Sketchbook: Steven Verbeek - 1 Month Hand Painting Daily
Hello All,
My name is Steven Verbeek and I am trying to learn how to properly hand paint textures as seen in games like BLC, WoW, TorchLight, etc. I will be painting one texture a day for a complete month (30 days, may not be consecutive) in my attempt to learn how to do this properly.
I will post approx. time of completion, colour swatches, style (there are several different styles), and type of texture painted.
I ask anyone who is reading this thread to be hard on me, I am new to this and I will not get better from people being nice. I want to get better so I ask you kindly be helpful and critic, please provide details about why you dislike this or that.
PS. First day will follow this post.
Thanks!
Steve V.
My name is Steven Verbeek and I am trying to learn how to properly hand paint textures as seen in games like BLC, WoW, TorchLight, etc. I will be painting one texture a day for a complete month (30 days, may not be consecutive) in my attempt to learn how to do this properly.
I will post approx. time of completion, colour swatches, style (there are several different styles), and type of texture painted.
I ask anyone who is reading this thread to be hard on me, I am new to this and I will not get better from people being nice. I want to get better so I ask you kindly be helpful and critic, please provide details about why you dislike this or that.
PS. First day will follow this post.
Thanks!
Steve V.
Replies
My first attempt I decided to follow the style by JFletcher, (using the smudge tool and overlays). I actually rather enjoyed this, I found it difficult to properly do the cracks though.
I think the splits are a bit dark, I tried to lighten them by applying more color to it then smudging and that turned out really wrong, so something to keep in mind for the future.
Thoughts?
I attempted to create a single part of a stone texture using reference from http://dns-art.com/ (church).
I am not sure exactly how he managed to do that, they appear as if they have a sort of drop shadow
I also played around with a lighting tutorial http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm#light_stuff (specifically the lighting part) a bit today.
PS. I am trying to get down to roughly 20-30 minutes for a single object before I do more then one, currently I spend roughly an hour to hour and a half on a single object.
As always, comments welcome!
some advice:
first of all, make sure you have plenty of texture reference. you mention games like WoW and Torchlight, see if you can find actual texture samples from those games to analyze. Look at how they use color and shape in regards to the surface they're describing. I know I've seen a thread around PC lately of someone doing a WoW style environment - if I come across it I'll edit this post but make sure you're browsing P&P.
second, don't limit yourself to a restricted amount of time. one thing I've learned is that quality takes TIME. unless you've been doing it for a while, expect good results to come from a large amount of hard work. speed comes later. so focus on raising your quality bar as far as you can without worrying about the amount of time it takes to get there. it's a learning process, and everything you've realized along the course of one texture will lend to making the next one not only better, but a quicker path to getting the same result (which usually leads me, at least, to spending more time trying to improve the quality instead of pumping stuff out faster).
third, that PSG art tut is great. read it multiple times so it can all sink in.
lastly, your wood doesn't look incredibly different from your stone in the way it's constructed, outside of the colors. try using different brushes and different techniques on different materials. you might wind up going back to using the same tools for both, but experimenting can lead to great things.
To recap!
- Gather LOTS of reference. Study it. Analyze it. Figure out why it works
- Spend the time necessary. no rushing, no pushing something out before it's done. It's super useful for learning!
- Keep looking for and reading tutorials, there's a lot of great ones out there and especially here on PC. once you get a good amount of these created it might not be a bad idea to post them on P&P to get some more focused critique.
and most importantly, don't stop. keep practicing. It's takes tremendous patience and discipline to keep going.
that being said, I really look forward to your future updates.
Thank you for the reply, I agree with everything said. This is rather hard to do with a mouse I must say.
I spent a great deal of time playing around with coloring/making an "ice stone" today and I tried a completely different method and after a very long hard day decided to scrape it. It was turning out horrendously so no update today. I will post one tomorrow.
PS. the ice stone started turning strange colours, which was nice but as a whole it turned out horrible, I think I started a bit too big for a texture (450x450). I will reattempt this tomorrow at a much smaller scale.
Any pointers on how I could replicate (the main problem I seem to be having is the part that doesn't have anything in it always looks bland, or too coloured)