Smart art - tricks and techniques

_Shimmer

hidiho,

so I was surfing again, mostly on art sites and found a lot of very well crafted paintings and pictures. While everyting, very professional und well done I thought.. hmm what the heck. No Painting , done in 40+ hours can beat a 30 min speedsketch of Craig Mullins who is basicly just using rough lines and some custom brushes (and maybe other digital tricks) to create a far distance photorealistic like image.
He uses quite simple to tricks to produce stunning pictures - no doubt he is a man with strong artistic background but If he would want to he could also do 40+ pantings all the time...

Before the rants starts, the point of this thread is, what do YOU use to speed up your work (mainly just speaking from artwork, not texturing tricks really), what do you use to keep your work easy, how do you improve your work using some tricks nobody really knows of? I am kinda on the hunt for smart art tricks and techniques.

Examples:


-I got completely away from pencils and ereaser. I just draw with markers and felt-pen tips so that I always have to start over if I dont like the concept and can develop my idea in more approaches instead of going back all the time ereasing, then redraw.


-I use textures ontop of my shapes, for example, pants. Once I have the rough shapes, wrinkles and stuff painted in I merge the texture and the layer down and start painting on the composit to get a good feel of the material to interact better within the material.


-If no realistic skin is needed I use complementary colors or dynamic colors to shade. For exmaple, if I have a red surface I can shade it down with a slight green, the result is a bit of greyish, though its very vibrant. Or I have a blue surface, so I can light up with slight yellow and shade down with a cyanish tone.


-Back, when I made my application portfolio for university I took some photos I made , copy and pasted them several times on canvas, took some parts and duplicated them. Then Overpainted it, used textures and so on.
Result was: http://www.stephko.viranyi.de/portfolio/traditional/design_steampunk.jpg
This used to be a manometer...



Other tricks I heard of and liked:


-Saturate an image of a person to 100% to find out which parts have red/blue/yellow tints.


-Per used it, I love it: As far as I am correclty informed he used googlemaps images as texture on top of some pictures to make it look a bit grainy.



Before the flaming starts: None of these tricks will be helpful If your not able to draw, paint, sculpt whatever, i.e you dont have an artistic background. They dont replace artistic power!


Please post your very own art tricks that makes your art easier and more intersting! I´ll love to hear...

MoP

I re-use good stuff

I have a low/high-poly hand model which I use for most meshes now, just merge it into the scene, attach it, and tweak till it fits. Same with ears and stuff. Generic bits that can be used as a base but customised easily.

_Shimmer

heh yeah MoP, forgot the mention that, though Its not recommended for those who are not modelling for years and do not have much experience. Mostly this should be a production thing in my oppinion!

I am also currently building up a library of arms, torso and besemeshes, though I model the faces from scratch, just for the fun of it

Stuff like textured theeth, eyes, hands are very handy, especially haveing all in hipoly so that you can have it nextgen or bake out the material for current gen.

poopinmymouth

When painting, use solid opaque strokes. If you get in a habbit of lightly brushing stuff on, your method will tend to be slow, and unconfident. By developing a strong application of paint, it forces you to pick your colors correctly the first time, or you have to undo and try again. When you become solid at this process it makes you extremely fast. I think that's part of what makes mullins stuff so successful. He knows exactly the color and value to use, and has developed custom brushes that look like particular finishes or shapes he wants, so that the texture is built into each stroke.

With high poly, start by blocking stuff out, and then slowly refining. Try not to take each chunk to total completion before moving on. It makes adjusting pieces to work with the overal mass much harder, and it is harder to base your end result around a timeframe if you have a deadline.

Learn the shortcuts for your programs.

I'm sure I could go on, but that's all for now.

scanning_factor

When it comes to generating normal maps, know when to model and when to paint. Sometimes you dont have the schedule to do a full out hi-poly zbrushed model, in which case you can probably get quite acceptable results using something like ATI's normal map generator and a detail map. Detail maps don't necessarily have to be extremely fine detail, they also do quite nicely for broad stroke stuff like cloth folds.

Gmanx

You've seen people here and on other forums post work which has little colour sample dots in, for them to quickly pull the correct base colour to work with. You can accent that by doing the same thing, but with gradients, picking a light/dark gradient of your chosen colour and popping it in a little strip alongside your art. It's especially suitable for depicting curved surfaces. Simple but effective.

killingpeople

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Don't be afraid to change your techniques or even the software you use.

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great advice

Prs-Phil

some good tips, but isn't the sloppy method more for people that have solid knowlege of form, and drawing in general ?

MoP

Phil, nah, I draw sloppily

shotgun

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some good tips, but isn't the sloppy method more for people that have solid knowlege of form, and drawing in general ?

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yes, i agree actually
the construction of the form in more important than the form it self. if you have very ugly, squiggly contour lines because you were sloppy, but still that convey a 3d form, you have all you need..

anatomy etc. simply allows you to correct and refine that form later on, and help you focus as you go on logical structure rather than a bunch of forms that dont actually articulate with each other.

Asherr

use reference! if you don't know what something looks like find out. if you think you know what something looks like find out for sure. especially if you are making a person/creature/being with digitidgrade legs (since no one ever gets them right in the p'n'p forum).

reference, reference, reference!

JordanW

I think a better word for what per was trying to say is Loose as opposed to sloppy. When I look at Mullins or someone like him I dont think their work is sloppy, sloppiness implies a sense of not carying and letting things fall wherever.

What i think is important is to remain loose and be comfortable creating your art. Often times people tend to be too stiff when first creating art. I remember in school art class one of the first things they had us do was take a large piece of paper and just draw thick large strokes loosely on the paper, no restrictions nothing, just dont be afraid to lay some stuff down. Like poop said you should get comfortable laying down solid colors. I think it makes you a stronger artist when you go at painting and such full steam rather than lightly shading around.

<hope that wasnt too random>

Ramucho

I'm a noob so I don't know how useful this will be but i always start my drawing with an opaque silhouette no pen pressure or opacity control then I sloppily draw the features of my silhouette with a slightly brighter shade. after that its only a matter of rendering using custom brushes and different brush's blending modes (ussually multiply,screen,soft light and color dodge)
look at www.sparth.com he's got some nice tuts on his workflow.