Renderization

At this stage, it's time to man up and marry the bitch because we're going to commit. What I mean here by commitment is the composition is locked, anatomy and perspective are accurate, and the 'big picture' is what you're going with. Not much more experimenting past here because most, if not all, big problems should have been solved by now. This isn't to say that everything here is absolutely final final, because I still find small things that need to be nudged this way and that, but for the most part, you have to have made your decisions.

Now, when I'm rendering, I keep my left hand on specific hot keys to make the whole process run faster. With the brush tool selected and flow turned down, alt (eyedropper) to select in between colors to blend, x (switch foreground/background colors) to 'save' a color if I don't want to go through the trouble of finding it again, space bar to drag myself around and around, and ctrl+z (you don't really need me to explain, do you?) in case I make an oopsie. These keys are pretty much all I need for the bulk of painting, and conveniently grouped in the lower left of my keyboard.

Remember that I'm not tell you that this is the right way; there's no such thing. This is just the process I find most comfortable to my style and technique.

  
1. I usually need something playing while I'm working, whether it's a movie, TV series, music, whatever. Yeah I'm one of those people. Since I only have a tiny laptop computer, all this has to be compressed on this screen. I'll invest in a dual screen machine soon enough. What a joyous day that will be, Photoshop on one side, reference and stoned Sir Michael Caine on the other.
2. Navigator helps me move around my painting, especially when I'm zoomed in at the later stages. It's just easier to get to where you need to go rather than clicking and dragging across miles of pixels with the hand tool. These three menus are hot keyed to f1, f2, and f3 respectively, so I can pull up the one I want when I need it, or hide them if they get in the way.
3. History lets me maneuver through my last 20 moves to spot exactly where I recently fucked up.
4. Can't paint in Photoshop without the help of trusty layers. Every time I need to try something new, or am unsure if something will work or not, I do it on a new layer. If it works, I merge it down, if not, I can throw it away without a second thought.

• 4a.  Another benefit here is the ability to organize your painting. As you can see, I started the initial painting with lineart on a new layer (now lowered to 70% opacity for the final painting), color rough underneath the lineart to give me somewhere to start from, and then my paintover layer on top of the lines and color when I'm satisfied with the beginning stages. Because I do color and value at the same time, I also keep a desaturation layer mask that I can turn on and off on top of everything else so I can make sure everything still makes sense at a black and white stage.

5. I like the keep my artboard dark for some reason. It just helps me evaluate values better I guess.

Ah, damn, more text walls. Sorry. Painting time.

Mmkay, same thing as before. Big brush, mediumish flow, stay zoomed out. Basically I'm just fleshing out the groundwork I've laid down. What I'm doing here is just color picking colors underneath and painting them over the lines. Every now and then, I'll go and slide the color darker or lighter, and give some more color variation, and definition of form. Already you can see how I'm trying to diminish the tangent of the raven's beak and back.

I'm not concerned with covering every inch of the canvas. There's going to be holes here and there where the original color rough shows through. That's fine. I'm just going to keep painting on top wherever I feel my attention is required, and move on from there. Now that I have the big stuff blocked in, I'm going to go in and start fine tuning things. Here's where I start to worry about edge control; where I want to focus and sharpen, where I want to fade and blend, color temperatures, and so on.

Starting to blend here; remember, 100% opacity and 20-40% flow. All it requires is a little patience to push the colors back and forth. The main reason I enjoy working with flow over opacity so much is that it gives me greater control over my edges. I believe edge control is very important in getting a painting working. It informs the viewer of focus, depth, texture, and generally makes it overall more pleasing to look at.

That's enough painting for now. I should probably do some other homework. See you next time as I continue to slave away!

College-Ruled Universe

College-Ruled Universe is a side scrolling shoot-em-up being developed by Leo Dasso, an award-winning illustration student graduating from the Academy of Art. The game is designed entirely on college-ruled notebook paper with a ballpoint pen. The stylistic approach of the graphics will be reflected by gameplay unique to the genre.

The game is in development, and has a Kickstarter to help raise funds. The expected beta release is July, and the game should reach Android markets in August.

Like what you see? Head over to the Kickstarter page and learn more! There’s many rewards for contributing, including artbooks, posters, and original artwork!

So long and enjoy the gifs!

Tutorial #2

Let's talk about some WORKFLOW! One of the things I do to maximize my time's potential is using shortcuts. Here's a list of hot keys I keep warmed up under my fingers when I'm rendering. Yeah it saves like...a second, but those seconds add up and my left hand needs something to do anyway. It's very disruptive to have to keep reaching up and scrolling through Photoshop's menus for these. Some of these are modified from Photoshop's default hot keys and can't remember which ones are and aren't anymore, sorry...

Tools

b - brush

e - eraser 

alt - eye dropper

ctrl - move
l - lasso

m - marquee

g - paint bucket/gradient

Various functions

x - switch background and foreground colors (I use this often when I need to 'save' a color when blending. This way I don't have to search for a specific color all over again after cycling through thousands of others).

d - returns background and foreground colors to default b/w (just a quick way to get to true white for highlights and such when coupled with x).

]/[ - size brush up and down respectively (I actually have these set to my pen's buttons so I don't need the keyboard to size my brush).

shift+]/[ - adjusts softness up and down respectively

ctrl+-/+ - zoom out and in respectively

ctrl+r - rotate 90 degrees

ctrl+h - flip canvas horizontal (remember to mirror your image early and often to find mistakes easily. Your eyes become used to the image before you and that's how mistakes hide in plain site).

ctrl+t - free transform
ctrl+e - merge layer down
ctrl+shift+e - merge visible layer
ctrl+shift+b - color balance

These are by no means a complete set of Photoshop's myriad magic powers, but these are the ones I use and am most accustomed to. Find the best way to streamline your own workflow and it can do wonders. Also, if you're not hitting save every few minutes, you deserve whatever catastrophe befalls you the night before a deadline. Seriously, whenever you take a five second breather to celebrate a perfect line, BAM! ctrl+s, and you've spared yourself a few gray hairs.

When I'm working, I generally like to keep a few books next to my desk so I can easily access reference for whatever I'm working on. Over my years at art school, I've built a modest little library ranging from anatomy to weapons to San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1800's to watercolor portraits to all sorts of art books, comics, and collections in between. Sure, there's Google, too, but come on. Who doesn't love the feel of paper between their fingers? Next generation's children :(

Man, look at all that text. My bad. Enough babble, let's see how I'll ruin the painting today. After I'm satisfied with the lines, I'm going to experiment with value and color studies. I tend to do these at the same time because I've never been able to get the hang of colorizing a greyscaled painting. Besides, it saves me a step and valuable time and effort. To me, value and color go hand in hand.

So here I have a few scaled down versions of the painting set up so I can play around. I turned down the opacity of the linework layer so I can see what's going on better when I'm working. Now I'm just going to take a big fat brush and play with different lighting and different colors to see what best fits the mood I'm going for. Remember, no commitment here. Nobody sees these early stages so be bold and let it be ugly. Stay zoomed out and squint a lot so you can see if the painting is working from a distance. If the painting isn't making sense from a thumbnail, the battle's already lost.

I've gone and thrown down some colors and played with lighting a bit. I think I like the last one best since it heightens the bleakness of the painting. The colors are most definitely going to shift a bit back and forth when I'm rendering since I like to overdose on Photoshop's color balance a lot, but it's a good starting point. So now that I have something to work from, I'm just going to copy that color layer, paste it back to my full sized document, and scale that up.

After looking at it a bit more, I think he needs bigger hands for anatomical and armor purposes, as well as helping the foreshortening. That raven is also sitting pretty horizontal in the composition. Not necessarily wrong, but I think it'll feel better if it's angled one way or another.

Hm. Yep. Already color balanced it a tad. Anyway, the raven's beak relation to the besagew feels better, like I'm not intentionally avoiding a tangent as before. Well. Kinda pushed it into the tangent, but that can be taken care of in the rendering stage. It does create a new problem, though. Its wings and tail run kind of parallel to the gorget and pauldron now. (Listen to this nerd listing off different components of armor--don't worry, it'll all look more accurate come rendering time). Yes. Parallel. Not too big of a problem, just shift a few angles around and it should be okay. Again, fix it in render.

I'm excusing a lot by putting it off to rendering, I know, but trust me, that's where the magic happens (ie edge control, warping, nudging). There's no point in attempting to fix every little mistake I make in these early stages because the lines are so loose and it all gets painted over in the next stage. I'm just not going to bother.

I mean, look at that. Pretty fugly eh? Man. It's really best for all parties to just stay zoomed out at this stage. I'm already thinking about scrapping this. Anyway, things are bound to get nudged around; I'll take all these minor issues into account and make sure they go in the directions I need them to. Alrighty then. Next comes rendering.

Dying Knight Guy

I'm going to try and do a tutorial here since I get a lot of questions asking about process, brushes, time, etc. Hopefully you'll be able to gleam something from all this and add it to your own repertoire as I have from countless other tutorials. I'm also doing this for my own benefit because organizing and writing all this down for you will help solidify my own understanding of how I work and why I do it.

I'll post as I work so you can see what I do to (hopefully) overcome problems and issues I encounter. Do note that I don't really have a 'set' way of working; I finish pieces in various methods depending on what I'm trying to achieve and time constraints. Basically I use past experiences and knowledge to figure out how to not make the current piece a disaster (well no shit, same goes for everything else right?). I only have a vague idea of what this final image will look like. I hope this works. If not, at least you can all have a good laugh at me.

 

So. Brushes. Let's get this out of the way: the number one question I get of all time is what brushes I use. Photoshop's default hard round brush. None o' them new-fangled Android's Super Brush Pack #4 bullnookie. The default brush does what I want it to, when I want it to. I almost always set the opacity at 100%, and the flow usually varies between 20%-80% for most of the painting. That's all there is to it. Try not to mistake fancy brushes as being the magic behind a good painting. Great artists I follow have a core understanding of principles and use different brushes to their advantage rather than compensation.

I can get a more than acceptable range with just this one brush. When I want hard edges and crisp lines, I turn the flow up. When I want to blend, I turn the flow down so I can eye drop the colors in between the colors I'm blending. Good for smoothing, rendering, and noodling around. Okay fine, hard round isn't the only brush I use. Sometimes I'll turn the hardness down and use soft round...

So I'm going to start on a blank canvas and fill it with a warm gray (meme completely optional). I don't like working on white because the contrast is too stark and distracts me in the initial stages. Filling it with a midtone makes it a lot easier on me. For the lineart and planning, I'm going to use a small brush and turn the flow down to 10% so I can squiggle around without worrying too much about commitment. Not being tied down is key at this stage. Let loose and see what comes to you.

Here's my prompt from Frank Miller: "With bloody hands, I say good-bye." And here's what my first draft looks like:

Something's amiss with those arms of his...the perspective is kind of off. I want them to be sort of raised up so it looks like he's reaching/fumbling at the raven as he dies. At the moment, the whole image is reading a bit flat and he could be laying his arms on his chest. Gonna need to foreshorten them since we're looking down at the figure and he's reaching up. By the way, that darker tone is on a different layer under the lines to help me separate the squiggles from the other squiggles so my eyes don't glaze over.

Remember that any time you foreshorten something, always draw from the front to back. Things get obscured and you don't want to waste time figuring out things that get covered anyway. I've also added where I want to add blood and grass for narrative and clarity's sake; all the little stuff I figure out now benefits me so that the final product becomes clearer in my head.

I'm happy enough with the drawing. I don't want to get too caught up in details at this early stage since everything will be painted over anyway. Usually, I just want to make sure the composition makes sense, the anatomy doesn't look too off, and the perspective is okay before I move on to value and color studies.

Anything you want me to discuss, leave me a comment or email me and I'll hopefully get to them next post. Thanks for looking!

College-Ruled Universe Kickstarter!

Loyal watchers, casual followers, and random drop byers, attention! Please take a minute and check out my friend Leo's Kickstarter project: College-Ruled Universe, an entirely hand drawn side scrolling space shooting arcade game. Sounds pretty fuckin boss, right?

For those of you who don't know how Kickstarter works, potential backers pledge money toward the project with a total goal of $6,000 by April 7th. If the goal is reached, backers get prizes and goodies galore (eg. posters, customized sketches, artbooks), and the game is developed, and happiness is spread all around the globe. If the goal isn't reached, you keep your money, no prizes and goodies will adorn your wall, and the game will be in development even longer.

Please take a peek at the project here and spare a few bucks!

Thanks a million,

Andrew

dun dun dunnn

 Fixed the King Thrushbeard colorscript a bit.

You better watch out, you better not cry

you better start running or you're really gonna die.

Santa's elves are coming

to town.

SAD

Happy Singles Awareness Day! The acronym is SAD? Nice.

Have some (2 minute) naked women.