Learning To Paint Digitally

Stinkhorse

My goal this weekend was to draw unafraid. If I didn't like how something was turning out I wouldn't allow myself to hem and haw over the parts I slaved over that weren't working. I'd clean them out and draw in something new. After a few tough spots I finally got into the rhythm of it and it felt great. I was on such a roll that I started throwing down color, mostly because I've been wanting to see the glow of this struct's over-sized heart for a while now and it kinda snowballed from there.

I've always wanted to learn how to paint digitally but I didn't expect to go anywhere with this. Somewhere around painting some darker shading browns into the hood I started to get the feeling how it might be done. I've understood the principles  for a while now, but there's always been something missing between, 'put down color' and 'tighten it up' where the line art goes away and you're riding the bike without training wheels.

This image isnt an example of that, but it is the picture where the aspect of defining forms with color appropriate to the location and the lighting clicked. I really want to try this out again soon. 

Stinkhorse

I took the bits of insight I had last night and put them toward an existing project. This is VERY work in progress. I already know it needs its saturations adjusted, and a shadow pass, and that lower light dimmed way down.
 

Eric Chadwick

These are great. Keep going!

beccatherose

Great job on posting your development, it's really awesome to see where artists work through what they love! Keep going!

Stinkhorse

Thanks for the encouragement guys. I'm still working on this but it's definitely slow going. I'll lay down a patch of color, try and shade, step it back and try again, and again. It's a learning experience and every inch is a slog, but I'm happy with the progress. I'm not wholly ignorant, I've been watching other artists produce works for years, but I've never been able to figure out how to go from base colors to shades and tightening up the edge work. Turns out it takes the confidence to fail. I've started chanting the phrase, 'Paint Without Fear' to remind myself that anything can be painted over and nothing is so important i cant tear it down and redo it better in some fashion. If you guys have any suggestions I'm all ears.

RN

Stinkhorse said:

I've been watching other artists produce works for years, but I've never been able to figure out how to go from base colors to shades [...]

I think it's useful to see other people working --especially when you're insecure-- so you can have those moments like "oh, so this is how you got that image done? I can paint this objectively?" But in terms of experience you get almost nothing, you're just watching someone else work. The only time I noticed getting more experient myself was when I spent several weeks working with the software.

Stinkhorse said:

[...] and tightening up the edge work.

This is one of the things I noticed after working a lot. Doing that "paint rough, then refine the shapes" process is not for me.
I always define the edges of shapes with care, then use a "Preserve Transparency" or "Clipping Mask" feature to fill the shape with shading. I do refine the shading over time, but the edges of shapes are already resolved to what they're going to be until the end. I think Ryan Lang's post explains it better: http://ryanlangdraws.tumblr.com/post/116775380604/another-panel-from-david-petersens-legends-of-the
I already know what the final painting is going to look like, morphologically. I established that during the sketching stage. There's no point in working with rough shapes.
But that's a personal, creative choice. What you do this way has a different visual style than when you work with that rough style: it looks less painterly.

So find your own way of working with pixels, as long as the result looks like what you want.

Stinkhorse

Keeping up that forward momentum and painting without fear. The Vicar's first pass is is the better part of done, all that's left are his hat, and the skin work which I've been avoiding. I'm painting without fear, sure, but that doesn't mean I don't have trepidation over getting human skin wrong.  Every night I work on this I walk away with some interesting new insight, tonight's was how to work a patch of paint so it forms a recognizable shape or deformation. I'm going to need that knowledge bad once I get to the Count's neck frill.

This is still moving very slowly.

That was a super useful link RN and thanks for the encouragement! I'm going to be pouring over that breakdown for a while to come.

Stinkhorse

Had to step back to an earlier stage, and get at least an alternate version done to stay ahead of my deadline. What had previously taken me about a month to accomplish was done in an evening solely because I had my linework in the image. Now all I need to do is work on refining this, and I have it to fall back on if the deadline comes and I'm not done yet.

Stinkhorse

Got marching orders to nail down some coin-looking tokens for the project and I had to learn to paint metallics quickly. I don't feel like I was super successful but they'll do for now. I started sketching these in Illustrator, probably because it was open. I didn't migrate them to Clip Studio until the first pass was finished. These went over well but the team asked to see a man and a woman on the gold token and skull on the silver one.

   

Stinkhorse

I've been given license to start back up on the banner, but I'm running into the same problem as before. Over the course of an evening I'll make fractional steps forward, often  overworking an individual section of a single character and making no moves to even start another section. This is untenable and I've got to find a better workflow. Tonight I got fed up and reduced the file to 72 DPI and began to paint in broad lighting minded strokes over a blurred version of what I've completed so far. The results are positive with most of a character already blocked in after a few hours of work. It still takes a lot of self control to not get caught up in detailing a single spot, but I'm getting the impression that's part of the skill set I'm building here. Once I'm back on it tomorrow I'm going to aim to paint in a blockier, more dimensional style and see if that works any better than what I'm attempting now.

DrawingMoose

Stinkhorse said:

It still takes a lot of self control to not get caught up in detailing a single spot, but I'm getting the impression that's part of the skill set I'm building here.

I feel that that is really great insight you got there. Personally I've found time and time again that going from rough to finished in multiple passes works for everything, not just digital painting. Working in iterations also suits a game dev pipeline better, since you can send it over to the team at any stage and have something to show for

Stay awesome!

Stinkhorse

Thanks for the encouragement @DrawingMoose

Followed through tonight and didn't get caught up in any individual part (at least not until I got tired and stuck on hair). Made more progress than I usually do for it.

Stinkhorse

Another day, another update. Somewhere in today's progress I started getting really comfortable throwing down paint and slathering more paint on top of it. I also got a lot less finicky about the neatness of it all and began throwing in color that doesn't necessarily belong on a given object. I'm liking it, but I'm not super sure why.

Stinkhorse

Pulled an all-nighter to hit my deadline. I'm waiting on info and branding but this is pretty much done at this point. I learned a whole lot working on this and I'm very proud of the results. If anyone wants to pick it to shreds I'm more than ready to learn from my mistakes!

Stinkhorse

Messing around to explore the next phase of the project.

RN

Hello. I think you can make the crown more pronounced in that cover image, it is the focal point after all:

Stinkhorse

@RN Ooooh! Talk about missing the forest for the trees. I completely walked past that possibility! We're already in print on this piece but I can update it for future prints. Can you walk me through how you produced the shine? Powerful contrast is proving a challenge for me.

RN

- The crown should look special so it that it makes sense that those characters are stabbing each other for it;
- The crown should look alluring enough that people that look at the image think "wow, that is a nice crown, I want that too".

If the crown is in an isolated layer it should be easier to manipulate it. If you are in Photoshop, you can use some adjustment layers that are clip-masked to the crown layer so that they only affect the crown layer and not all other layers below them in the stack.

With a 'gradient map' adjustment to recolour the crown with darker shadows (blue shadows, sampled from the characters) and brighter highlights so it fits more with the other elements in the image (has the same dynamic range etc.), with a 'hue\saturation' adjustment to avoid making it too colourful and with the 'exposure' adjustment to give that metallic look.
You can also add a glow, either by manually blurring a shape of the crown filled with some bright colour, or by using the layer style options in Photoshop with that Outer Glow effect.

To make that star shine you can start with a bright dot then use a small soft brush of the same size as the dot with the Smudge tool at 80% strength to "pull" the rays of the star out of that dot. In Photoshop, the key is to hold Shift right after starting the stroke so it is constrained to straight directions (vertical, horizontal or diagonal).
Then duplicate this star, scale it down and rotate at 45º to add more rays diagonally. Then merge everything and use this shine in Screen blending mode.

Stinkhorse

That's awesome, and so simple too. I've been concentrating so hard on the painting aspect of this I forgot the other tools in my chest I could be working with. The full banner is already off to print but this addition is definitely going into a 2nd run version of the file.

Thanks a bunch @RN!

Stinkhorse

Bunch of stuff in progress progress right now. Still intending to come back to the banner (which went over really well at the convention!). Oh, on that note the kickstarter for this project has gone live!



Dice of Crowns is a 10 to 15 minute dice game filled with backstabbery. We've already funded and are getting into our stretch goals with nearly the full month left to fund. If you guys want in on the base level and the associated unlocks it's a low low $10!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thing12games/dice-of-crowns?ref=t12fb

I'm really proud of the work I'm doing on this, but I can always learn from the mistakes I can't see myself. Let me know if you guys would have done anything different.

On that note I've got a series of character avatars being made for the game in various states of completion. They need rim lighting badly.

Stinkhorse

Made some more progress tonight. I know I'll get faster with time but I want to be fast now...

Stinkhorse

Finally got a full day to flesh these out. I'm kind of working blind here, trying to feel out a workflow. The process for each of them has been unique in relation to the others. I'm not happy with any of them, but that's learning i suppose... If it's not obvious I've been rather inspired by kaktuzlime's lighting experiments.

I think the biggest takeaway from this process so far is that I have very little grasp on either anatomy or form. I've been able to dodge around it up until now because my primary art style is just linework. This has been humbling...

Stinkhorse

Ok, these are as done as they're gonna get on my current time table and skill level. I learned a couple of things about blending using the smudge tool, learned how badly I need to finish learning how to draw people, and got to practice colors. Next time I hope I get to apply some of this and get a little better.

RN

Hi. I like how these portraits turned out, congratulations.

The woman appeals to me more as the portrait seems the most polished, carefully blended. The others show rougher brush strokes -- not in a bad way though, it's just the style.
Also, if you squint your eyes she stands out because of the strong (saturated, vibrant) colours you used.

I think the other characters would also benefit from clothing that is as saturated as hers if you're going for a cartoon style. It's also an opportunity to worry about colour communication and semiotics (cultural meanings etc.) in your character designs.

- http://www.academia.edu/6270271/Colour_semiotics_and_creative_application
- https://www.artsy.net/article/the-art-genome-project-a-brief-history-of-color-in-art
- http://clothesonfilm.com/journeying-into-the-costumes-of-into-the-woods/35611/
- http://clothesonfilm.com/how-to-read-costume-on-film/20146/
- http://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/cinema-palettes-twitter-account-color/

Muzzoid

Nice man! Glad to see you really pushing the 2d stuff. The progress on the scene shot with the crown is unreal!

Stinkhorse

@RN @Muzz
Thanks for the encouragement guys! I'm going to come back around to these in one form or another, but painting is agonizingly slow and I've still gotta produce a bunch of stuff for the kickstarter. I'm really excited for the day when I can just throw down a blotch of paint and have it feel meaningful. I feel like what someone else can communicate in one slash, I have to work up to with a thousand cuts. There are some setting and character pieces up next, mercifully just black and white sketches for a breather.

And thanks for those links RN, I'll be referring to them often in the days to come!
Here's tonight's sketch:

Muzzoid

Yeah it can be a bit like that, but the thing is that you need to hit the quality in the first place to optimize the process. Keep working at this level and it will become a habit working at this level.