Hand Painted Shield

UltraLrod

Hey everybody. Loving everybody's hand painting that I took a chance to do one myself. No background in traditional painting or digital. I found a concept art done by Dan Scott on while browsing on Pinterest. Here is what I got so far. I wanted some critique on this. Not sure if I'm going about this right.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Your base local color for the blue should be more desaturated, and your gold needs more orange hue to it to be more accurate to the concept.

What are you using for texturing?

UltraLrod

Photoshop

Brian "Panda" Choi

Do you have a handle on what 'top-down lighting" means in regards to what you're trying to accomplish?

UltraLrod

I do not. I'm still very new to this whole process of hand painting. Do you have any tips or articles I should read up on to get a better understanding of 'top-down lighting'?

carlobarley

heyo!
here are some good tutorials for the handpainted feel

paid:
http://3dmotive.com/series/hand-painted-texturing.html
https://gumroad.com/turpedo

free:
http://blog.bitgem3d.com/post/33293411529/3d-hand-painting-workflow-02
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/404690716489171325/
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/404690716489491647/
https://cgcookie.com/concept/resource/the-gold-resource-tutorial/

peace!

heres a quick feedback, i would limit your color palette when your starting out, look for the colors of midtone, shadow, highlight either based on concept, real life-reference or your favorite artists that do handpainting.

goodluck!

Brian "Panda" Choi

Both volumes of Vertex by Polycount members have handpanting articles that you're going to want to look at.

http://artbypapercut.com/

And a rule of thumb that has helped me a lot during handpainting art:

When you're changing values (i.e. things getting darker or lighter because of light exposure), do NOT just change brightness in Photoshop. You need to adjust hues as well, even slightly. In general, you can think colors get WARMER when light is exposed on a surface, and COLDER The farther away from light it s, like in shadow (I'm using these terms specifically, google them and understand what they mean within color theory).

UltraLrod

carlobarley thanks for the quick feedback and those sphere you did. It was helpful in bringing out the center blue piece
JadeEyePanda forgot all about the Vertex ebooks. I have some reading to catch up.

Update on the shield. Re texture the shield and figure I start from the blue area and work my way out to better understand the process. That the transition around from the dark blue to the light blue still bothering me. Gonna have to fix it.

RegulusAwesome

You're right that there needs to be more transition from dark to light, but I think you're still missing a lot of what's conveyed in carlobarley's example.

The main thing that jumps out at me is your colors. You chose very saturated, almost crayon-like colors for your shield. In the reference the blue is almost gray, and the yellow is more brown/gold. It may help you to actually pick colors from your concept until you get a better eye for choosing them yourself.

Brian "Panda" Choi

As an aside, you're going to want to start NOW a background in traditional painting. Make sketching a habit, do master studies of well known pieces of work, do still life drawings, etc.

UltraLrod

RegulusAwesome - Took your advice and picked the color off of the concept. I definitely saw a big difference from what I had and in the concept.

Here's an update.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Block in your lights. Think big picture, don't noodle away at details yet. Define the major planes of "geometry."

Chronicle

I just watched a video on painting that mentioned a really good way to think of the steps of painting something like this. First you do the line drawing, no value no color, just get the outlines set up and in place as tight as can be. then paint through on a grayscale, only worrying about the value of the area. Finally add color by using gradient maps in photoshop to set up a base of your colors. You can then fine tune the spots you want once you've done the gradient maps for the main colors.

UltraLrod

@Chronicle - Do you have a link of that video. I would definitely like to check that out.

Chronicle

This is part 1: https://cubebrush.com/video/the-importance-of-line-art/#.VJ34EV4DA

This is part 2 the grayscale: https://cubebrush.com/video/painting-in-grayscale/#.VJ34NV4DA

This is part 3 The gradient maps: https://cubebrush.com/video/coloring-with-gradient-maps/#.VJ34T14DA

Then there's a final one which kinda shows a quick timelapse of the whole process: https://cubebrush.com/video/speedpaint-bloom/#.VJ34a14DA

UltraLrod

@Chronicle - Thanks for link.

Started working on the outside of the shield. Getting kinda lost at the moment. I went and added in the highlights and shadow to the top part of the shield. The darker area of the shield seems awkward to me. Anyone has any pointer? Also I read the article about hand painting that JadeEyePanda suggested and tried out the pen pressure. That's how I'm getting the result.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Stop henpecking with your stylus. Block in the values and colors, don't spend time blending things. If you're using 10+ strokes for on tiny area, you're starting unhealthy habits. Go from big forms to tiny details, not tiny details to get big forms.

I've attached a filterized version of the concept art. Notice how blotchy it looks, like paint blotches were put on there? Do that with your brush work before you start refining things, maybe underneath a light line art layer. Fat brush radius, intentionally blocking in the colors.

Also, I think you might be misunderstanding the material (what the actual shield is made of) of the shield. The trim is metal, as well as the hand hold buckler. The Blue area and sun rays are probably wood and not very specularly intensive.

praetus

Just curious but are you doing the shadows using black? It's really muddying up texture quality and different material will react differently with shadows. You can't just overlay or multiply black and expect it to work, take it from someone who used to do that. =P

Someone mentioned it before but I really recommend watching the painting tutorial on 3DMotive by Tyson murphy. While I still have plenty of room for improvement myself, most of the techniques I use I have learned from his tutorials. Worth every penny.

Brian "Panda" Choi

If it helps reinforce Tyson Murphy's tutorial, he's one of the artists on the WoW team at Blizzard Entertainment. They've basically co-led the charge for hand-painted looking games.

UltraLrod

@JadeEyePanda - That helps. I was trying to understand by what you meant by thinking big. Now I see what you mean.
@praetus - I followed RegulusAwesome advice and used the color picker to pick the color since I'm not experience in hand painting. The color was close to black/brown area that's why it appearing black.

Brian "Panda" Choi

I think it'll be helpful for you as an artist to not even think about this as hand-painting, just think about it like regular painting.

It's basically painting in the larger art scheme of things.

The funny thing about "hand-painting" is that it requires you to actually learn how to paint in the first place, it's not really even a huge texturing field. What you pick up here translates a lot into just doing portrait paintings, plen-air paintings.

That being said, don't restrict your search with "hand-painting." Just google "painting" sometimes.

Odow

Just like JadeEyePanda said, you actually need to learn how to paint before trying handpainting, you clearly lack the base, you don't know about colors and lights theory, for example a shadow is never really black. A color isn't only made by a gradiant of the same slider, you need different value etc. Try painting that shield in photoshop before trying to apply it to 3D. don'T try to color pick, find your own color, study how metal react to light, learn about painting, colors and lights, then come back to handpainting, else you'll never achieve what you want. It's just like trying to learn how to read with a Shakespeare.

UltraLrod

Thanks for all the helpful advice especially that hand painted texture isn't really anything but painting. Bought the hand painting texture video from 3dMotive. That was a huge leap while watching Tyson Murphy just paint without having time sped up. It really was challenging not trying to get everything to look perfect, but I kept remembering him say to just do it quickly. Here's my here's what I have now. Looking at it now. there doesn't seem to be a huge shift in lighting.

Also as for my UVs. I kinda hate they hate it looks. The main part of the shield seems to be taking up too little space while the center and the wings practically takes up about 60%-70% of the UV space. Does this seem fine or is there a better way to fix so that the main part of the shield has more of the texture.

Brian "Panda" Choi

When you do your UVs, do you use a checkerboard texture to check your texel density?

UltraLrod

Yeah. I did. I was following advice from Tyson. Made sure the front of the shield had a perfect squares all around while sacrificing the sides.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Right now your gold is reading very greenish. The concept is a lot warmer, more orange in other terms. You can make a quick fix by using a hue adjustment through Photoshop's Adjustment tools and slide it towards a more orange tone.

And bigger strokes, block everything in. I still see henpecking.

UltraLrod

Added blue in there to give me a sense of difference. Yeah I'm notice I've been henpicking the painting from time to time. Definitely do need to work on just blocking in the form and do big stroke.

Snafubar7

A good way to get used to blocking in values and avoid nit-picking strokes, is to set a timer. race against the clock, try not to get attached to one area, jump around and have fun. In this project, I say just make a new layer, set a timer for 5-7 minutes. Start blocking in value in that fashion, if you don't like what you have, scrap the layer. Try again. When you get the "initial read" down, then you go refine.

I second Brian's comment about getting used to sketching and doing value studies. It builds a library in your head of shapes and understanding and you won't even realize it.

Keep going, I see improvement!

Odow

I don't know in what your checking result but it's a better idea when still being in WIP, to work in flat light or self illuminated the object, it will gave you a better view of what you're really painting, rather then a really dark object.

UltraLrod

@Odow - can you give me an example of flat light or self illuminated object

Starting to flush out the center piece of the shield

Brian "Panda" Choi

Looking good! Keep cracking.

Top highlight is too white. Use a warmer hue, don't just add white to it. Use a orange-ish yellow.

jinn15

wow the improvement from the first post to your latest post is impressive, nice job =D and yea like panda said just keep pushing it more and more and you'll have a nice piece for your folio =D