I Need Pointers on Form, Lighting and Stuff
vertex
Hi all,
I'm starting my transition from animation design to concept art. There's a lot of things I need to change and improve such as mindset, style, workflow etc. Right now as a first step I'm focusing on improve my rendering skills, studying color and light.
Here's one of my most presentable piece to date. A couple months back when I finished it I was really proud of it but now when I look at it I know for sure there's a lot of room for improvement. Please feel free to point out to me all the problems in this piece. A sketchover or paintover would be awesome!
Thanks in advance for anyone who's willing to take the time to respond!
Replies
About the piece, it looks great. Nice flow, nice rendering. The colors are a bit monochromatic, which flattens it out quite a bit. The pants are only red, the scarf is only green, etc.
I like the image but you are right there are a ton of issues.
Where is your light source? You should NOT be rendering until you know this.
Try not to use a white background, it throws out your perception of value and means you can't have the illusion that anything is brighter than the background which is important. Where is the horizon line? Your forms and construction are very flat. You should have a solid idea what perspective you are drawing in so that you can solve these issues as you are drawing.
Overall what i am seeing is that you are not making decisions and sticking to to them throughout the image. Good images are internally consistent and follow the same rules throughout, and you will only improve in this regard if you start to pay attention to what you are doing in these areas.
Hope that helps!
You are right I did not think of the horizon line or light source when I started this piece. I've also changed the background and right away it's much easier to see overall.
I'm a little confused as to where the horizon line should be for a character piece like this. I've read before that the horizon line should be where u want your focus to be. In this case if I put the horizon line at where her face is, wouldn't it warp the rest of her body into almost a 3 point perspective? I started this as a gesture drawing and I did not take into account how complex it is (for me) 3 dimensionally.
I've put in some construction on the forms and I do see some problems. But there are some areas that confuse me as to how that's suppose to work with the perspective? For example the leg area when one leg is on tip toes and the other is kicking up. If the horizon line is around her eyes then the legs would be in a downward perspective but its kicking up so how would that work?
Next time i start something knew I'll definitely begin with what you said, horizon line and light source.
Thanks again!
I would put it near her knees based on the foot and legs, because she's contorting and thus her foot and leg are the most stable and parallel to the flat plane of the ground.
There's some other tidbits that were missed:
1. Those clothes make no sense with her movement. The scarf in particular, how is it billowing behind her?
2. Feet are different size.
3. I can't figure out how the further away hand attaches.
4. Front arm's elbow was a bit too low for me.
Having breast and butt visible at the same time is what is known as a tits-n-ass pose. I recommend you look for photo-reference for these as they aren't impossible, but people exaggerate them hugely.
For shading, I would flatten all the colors, and then on a seperate layer start doing the bare basics, so terminator, self-shadow, cast shadow, indirect light, ambient occlusion. Don't worry about blending and color picking yet(I would even suggest to keep this shadow layer b&w and set the mode to multiply), just get the basics done and work from there.
I did not know about the tits and ass pose when i gestured this pose but since you pointed it out I realize that's why I felt it was not giving me a good feeling. So I decide to change it up a little with a ref I found. Hopefully it's not giving that vibe anymore. In terms of movement I'm picturing this as like a snapshot of her coming down from a jump. If that's the case I guess the left leg should be more bent
As for the shading I painted over a lot of the shadingwhile fixing my poses and then after added a black shadow layer that I put on soft light. This is my progress so far. One thing that stood out to me thought is that the shadow is starting to look muddy to me. Is this the case? How do I combat such situation?
If you don't understand the forms you are trying to light, you are never going to be able to get a convincing result.
btw click on the image if the tezt is too small.
What do you think? Did it help you understand what you are doing a lot better?
Thanks for the input! I really appreciate it!
I'm keen to see how you go in the future with this
Regardless, very good results! You'll find that you'll be able to more complicated pictures easier once you get comfortable with these basics.
One minute I was watching ctrl paint next thing I knew I was painting this through...
I'm sure there are mistakes that emerged while I was busy "rendering" Head and hair I haven't really worked on yet it's a little difficult for me to grasp. The pants are also looking a little flat. Overall it looks quite dark and not luminescent enough. I tried to use saturated colors but it's not working as I had hoped. Also I am a little lost as to how I should treat the background.
Could I trouble you all for some more guidance ?
PS. don't mind the messy dark line on the yellow those are potential designs I'm going to put in later on.
I think, overall, you can be a bit more blunt with your shadows.
From right-to-left/top-to-bottom:
1. 50% black over your base colours. Shadows, being a lack of light, are black. But if we abstract the indirect and atmospheric light, by making black 50% transparent, it'll already give a good idea of how some nice contrast can help your image.
2. Now we're reducing our abstraction. Set the black shadow layer to 100% opaque, and the blending mode multiply. Then paint with the background colour. The logic behind this is that there's a few types of ways light can reflect from a surface, and the diffuse one, which what most materials use, has the reflected colour resemble a multiplication of the colour of the light with the colour of the material. We can let the art program do this for us with blending mode multiply. (Ideally, you'd work in a linear space for this to get the right lightness, but I forgot to do this, proving that I too can be a dummy. There doesn't seem to be much difference in this case though).
You do this for indirect light as well, so the light reflecting of the skin colours the darker part of the scarf, which in turn colours the shadowed skin. Don't forget that certain areas can't have any light reaching it at all, like the darker folds.
3. Merge down and clean up. You seem to have a tendency to blur all shadows, which means that the shape doesn't get defined enough. Ideally you use both gradients and sharp contrasts, depending on how rounded the surface is, whether it's a cast or self-shadow, and how far the shadow is being cast if it's a cast shadow. Colours have a tendency to feel muddy here, because you are pushing them around, don't worry, just keep smoothing the shapes and cleaning up and after a while you'll find you've removed the muddy quality.
4. Add a bit of Fresnel-rimlight, this is a second reflection method, where we are doing direct reflection. It is also the source of highlights, though the latter will lead you into the world of HDR values. Here, I just use it to spruce up the shadows. Fresnel needs to be mixed in with the normal blending mode as far as I know. Someone will proly correct me. (In the case of highlights, it is that the light-source is whiter than white(hence HDR values, which are white than white), so a regular averaging it's reflection leads to relatively bright colours.)
5. The clothes are a bit shapeless because of the lack of folds, but to understand how a piece of cloth is folded, you would need to think about how it's constructed first. So I would suggest thinking about that first.(look up skirts on google image search or something)
Overall, the method I am giving you might be a tad bit too realistic for your tastes(and someone is doubtlessly going to correct me), but it's interesting to do some orbs/studies this way. If you are going for stylised colours, I recommend to make sure you keep gradient-sharpness contrasts in the rendering the shadows, and to keep an eye on the relative luminance of your colours(you can use the luminosity blending mode available in a lot of painting programs to help with this). (Speaking of which, a good tool to analyse your image if it feels like it misses some je ne sais quo, is to add a layer with pure grey on top and select the 'color' blending mode or to just desaturate with the hsv-filter. This'll allow you to see the contrasts of your image more clearly, and as humans are more sensitive to tone differences than saturation differences, it's the best part to start with your analysis.)
I hope this helps.
Edit: speaking of being a dummy, I put the fold caused by the rib-cage too high. Don't repeat my mistakes.
I see what you mean about the shadows being undefined. I think it comes from me shying away from bold shadows and hilight because I'm so afraid of getting it wrong. I've also tried the methods you mentioned and I think I got a much grasp on the workflow now. The Freshnel-rimlight is a Godsend! As soon as I added some it just made everything feel more alive.
Here's another update. As you can see the background is at a very basic stage. That's the next area I'm gonna have to tackle.
It's that context that will give you hints of where the light should be coming from -- is it torch light from the walls of a palace, or daylight from a desert etc.
Having the scene established in sketch form also allows you to plan how the objects will influence each other regarding lighting. For example, should those trees (especially the ones outside of the image) cast any shadow on the character?
EDIT: Like this, this guy sketches the entire scene before putting any colour in:
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com.br/2009/07/line-drawing.html
I started this piece off as a character illustration with no background. I experimented with adding in some background action to give it some more context but as it goes on it's just not working because I didn't start it off that way and it's just an afterthought. So I think maybe I'll stick to no background for this one.