Digital Painting | v8ART

This is primarily for those just starting out drawing. For the rest I say: Get in here too! Unless you have to walk your dog, clean the dishes, water the plants. That stuff is mandatory.

This series will teach you the fundamental concepts / mindsets I’ve learned over the past 4 years that got me the level of skill I have now.

And although this website emphasizes that progress comes from taking a variety of necessary right actions, I strongly feel that there is one magical element to this whole art thing…

The One All-Important Ingredient: You.

This first post of the Fundamentals series will focus on you. Why? Cuz yo awesome.

You are the host of a powerful creative mind.

And that mind is yours to mold. Every single piece of painting you make, originates from your brain, to your spinal cord, the rest of your nervous system to your hands, pencil and onto your canvas of choice. That painting originates from your creative mind and that mind is formed by your experiences, your knowledge… you.

“You, your personality, your individuality comes first. Your pictures are your by-product. Everything about your pictures is, and should be, a little of you. They will be a reflection of your knowledge, your experience, your observation, your likes and dislikes, your good taste, and your thinking.” – Andrew Loomis

You are the trainer, former, leader and biggest inspiration of your mind. It is what you decide to feed it, that will determine its future course. So be aware of what you let in. Let in the good stuff and you’ll become unstoppable.

How about another quote from our amazing artist teacher? He talks about his time as a student. That he would look for a formula for becoming an artist. He finally found it:

“It is really plain old courage, standing on one’s own feet, and forever seeking enlightenment; courage to develop your way, but learning from the other fellow; experimentation with your own ideas, observing for yourself, a rigid discipline of doing over that which you can improve.” – Andrew Loomis

I would cite the entire “opening chat” from Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth, as it contains so much value for the beginner, but I guess its most important lesson can be summarized in this sentence:

Take care of yourself mentally and physically, build character, as that will do more for your success and progress as an artist than any technique available.

2nd Ingredient: Have a Vision – A Source of Motivation and Direction

So! I’m still assuming you’re here to start an adventure towards the awesomeness of art-making. Well, before any journey, it is usually a good idea to reaffirm why you want to take the trip in the first place. It’s not fun to end up in the jungle, stung by killer bees, poisoned by ivy and snake bites just to be asking yourself:

‘What am I doing here again?’

That would suck. No, you want to survive that adventure! So have a grand vision ready. Focus on that scenario, making it as vivid as possible. Paint the scene in your mind. That painting is for you to go back to when times get rough; whenever you don’t feel like continuing the journey.

Keep it for yourself and don’t let it lose its power by sharing it so openly. Let the idea of your compelling future take root in your brain: Every time you come back to it in a moment of strong emotion, those neural pathways strengthen. It forms you. So take care in what you decide.

Here are some ideas on why you might want to learn how to paint. Take what applies to you and forget the rest:

An urge to communicate ideas visually
To inspire with these ideas like you’ve been inspired before
For the pure joy of creation
Social aspects, giving value and strengthening relationships with your art
Validation of your competency (Frankly, I know this is an underlying motivation for me)
Attaining the glorious, romantic identity of a superartist

Now you know why you’re here, so let’s begin with your first lesson pertzaining ze creation of ze artz!

Remember this, It’s About Whát You Present

This one is so important, and yet so many artists (including myself!) forget it too often: It’s about what you present, much less how you present it. We get caught up in rendering and leave out any story, idea or feeling to be communicated. This leads to static, uninteresting over-rendered work, that’s weirdly uncompelling. There’s an 80/20 relation in importance between what you present, and how you present it. Don’t go polishing apples for the rest of your art life.

What do you want to present? What would be interesting for you? Don’t limit your subject matter to that which resides only in your comfort zone. Allow yourself to imagine. Let your work become a seed for another person’s imagination.

“But Frans, I’m not that imaginative…”

Unless you’ve been frying out your brain in a microwave, I highly doubt that statement. You have a lifetime of memories that can be combined to form an intergalactic supertransformer subterranean organism from another dimension.

If you HAVE been frying out your brain figuratively, leaving it void of anything remotely interesting, you need to fill that brain of yours with some sweetness. Now how do we go about doing that? Glad you asked…

Building your Mental Library

Before putting anything on paper. You will need to have something in your head. Your brain is (or can be) a library with a wealth of knowledge, and your art is only as versatile as you are.

There are a few ways of getting that mind of yours imaginative:

1st hand experience: Live Life

Lead an interesting life
Go on adventure! Push the boundaries of your comfort zone

2nd hand experience

Read books
Watch movies
Listen to stories
Play games with amazing story and imagination

I remember drawing Vegeta after seeing Dragonball Z on the television when I was a kid. It may not have been the most original imaginative piece of art, but it got in my head and I wanted to draw it.

Through experience, your mind gets filled with wondrous things. But does that make Indiana Jones an excellent painter? Now that would be fun. The answer is NO.

Having experiences will allow you to add more of yourself in a piece, but the combination of activated neural pathways that represent a perticular visualization in your head isn’t wired strong enough for you to draw or paint it. This problem is easily solved by the one activity that will do more for your art than anything else combined.

Remember what I said about feeding your mind? Well this is the artist’s most essential brain food. Read on.

3rd Ingredient: The Artist’s Brain Food – Doing Studies

I will write only shortly on this topic, as it will be covered in a later article.

Doing studies is all about looking at a subject, scenery, environment, someone else’s work, and by making a study of it, you’ll absorb it as knowledge into your brain.

Directly copying what you see
Copying and assimilating the elements that make up the whole
Understanding the function of each part

The more you work, play, practice with the subject, the more ingrained it gets into your memory. This is the key to drawing anything. You can go as far as to make 3d clay replicas of e.g. an arm, so you can study its anatomy. Some artists reaaally go all the way on studying anatomy, which I think is awesome. Check out this video of Mentler aka The Bone Doctor.

Go study it all: Figures, trees, plants, animals, vehicles, buildings, cowboys, aliens, reptiles, environments, clouds, weapons, clothing, fashion. Do what you like best.

Until next time…!

Okay this was an introduction to art by me. You’ve learned what I consider to be the most important fundamentals before even beginning to draw.

It’s about you. Your ideas. Your mentality, your drive for self-improvement.
Define your vision. Why do you want to make art? This will become your primary motivation that will push you through challenging times.
Substance > Presentation. Build a library of subjects in your head through experiencing life and doing studies.

Next Fundamentals post will be about basic art concepts. See you then.

Do you have anything that you would consider an important non-technical ingredient for making art? I would love to read about it in the comments below.

Painting the Red Ogre: 10 Ideas to Improve your Photoshop Paintings

Frans — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:44:32 +0000

Ever wondered how to paint a red ogre? Yea.. sure, I do all the time. Well this is your lucky day! I’m going to upload a full process explaining every step.

Before we start, I am presuming you already know the basics to painting in photoshop. If not, visit the New? Start Here! page and get back to this tutorial later.

Idea 1: Begin with mass, focus on sculpting form

One of the easiest way to begin painting a subject is to just begin sculpting. The illusion of mass is created when you have a light source that interacts with the subject. When you have the following:

Light areas ( light interacts directly)
Neutral areas ( gets indirectly lit by light in the environment)
Shadows (absence of light)

Those are the bare essential ingredients for mass. I might even go as far as to say that two of the above is enough to generate the illusion of mass.

So get yourself a solid round brush and start with painting a silhouette in gray. Decide upon the direction of the light source. Draw an arrow that faces your ogre. Get a slightly lighter shade of gray and paint the areas where you believe the light will bounce off of.

Then get a darker shade and again think of how the light from your light source would travel when it hits your subject. This might sound a bit fuzzy, but try to feel the form when you sculpt. Where does light not end up? Paint the shadow.

On the ground; what areas will not get directly hit by the light, because of the subject? This becomes the cast shadow.

Idea 2: Edge control

This one is huge. Very important: One thing I repeatedly do throughout the process, is making sure my edges are clean. This instantly increases the level of ‘finish’ of the painting. You can see in the animation above that, when I added shadow, I also made sure the edges are not fuzzy. This makes the subject more readable to the viewer.

Note: When I talk about edges, it is not just about the outline. Everywhere in your painting where a piece of mass ends, there is an edge. For example the arms in front of the ogre.

Idea 3: Work from low contrast towards high constrast

By first painting the silhouette, we started out with very low contrast. After adding lighter and darker areas, we increased the contrast. You can keep adding lighter and darker areas until you reach the darkest dark and the lightest light: pure black and pure white.

Keep these extreme values to a minimum, unless you are going for a dramatic shot. Use the lightest light like the cherry on top of an amazing sorbet ice cream. Use it sparingly and at the end. As to quote some artist whose name I cannot remember: “It’s like working towards an amazing orgasm. The longer you hold, the better it will be.”

In the last step in the animation above, you can see I added a multiply layer of 50% gray to decrease contrast and to get rid of all the white background.

In the step below, I reincreased the contrast from the background while simultaneously working on edge control.

Idea 4: Check your anatomy!

When a subject seems too anatomically impossible, it will take a hit in credibility. It will look bad. That’s why I always do an anatomy check in the early stages (should have done it even earlier), where changes can still be made easily.

Still, when you find out in final stages that something is off, do not hesitate to kill your painting in order to fix it. An anatomically flawed in-credible fully rendered painting will lose the battle when fought with a believable painting.

Idea 5: Check your balance

The same thing goes for balance: If your character is off-balance, people will feel it. In the animation below, I kind of corrected the balance that was already okay, but it felt a liiittle off.

Easiest way for checking the balance is by drawing a box when standing on two feet, or a triangle when standing on one. Draw a line perpendicular from the ground up (not in the example) and see if you can notice mass being too much out of balance. Mass left should equal mass right.

Idea 6: Add color later

Adding color later makes it easier for the newbie to focus on what’s more important: value. But when the time does come to bring your ogre to life with some color, Photoshop enables you to easily add it somewhere along the way.

You can either use a color layer, or an overlay layer for this. Try both and see what works better for you.

Idea 7: Highlights may be more or less saturated depending on light source

Usually, when rendering, highlights tend to be less saturated than the actual color of the subject. This is because the light source usually is less saturated aswell. Take for example the sun. those are not yellow rays my friend.

So what I usually do is color pick the normal color. Make it lighter using HSB-sliders (Hue, Saturation, Blackness) and decrease saturation.

Bounce light that bounces off of a subject, has the color of that subject. So light that bounces off this guy’s red skin is more red. Red on red gets more saturated. I haven’t really done that in the example, because it’s not THAT important, but it’s another aspect of rendering you can keep in mind.

Idea 8: Use the Photoshop Auto Levels Shortcut Ctrl + Shift + L

As we near the the end of the process, I want to increase contrast to the point where it looks good and the colors are balanced. Photoshop has a nifty tool for this, so either use the shortcut or Ctrl + L or Ctrl + M for curves.

Quick and easy. Love it. (Edit: The shortcut in the image should be ctrl + shift + L)

Idea 9: Photoshop Dodge Tool as cherry on top

I only use this one at the very very end as it allows me to make things pop out that bit more.

What it also does is increase the saturation on the border of highlight-shadow. This mimmicks a natural phenomenon where at the beginning of the shadow, the material gets lit and it radiates light with the color of the material. So you won’t see the unsaturated directly bounced off light, but the light that bounces from within the material.

Try holding your hand or a leaf against direct sunlight, you’ll see the light that radiates from within the material is much more saturated.

Idea 10: Focal Depth

As final push for contrast, you can use the sharpen and blur tool to add focal depth. This is essentially just an extension to the Edge Control idea, as it leads the eye to those parts of the painting that are more readable. I usually sharpen the face, or the best parts of the painting to lead the eye away from the ugly parts. ;D

And there you have it! 10 Technical Ideas to Improve your Photoshop Paintings.

Cheers,

Frans

PS: If you are thinking about uploading your ogre to facebook for all your friends to see, be sure to optimize it using this simple technique: 2 Simple Steps to Significantly Improve the Quality of your Facebook Photos