machines absorbing certain wavelengths and bouncing off others), things become really easy.
Also, I found what you said to be interesting :
What made this stuff really click for me was actually sitting in a dark room using an ipad as a light source and changing the screen color to illuminate other objects.
This made me realize how lucky I am to have been taught all that at school as a kid (even tho I barely used that knowledge until now !). I do not remember exactly when this was covered in the curriculum, but I have a clear memory of sitting in a dark science room with classmates and being instructed to do exactly that - illuminating different objects with filtered lights in order to understand additive color mixing and the light absorption properties of objects of different colors. I think it was around age 13 or so ? Fun stuff to remember ...
dang pior that's awesome lol, off tangent but have you ever thought of synchronized swimming for power stroke?
also, while it's good to know this stuff I find it hard to use the RGB sliders while painting. Mainly because in photoshop they are tiny and it requires me to move three sliders to pick one colour. That's alot of aiming to pick just one colour. It's king of like maya, where i used to like the marking menus but now think they are only ok because to get to a menu you have to hold right click, drag your mouse, aim and release. Equivalent exchange broken. however I think I could have the colour picker palette open so that I can visually see the sliders but use the normal colour picker.
edit: just tried it, not as easy as it sounds..I understand now why a colour wheel would be great
also, while it's good to know this stuff I find it hard to use the RGB sliders while painting. Mainly because in photoshop they are tiny and it requires me to move three sliders to pick one colour. That's alot of aiming to pick just one colour. It's king of like maya, where i used to like the marking menus but now think they are only ok because to get to a menu you have to hold right click, drag your mouse, aim and release. Equivalent exchange broken. however I think I could have the colour picker palette open so that I can visually see the sliders but use the normal colour picker.
edit: just tried it, not as easy as it sounds..I understand now why a colour wheel would be great
Really fought on this one and I'm NOT looking forward to the rest of the turn arounds on the SQRbot. I'm still not happy with how his arms turned out, but that whole notion of thinking in the space helps a little every time.
Stinkhorse cool! I'd say that it's going to be more difficult for mechanical items to get away without doing planning, especially for a perspective like this. I would personally do at least a little planning, but it is definitely great practice to do this sort of thing without planning, and it will only get easier as you go.
I can do a sketch-over if you want a bit of help with it?
Pior! great little experiment there! I'm glad to hear that it was all logical and natural to do. It's kind of interesting how similar the aesthetics of the last one and what Hyung Tae Kim does, the natural De-saturation of skin due to blue ambient is such a strange effect when exaggerated.
I actually did all that science experiment in high-school as well, and so the experiment with the ipad was really me revisiting that with a different purpose. I really don't understand why we don't teach this stuff in art class. Trying to teach this sort of thing to people I always come up against so much confusion because it doesn't match what people think they know about colour .
I really am in favor of breaking the terms colour theory and lighting theory up because using the one term colour theory for all of lighting and colour really confuses the matter.
Daew:
Haha that complaint is the same as what most people say when starting out messing with rgb. Honestly once you get used to it i actually find it faster, it's only one extra click, and you tend to hit the colour you want exactly rather than needing to pick the colours a few times till you get the right one.
With the picker you have to click and slide once to set luminance and saturation, then click and drag a second time to set the hue. I think it just feels clunky at first because it feels like each click is more meaningful in HSV maybe?
That being said, if you do end up feeling more comfortable with the picker there is no reason why you have to change, it's mostly for people who want to try out something different, and it works for some artists and not for others. Personally my colorblindness means it's an indispensable tool that means i can get around making green people.
Beestonian, thanks that definitely looks interesing!
Muzz, yeh after playing around some more. It is easier finding what colour you want, I guess its just that changing values means moving three sliders? or are you using something different?
Muzz: Yeah a paint over would be indispensable. Just so I can't later say whatever it is you do is 'exactly what I was thinking!' I think the changes that need to be cone are relatively minimal. The forearm closest to the viewer has a bit too much of it's flat connecting joint showing and should probably be skewed downward a bit more as it connects to the upper arm. Then the upper arm on the far side of the body probably needs to be rotated up to better match the one closest to the viewer.
are this in orthographic or pespective? the head of the robot makes me think the first, but the right arm is smaller than the left, which indicates the latter.
the angle on the camera is tilted slightly upwards compared the other dude. it feels like its looking on the robot more from above.
adding to that, the "base", ie the arms and legs, are much wider compared to your earlier drawings.
the biggest issue for me though, is the arms. one of them should change the angle of the elbow. the right one could be resting with the elbow much further down, making the whole arm more straight in the current view. i hope that make sense.
Hey all - just wanted to share some results regarding color picking through RGB sliders. I have been using this approach for the last few days and it certainly helped me pick more natural colors and, more importantly, helped me work with a more subtle and more controlled lower value range.
It certainly contributes to a less digital feel, to a point where I think I now need the equivalent of a coat of varnish to make stuff pop back out. That is to say ... a mere curve adjustment layer
I think that what I like the most about it is that unlike crazy fancy textured brushes like the ones I often see used by digital artists, this brings a natural feel to a digital piece *without* having to fake anything after the fact - something that I always considered to be a bit of a pointless thing to do.
I also forced myself to worked fully zoomed out as suggested earlier, and with a fully opaque brush with soft edges. Not relying on stylus pressure sensitivity for any kind of blending contributed a lot to the perceived feeling of using acrylics. Yay !
Hey,
I thought the color wheel would be great, but looking back I was thinking more along the lines of a traditional colour palette where you can mix colours together. It essentially is the RGB sliders.
Stink! Sorry about the late paintover. So i think the biggest issue you are having with these legs is actually that you are trying to fit the legs into a physical space they don't fit. The body is too close to the ground for those angles, and so everything is vertically squashed.
So here is my suggestion. As soon as i raised the height of the body it became much easier.
Hnnng, Pior that looks amazing. Really That has a really interesting earthy aesthetic. I don't really have much more to add other than to say that it's really awesome to see other people having good results from using the sliders.
Dado, I guess I could put something together, but I'm not too sure what more i could say than the linran tutorial. Anything more would be explaining the science of additive colour, is that what you want? Pior could probably do a better job if he wants to though?
Setting aside the reasoning behind it based on physics and physiology (RGB wavelengths in correlation to the corresponding color sensors in our eyes), the main thing I personally get out of all this is that when it comes to picking the darker shade of a color, it is faster/easier/simpler to just drag the three RGB sliders a little bit to the left, than trying to guess things within the heavy-handed space of the HSV color picker or with a color wheel.
The added benefit is that it makes it very easy to tint any color with another - just a little nudge of a slider to the right increases the contribution of the color that a given slider represents. Similarly, it makes subtle tinted greys very easy to achieve.
And then of course it allows for some more advanced calculations. For instance, once you start thinking of colored objects as physical mechanisms reflecting certain amounts of the 3 base colors, it makes it easier to guess how colored lights will affect a specific object. For instance, if an object's RGB color under white light is 90-107-126, it follows that its color under red light will be 90-0-0 (=dragging the G and B sliders all the way to the left)
Muzz: AW YEAH! That's bang on what that guy needs. He is too low for that lean, especially when you factor in that copper wire generator for a butt I gave him. I'll be getting him redrawn ASAP! I'm also getting the environment for them built up and hope to have some of that ready for the next post.
Pior: that guy is looking HOT. The painted skull mask has a great dimensionality to it with that specular, and its fangs are a really great eye catch. That soft, desaturated tone defining the chest is also really great, it's really everything I was talking about earlier.
The only nag I've got, and this might just be me missing something, is that some of the highlights across the cloak's leather spiral insets feel a little scatter shot. Is that just a speed run to get the concept together?
Hey all - just wanted to share some results regarding color picking through RGB sliders...
...and with a fully opaque brush with soft edges. Not relying on stylus pressure sensitivity for any kind of blending contributed a lot to the perceived feeling of using acrylics. Yay !
Been lurking on this thread since before it was cool. Keep going with this. I'm learning a ton. Any chance you can go into detail on this method more Pior?
i struggle with a couple of things, but its mostly concerned proportions and such. i go back and forth a lot, changing the size of stuff ever so slightly.
i want to achive a great sense of weight and power, and im not really aiming for a cartoony style. more like somewhat realistic fantasy.
i also want to convey the size, without relying on the human ref.
the concept i want to make in the end, is something of a fantasy ogre race warlord. so next step is figuring out armor and clothes. if i feel interested enough after that i thinking of redoing it from scratch, in a more interesting pose, that would give of more of the character and such.
Well this has been an immensely trying evening. After about four hours of trying to kludge the damned thing into shape I finally scrapped the whole goddamned robot and built a maquette to draw around/on top of. This feels like both a step forward and a step back in the sense that I'm not really learning perspective in the true sense of having a solid grasp of how it works, but I am taking away the very useful lesson of using all the parts of the buffalo.
Stickadtroja: Well that's an imposing bastard. My immediate thought is that piled folds of flesh you're adding around the feet/knees/wrists are trying to emulate rhino skin, but instead of skin/fat you're building the effect with muscles. Is that what you're after?
Something a bit like this right?
Replies
I tried the controller at GDC and it would be rather interesting to see applied to drawing tablet technology.
And to add to the knowledge bank, sorry if this is basic knowledge,
Also please correct me if there is something wrong with this, I'm pretty sure i've goofed somewhere;
What I've learn't is that the darker areas are almost always more saturated than the lighter areas, and in the dark areas it is usually redder while the brighter areas it's more yellow.
Now here's me trying to understand why...
Skin has subsurface scattering, subsurface scattering means light enters the surface and gets "bounced" around before exiting at a different angle.
Light consists of many different wavelengths, e.g. red, green, blue, etc...So when light enters a surface the wavelengths are either absorbed or reflected. We see the wavelengths that are reflected.
Since skin is a "translucent" material and has subsurface scattering, the yellow is the initial wavelength that gets reflected it is near/at the light source (the lighter areas). Meanwhile the rest of the wavelengths are absorbed and bounced around. Exiting at a different angle, which means not near the light source.
Now the saturation bit i'm unsure about, maybe it's because the light is being bounced around. So we see more of the red wavelength?.....
And is hair a translucent material?
polycount should make a swimming game
- Desaturated yellow is used on surfaces angles or pointed toward the sky, where the light from the sun makes the skin seem more opaque.
- Clay red marks points where the skin is flush or rich with blood. These will be mid points between your light source and shadow.
- Navy blue-gray, to varying levels of saturation are used for either your shadows, or purely as bounce lighting with some muddy browns taking their place as the shadows. This color represents the blue sky reflecting off the earth and back up onto your figure.
I can't give you any of the science behind it, or specific colors as I've never learned any color theory beyond BLUE+ORANGE: SUMMER ACTION FILM! WHat you have so far is a good start but I'd push your reds and their saturation further to punch your forms apart. Example being the girl's left forearm blending a bit with her bicep and shoulder. Rim lighting will also help with that.
Good luck and someone else who knows more please step in and help Daew out!
EDIT: Here's a link to a blog roll of a guy named Qiang-Huang who's knocking out incredibly rich paintings like they aint no thang. Check out how he's handling his lights and shadows, especially when one object is nearing another and bounce light gets involved.
While you guys both have the right ideas and are correct with your analysis of skin, i might chime in with a bit of info that will make it all make a bit more sense. In fact i don't think that painting is too far off the mark, really it is just missing some specular highlights from the oils in the skin and some texture and that's it. You can push it further but really it's the rendering that will take it the rest of the way.
If you want to know why saturation goes up in the shadows due to filtering, there is a first cause question that needs to be asked first. "what is saturation?".
I think there are a few definitions but the one that is most useful to me is that saturation is a miss-balance of RGB.
Our eyes essentially work in RGB, and while we are taught that colour has a range of wavelengths, our eyes can't tell the difference between wavelength yellow or if the eye is simply getting red and green photons hitting it at the same time. This is wonderful simply because it means that RGB is close enough to our eyes that learning how it works will solve most colour problems we will come across. It doesn't address things like Rods being more sensitive to blue/green in low light, but things like that are more edge cases than anything else.
So that means we can learn how RGB works with colour and it will be very close to the system our eyes use.
Also thanks for the thumbs up Muzz, I'm working on updating the robot to match. I think it might be about time to post a thread on these guys finally.
Edit:
Actually might as well link the source from why i use RGB sliders, though there is the added benefit of it actually being effective in working around colorblindness.
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php/148355-translation-LINRAN-s-Light-and-Colour-Tutorial-Mini-tut-BIG-download!
And that linran link I'm pretty sure i've read it before but didn't understand it so just dismissed it haha. I'll read it more indepth this time! thanks Muzz!
Ok so here was a quick paint over from stinkhorse's feedback, I agree that the forearm was getting lost but I think that was because I tried to add a bounce light and it lit up her arm. So the value between her arm and her body lacked contrast, blending the two together. Also looking at it now there are a lot of value issues but I'm going to move on.
1) Original, no bounce light
2) Added bounce light, (initial post)
3) Cast shadow
Thanks again guys
White reflects light in the same proportion it receives it.
Also i'll point out again that when you clean up the rendering and forms things are going to start to naturally feel more like skin
Ironically tho, this very same powdery effect seems to be very widely used when it comes to painting objects under a bright blue sky. It is quite popular, but I personally can't help myself and notice it every time I see something painted that way. Can't unsee the powder !
(Now of course atmospheric perspective is a different subject altogether. But it is still not powdery chalk either
this changes a lot. what you are saying make so much more sense.
muzz, thanks a lot for the stuff on rgb. this is an amazing thread, keep it up.
Are are three pieces from the individual I most associate with this style, Hyung Tae Kim. The shadows show extreme desaturation in some cases and just like Muzz pointed out the terminator between the areas facing the light source and the shadow all have intense saturation.
Haven't finished reading the Linran tutorial and a lot of this is a rehash of what Muzz said. Just me trying to figure it out
hope it's readable;
Question
Coloured bounce light. That would start balancing out the RGB? So then it would get less saturated.
This stuff is pretty confusing to start with but it makes a lot more intuitive sense than the colour picker.
StinkHorse: Yeah man, i actually kinda like the look of it as well when it is used in a specific stylistic way. Hyung is someone who has gone down a very narrow rabbit hole of breaking stylistic problems and ended up with something aesthetically pleasing.
However there are actually two ways that you can end up with kind of that effect. With a rim light it could be so bright that it is overexposing, and thus pushing it to white.
The other effect at play here is specular reflections which one everything but *metals reflect the light exactly as it receives it. Often when a light is at a rim light angle it will sit on top of the lit areas desaturated that part of the image. And not to mention that every material has Fresnel which means that planes facing away from the observer will have a higher specular.
Makkon actually said this in a post just before.
This photo is both overexposed and has a crazy amount of specular reflections happening at the same time, so it's a good example.
I think this is all correct anyway... most of this information comes from my own studies.
*metals have some funky electron physics causing coloured speculars, no joke. http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/9.html
However, I am realizing that I am still facing a feedback problem. (In passing I need to thank everyone who helped pinpointing this in the posts above - this stuff has been nagging me for a while and only now am I able to consistently recognize the cause and symptoms of this odd feeling of discomfort.)
The problem is scale. It is becoming obvious to me that there is something inherently wrong with how zoomed in one needs to be in order to have any kind of accuracy when working on a digital cleanup pass. It's actually a common trait that is pretty easy to notice among all the youtube timelapse videos of artists sketching and inking digitally, everyone does it. No matter how nicely the MS inking brushes behave, I still have to zoom in this much in order to finely control what I am doing :
... and then I need to zoom all the way out again to check the overall results. Then zoom back in. This is madness ! I didn't quite realized how crazy it was until I took this picture. It's like drawing directly at 1:1 scale, which greatly affects the proper judgement of proportions - thus obviously holding back the overall dynamism of a piece. Muzz, if I am not mistaken I think I can see a bit of that in the painting you posted at the beginning of the thread. What do you think ?
Now here is the scale that Adam Hughes works at for a comic book cover illustration :
This is pretty much worlds apart. He can always see the whole drawing at once ! That seems like such an obvious thing. Now of course there is nothing wrong with rendering details while zoomed in ; but when it comes to finely refining the overall contours of a character in order to bring it to life within the space of the page, I think problems are bound to happen if one cannot see the big picture. Bad perspective distortion, inaccurate overlaps, alignement problems ... you name it.
So, this is my next step : trying to figure out a way around that. And of course I need to find some time to read through all this RGB madness
Thank you all for your time !
Well, I'm pretty much over it. I've listened carefully to the testimony of artists such as Dave Rapoza and Stjepan Sejic, who sketch digitally with nearly as much free-form confidence as they do traditionally and concluded that it's probably a matter of confirmation bias run rampant within an insular community; let's face it, artists online today are often shouting at each other from opposite ends of an enormous echo chamber.
What do I mean? Well, pencil and paper is the default method of getting drawing done for most of us. We didn't have a tablet/stylus when we were young, bright-eyed doodling maniacs; drawing was more fun for most of us back then, further compounding the issue. How are we supposed to see this clearly when we have such strong, positive associations with the act of traditional sketching?
To be honest, I don't know, but I think we're far too eager to attribute our digital difficulties to the tangible differences inherent to the medium. Just out of curiosity, how many of you would still be complaining about your digital sketches tomorrow if they were suddenly Luke Mancini quality? I think that the honest answer for most of us would have to be "well, it depends on how it feels to draw those sketches".
I watched Peter Han's dynamic sketching two or three months back and was pleasantly surprised by how easy the exercises felt on paper, but when I tried to replicate these exercises digitally I couldn't draw a straight line to save my life, I MEAN IT, and I couldn't draw circles either - not with nearly the same confidence/dexterity. So, I made myself a quick template on which to practice these fundamentals and my 'line quality' has been improving steadily ever since; I do the exercises every day, and they take more than an hour to complete.
Above are some 15-second gestures I knocked out just now for the sake of this post. I remember really resenting these exercises just a few months back, but better dexterity means more confidence making deliberate marks, and now these are more relaxing and enjoyable for me.
Above is the template I made after watching the Peter Han video.
I think it's difficult for us to shake our convictions about the 'digital disconnect' even if we've mostly drawn on a tablet, simply because manipulating objects in a paper/pencil, or frying pan/spatula dynamic relationship is an interface we've all experienced to the point of ingrained intuition. The only way I can see to compete with it is practice; Dave Rapoza and Stjepan Sejic have taken steps towards reducing this dissonance - and I am seeing results myself, so maybe it's just that simple.
(I realize this is all speculative with very little, and almost exclusively anecdotal support - I'm not trying to be contrary, merely suggesting an alternative hypothesis; I'm not trying to derail the thread either.)
I think this is actually a large part of the reason i never enjoyed cintiqs compared to an intuos is because of how close your head is to the screen, and that it feels like a much lower density screen because you are closer. I wonder if a high density cintiq would be part of the way to solving this?
I'll also mention that like Makkon i use an art pen with the large flat nib, but I'm not sure it really changes anything for me. it has a massive felt tip that i should give a shot. It makes a pretty paper like noise so it might change something?
Have you ever tried to have two photoshop windows open at the same time? I've known about it for a long time but i might try and do it for a week and see if my sketches get any benefit from being able to keep an eye on the whole without zooming out.
Dado Loving the stuff you are doing man, good tips too. I'll try and drop by tomorrow and drop you some solid feedback
WSLaFleur:
Glad to see you on the forums man!
I think the idea of doing daily excersizes like that is certainly a great way to up those motor control skills, another one I've seen is doing a figure 8 and see how many times you can go around it without going too far off the original loop.
That being said i don't really agree with your conclusion that people just haven't been able to get to the same skill level because they don't have time. I mean it's not that digital drawings are in anyway inferior, but it's very easy to make the argument that digital has a much steeper learning curve than traditional to get nice lines, and as Pior has been saying it does largely seem to be a force feedback issue.
Maybe that might change with new tech, but until i see examples of people as deftly doing super complex lines without mistakes like we see often in traditional i think I'm on the side that digital sketching just isn't natural, and certainly not because of confirmation bias. which might I add isn't here as far as i can tell, this entire discussion began because someone was impressed at someone Else's impressive lines and wanted to know how they did it.
But thanks for the post and i hope you keep posting dude.
I can fully relate to what you are talking about, as I pretty much went through the exact same journey about 2 years ago. I ended up feeling quite comfortable with the medium after months of intense practice ; at the time I actually decided to use a regular tablet again, and it sure had some clear advantages. After all, art is just as much in the eye as it is in the hand ! However I think I was in a very different state of mind back then compared to where I am now, in the sense that I was 100% focused on the quality of the final result and was willing to brute force my way through things no matter what, just like you did - which is without a doubt a great quality to have, especially in a production environment.
I am actually pretty happy with some of the work I produced back then, like this, this or this (and dozens of other sketches and concepts that I unfortunately cannot show
However I think I am in a very different state now compared to then. While I too dig the work of Rapoza and Sejic, and Luke is awesome (great guy too ! very nice to talk to
On that subject I think Dado is on to something when he mentions "brain-consumption". There is something extremely satisfying about being in the zone while working, and I think that this is what I am going after. I am not in a hurry though ! And yeah Dado, I have been closely following your LoL thread - you have excellent work in there. I was recently watching your bomb handling zombie video recently too. I am keeping tabs on you !
Muzz, yup I do that very often, even dedicating another monitor to this purpose. It allows for a constant self review and can do wonders for the balance of an image. Sci-fi painter John Berkey actually did something similar in his studio setup, using a setup of mirrors allowing him to see his canvas from a distance while working on it. HowevercI think this relates more to the final steps of an illustration than to the earlier and more gestural stages ...
So much to think about ! But that's why it's so good
I also think the simple fact that everyone does art a little bit differently - we each have our own methods, ways of problem solving, or interpreting what we're putting down while we work - means that pinpointing the (potentially problematic) differences between mediums can only be a benefit to making sure the practice you do is worthwhile. Of course spending tons of time crunching away with a specific tool will probably result in more confident usage of that tool. But as is the case with any sort of practice, it will be more beneficial if you do it after careful consideration of your goals and how you can achieve them. For someone who relies more on tactile feedback while sketching, implementing some quick tweaks to the process may speed up their progress significantly, compared to if they'd simply continued going to town on their tablet with the standard Wacom pen. Honestly, I feel like anyone with skill using a tablet will only understand more the differences between digital and traditional mediums. That acknowledgement may even be part of the reason for their success, as it allows them to more effectively muscle through it, and practice in the right ways.
pior - I've got no further crits for you, I've never used a Cintiq so your toolset is a little different than anything I'm able to experiment with at the moment, though I agree the zoom issue can be a huge annoyance. For real, sometimes it's a nice benefit to digital (painting/rendering details, as you mentioned), but it's one of the main reasons I'm constantly flipping my canvas to check for when things look "off", it's just so hard to see it all together when you're zoomed. I will also note that it's super cool to see you here in the 2D section chiming in on your experiences, I appreciate it!
Muzz - That's an interesting idea, having two photoshop windows open at the same time. Though it's a little hard to tell from your image - do you have the Navigator window enabled? I don't think I see it, seems to me enabling it and adjusting its size may accomplish roughly the same thing?
And also, no offense intended, but it's great to hear everyone so openly discussing their struggles and efforts to move forward with their craft. It's very human and very relatable. Most of the time work is posted complete and refined and there's no hint that the artist beat themselves to death to make it happen. You're going to give a lot of up and comers hope and energy to keep on working on their own stuff which we all need from time to time.
kind of early on i had a teacher telling me that, that its always important to zoom out continuosly during the painting process to see the whole piece, to get composition right and not focus to much on details.
since then i made it a habit to zoom out often, and i also fight the urges to zoom in to fix details. i try to do them as good as i can from a zoomed out view, and i forced myself working like that for so long that it feels natural now. i try to work in a 1:1 view constantly except when i zoom out super far, just to see it as a thumbnail. rarely i go in over 1:2 (or 50% in photoshop) to fix details.
i dont know if this helps, but i also have a pretty lowres photoshop canvas. 1500 x 1500 px usually. that way i cant zoom in too much without the pixels getting visiable.
i also have a question about the whole light-shadow-saturation-thingy. maybe it has been adressed but i coulnt make it out.
when i pick colours on the hsb slider, i have to make sure that the darker colours are more saturated to look the same colour as the lighter ones. why is that? should i care about the hsb sliders at all or are the just skewing my perception? i feel the same is true for any painters wheel. like you have to make sure to make the darker colours has the most saturation?
the thing about having most saturation in the terminator line, does it only go for skin and such, due to sub surface scattering?
ehm i guess im pretty confused by all this, if anybody knows of a good painterswheel that minimized this kind of headache i would be grateful.
It's all about establishing a palette beforehand - if you know in advance which colors the lit areas and the shadowed areas are supposed to be, then there is no way things can get dull later on
This is why anime can be such an awesome reference. The technical limitations of the medium force colors to be separated by a harsh boundary, but that doesn't prevent rich tones and subtle material properties from being achieved.
An strong, established palette will always be better and more useful than any crazy blending technique
The zoomed out approach was beneficial and allowed for a more relaxed work session, but it also highlighted the core limitations of the medium. Pixels on a screen really *are* freaking big, and it was really shocking to see how visually inaccurate step #3 shown below turned out to be when I got to inspect it at close range. (It was drawn with a hard pixel brush using the "pencil" Photoshop tool)
Step #4 consisted of finally zooming in and simply tracing whatever came from #3, without really having to think about it at all. It was actually a very quick step taking only a few minutes, since there was no guesswork involved (hence no zoom in/zoom out dance whatsoever). And of course from there, painting is very straightforward since the lineart is here to guide everything.
This was fun ! And it caused very little frustration besides maybe the inaccuracy of the display/tracking at step #3. It goes to show that discussing these kind of things with fellow artists goes a long way, and is more beneficial than months (years ?) of brute-forcing through an uncomfortable feeling
Now on to the next thing !
Actually this is a mathematical issue in HSV. Essentially using the value slider is mixing the colour with white or black, whereas light in reality keeps the same saturation value as it drops in brightness. HSV as a model is nothing but an intuitive interface to colour, but it doesn't map to how light actually works. It actually has to do with the fact that we use such a limited range of value to represent an image digitally, and so we run into issues with channel clipping.
Also yep the saturated terminator thing only happens with SSS. SSS is a combination of light scattering and filtering with in a thick translucent material.
Of course this is all the boring technical side of things, which for some reason I'm a total nerd over, if you are having trouble understanding from this direction really just getting your hands dirty and sampling colours from photos will help out a lot just make sure they aren't colour graded, and also try and learn a bit about photography and exposure.
What made this stuff really click for me was actually sitting in a dark room using an ipad as a light source and changing the screen colour to illuminate other objects.
Pior: Thanks for showing us all that stuff, it's been very interesting, and it's been causing me to change up a few things as well with my drawing. It's been a really interesting read.
I'm still not convinced that three passes are actually needed, as some of my best sketches digitally are one pass, but the main thing is finding a workflow that's fun and makes you want to create
Talking to Makkon these sketches are all one pass. http://makkon.deviantart.com/art/09-21-2014-Studies-484001128?q=gallery%3AMakkon%2F22581618&qo=1
Twolisten: Actually the second window is a mirror of the first, you can even draw in both windows. window>arrange>new window for filename.psd
On a side note, this makes me wish that some brand could produce a fully pressure-based input panel, relying on pressure points for both pen pressure and X/Y tracking, as opposed to the current combination of a pressure report coming from the pen and a magnetic interpolation coming from the panel (if I am not mistaken). Just like the Nintendo DS, actually ...
Anyways, I just did some RGB sliders exercises in order to determine the resulting colors of certain surfaces exposed to a given light, as follows :
- Spotlight selection mask
- colored objects under white spotlight
- colored objects under red spotlight
- colored objects under white spotlight (= sun) + a blue sky ambient.
Calculating all these RGB colors was actually really straightforward, and much more satisfying than trying/hoping to pick at random. As soon as one starts considering colored objects for what they really are (that is to say, physical machines absorbing certain wavelengths and bouncing off others), things become really easy.
Also, I found what you said to be interesting :
This made me realize how lucky I am to have been taught all that at school as a kid (even tho I barely used that knowledge until now !). I do not remember exactly when this was covered in the curriculum, but I have a clear memory of sitting in a dark science room with classmates and being instructed to do exactly that - illuminating different objects with filtered lights in order to understand additive color mixing and the light absorption properties of objects of different colors. I think it was around age 13 or so ? Fun stuff to remember ...
also, while it's good to know this stuff I find it hard to use the RGB sliders while painting. Mainly because in photoshop they are tiny and it requires me to move three sliders to pick one colour. That's alot of aiming to pick just one colour. It's king of like maya, where i used to like the marking menus but now think they are only ok because to get to a menu you have to hold right click, drag your mouse, aim and release. Equivalent exchange broken. however I think I could have the colour picker palette open so that I can visually see the sliders but use the normal colour picker.
edit: just tried it, not as easy as it sounds..I understand now why a colour wheel would be great
Try this.
http://www.coolorus.com/
I can do a sketch-over if you want a bit of help with it?
Pior! great little experiment there! I'm glad to hear that it was all logical and natural to do. It's kind of interesting how similar the aesthetics of the last one and what Hyung Tae Kim does, the natural De-saturation of skin due to blue ambient is such a strange effect when exaggerated.
I actually did all that science experiment in high-school as well, and so the experiment with the ipad was really me revisiting that with a different purpose. I really don't understand why we don't teach this stuff in art class. Trying to teach this sort of thing to people I always come up against so much confusion because it doesn't match what people think they know about colour
I really am in favor of breaking the terms colour theory and lighting theory up because using the one term colour theory for all of lighting and colour really confuses the matter.
Daew:
Haha that complaint is the same as what most people say when starting out messing with rgb. Honestly once you get used to it i actually find it faster, it's only one extra click, and you tend to hit the colour you want exactly rather than needing to pick the colours a few times till you get the right one.
With the picker you have to click and slide once to set luminance and saturation, then click and drag a second time to set the hue. I think it just feels clunky at first because it feels like each click is more meaningful in HSV maybe?
That being said, if you do end up feeling more comfortable with the picker there is no reason why you have to change, it's mostly for people who want to try out something different, and it works for some artists and not for others. Personally my colorblindness means it's an indispensable tool that means i can get around making green people.
Muzz, yeh after playing around some more. It is easier finding what colour you want, I guess its just that changing values means moving three sliders? or are you using something different?
How off am I?
the angle on the camera is tilted slightly upwards compared the other dude. it feels like its looking on the robot more from above.
adding to that, the "base", ie the arms and legs, are much wider compared to your earlier drawings.
the biggest issue for me though, is the arms. one of them should change the angle of the elbow. the right one could be resting with the elbow much further down, making the whole arm more straight in the current view. i hope that make sense.
It certainly contributes to a less digital feel, to a point where I think I now need the equivalent of a coat of varnish to make stuff pop back out. That is to say ... a mere curve adjustment layer
I think that what I like the most about it is that unlike crazy fancy textured brushes like the ones I often see used by digital artists, this brings a natural feel to a digital piece *without* having to fake anything after the fact - something that I always considered to be a bit of a pointless thing to do.
I also forced myself to worked fully zoomed out as suggested earlier, and with a fully opaque brush with soft edges. Not relying on stylus pressure sensitivity for any kind of blending contributed a lot to the perceived feeling of using acrylics. Yay !
I thought the color wheel would be great, but looking back I was thinking more along the lines of a traditional colour palette where you can mix colours together. It essentially is the RGB sliders.
So here is my suggestion. As soon as i raised the height of the body it became much easier.
Hnnng, Pior that looks amazing. Really That has a really interesting earthy aesthetic. I don't really have much more to add other than to say that it's really awesome to see other people having good results from using the sliders.
Dado, I guess I could put something together, but I'm not too sure what more i could say than the linran tutorial. Anything more would be explaining the science of additive colour, is that what you want? Pior could probably do a better job if he wants to though?
Setting aside the reasoning behind it based on physics and physiology (RGB wavelengths in correlation to the corresponding color sensors in our eyes), the main thing I personally get out of all this is that when it comes to picking the darker shade of a color, it is faster/easier/simpler to just drag the three RGB sliders a little bit to the left, than trying to guess things within the heavy-handed space of the HSV color picker or with a color wheel.
The added benefit is that it makes it very easy to tint any color with another - just a little nudge of a slider to the right increases the contribution of the color that a given slider represents. Similarly, it makes subtle tinted greys very easy to achieve.
And then of course it allows for some more advanced calculations. For instance, once you start thinking of colored objects as physical mechanisms reflecting certain amounts of the 3 base colors, it makes it easier to guess how colored lights will affect a specific object. For instance, if an object's RGB color under white light is 90-107-126, it follows that its color under red light will be 90-0-0 (=dragging the G and B sliders all the way to the left)
It's quite fun really !
Pior: that guy is looking HOT. The painted skull mask has a great dimensionality to it with that specular, and its fangs are a really great eye catch. That soft, desaturated tone defining the chest is also really great, it's really everything I was talking about earlier.
The only nag I've got, and this might just be me missing something, is that some of the highlights across the cloak's leather spiral insets feel a little scatter shot. Is that just a speed run to get the concept together?
Been lurking on this thread since before it was cool. Keep going with this. I'm learning a ton. Any chance you can go into detail on this method more Pior?
i struggle with a couple of things, but its mostly concerned proportions and such. i go back and forth a lot, changing the size of stuff ever so slightly.
i want to achive a great sense of weight and power, and im not really aiming for a cartoony style. more like somewhat realistic fantasy.
i also want to convey the size, without relying on the human ref.
the concept i want to make in the end, is something of a fantasy ogre race warlord. so next step is figuring out armor and clothes. if i feel interested enough after that i thinking of redoing it from scratch, in a more interesting pose, that would give of more of the character and such.
Stickadtroja: Well that's an imposing bastard. My immediate thought is that piled folds of flesh you're adding around the feet/knees/wrists are trying to emulate rhino skin, but instead of skin/fat you're building the effect with muscles. Is that what you're after?
Something a bit like this right?