[Dr. Missle]

This took me a long time.





- Ari
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[sometypeof]

wow. i'm honoured to be the first to post on these. really like the composition a lot. i'm interested to see the techniques that you used to build this one up. any underdrawing invloved???

keep up the good work.

[Simoom]

i'm quite fond of the technique you used on the clouds, and colors in general. very much simplified but still a lot of color that represents the piece well. I'd love to see more like this

[Sumaleth]

I like these a lot. Sort of a "graphic" variation of Maxfield Parrish. Nice.
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[Awetopsy]

wow.. thats really cool. It may have taken a long time but it was well worth the effort. very nice painting.

[AndyT]

Holy moly
Another great thread ... stunning images!
(Today's a good day)
More please! Tutorial please!
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[ebrian]

This is great indeed. And I am inspired by it for my own vector art. Your style is unique, "hardlined", yet it turned out pretty good.
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[AliasMoze]

Excellent. I love this to pieces.

The only funky thing I notice is the rocks. They look covered in vanilla pudding.

[Dr. Missle]

sometypeof: Thank you, glad to have your feedback. Actually the color painting portion of the piece was a very small percentage of the time spent. most of my time went into my value study and the actual design of the building and it's surrounding environment within the composition. before I even touched color, I had nailed my layout and value.

in terms of my working process...

I begin by deciding on three or four emotions that I wish to convey through the piece. Basically I want to manipulate the viewer (nice, huh). I had chosen serenity, closure, and calm as my three emotions.

The first actual drawings that I do are very simple iconic silhouette compositions using only black and white. if you can capture the desired emotions through these then it will be much easier to carry those emotions throughout the process. I try to do a lot of these because they are so fast and can have such a tremendous impact on the finished piece. Also they will help you organize your lights and darks and will keep your composition strong. In doing these I pay close attention to the figure ground relationships.

I then select the comp that is the most successful at conveying the desired emotions and from that I do a rough layout. It's reallly important to keep things as simple as possible, so, initally, I work with foreground, middle-ground, and background, three overlaping layers, no more. I can always add more later to create realism. I assign each layer a value, light, medium, and dark. maintaining this will maintain depth. Since the assignment for the class was to emulate a style, some of my decisions were made for me, but I am really bad at copying anything so I ultimately went with my gut instinct. ironically, I think that I captured the essence of some of my inspiration pretty well.


inspiration images

from my rough layout and initial value studies, which were very crude, I composed a line drawing which was chalk full of poor compositional choices. But I got a lot of input from teachers whose opinions I respect. During this process I learned something really valuable about organics shapes. Generally, try to avoid repeating the same shape, both in you positive and negative space. There are many other compositional principals that I employed in the piece that really would require a great deal more time to discuss.. I digress. Several overlays later I had a line drawing that I was pretty happy with


line drawing

In Photoshop I did my first pass at a tighter value study that was roughly based on my initial layouts. Keep in mind that I am repeatedly asking myself throughout the process if the the piece makes me feel serene, calm and gives me a sense of closure. I think that if a painting doesn't convey some emotional content then it probably has less of an effect on the viewer (if you care about that sort of thing). the from my value study I'll do several color comps. Obviously I want to select colors that push my desired feelings.


Value study and color comps

I really felt that these initial color comps were terrible, they had none of the richness that I wanted. Furthermore there were still glaring compositional problems that I would resolve when I went back into my value study.


final value study

When I was satisfied with my values I went back to color, which I was very afraid to do because my earlier ones were so unsuccessful. So, I collected some good photo reference of the subject matter and of color schemes that I liked.





Photoshop has this filter which really helped me transition from value to colors without getting that colorized black and white look. it's called "find edges" under the filters -> stylize -> find edges. Basically what it does is build line-work from an image.


new line drawing

Generally I paint with my line-work on the top layer blended on a multiply channel with my painting on the middle layer fully opaque, and photo reference on my background layer which I eye-drop to get my colors (yep, I'm a hack). I wanted to work that same way, but I had departed so much from my original line drawing in my value study that I needed to somehow generate a new one that uphold my composition as it stood. I think that I may have had my value study open in a separate window to which I was checking my color. it might have just been on a seperate layer that I would periodically turn on and off in order to check for inconsistency.


line and photo

most of the colors that I chose were from the photos that I assembled in the background, but I could not have pulled it off without a sense of which colors to pick.

Hope that helps.





Simoom: Thank you.. I hope to create more like this!

Sumaleth: Very much thank you!

Awetopsy: Thanks, I think that it was!

AndyT: Flattery will get you tutorials!

ebrian: thank you. really what it would require to make thig less graphic would be more noodleing which would be too great of a departure from the style.

AliasMoze: Thank you, Yeah my teacher said they looked like "Zingers" they are like twinkies but with frosting on top! ha ha ha.
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[merlyns]

impressive working progress, you've really putted alot of attention to this. its simply amazing.

-david
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[AndyT]

Thanks for the insight.
Seems like you made a lot of good and difficult decisions.

Wow ... even the line drawing and the color/value studies are great.
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