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The Inquisition, what a thrill!
Tonkka
Some one in the club tonightHas stolen my ideas.Registered User regular
Some one in the club tonightHas stolen my ideas.Registered User regular
So I've been posting some updates on this in the doodle thread... but I don't think it's a doodle anymore. just wanted to get some help/advice/criticism before I start dropping in background and making the image bigger.
Two things I'm unhappy with or unsure of: the sword effects and the color on the pants. Discuss.
Two things I'm unhappy with or unsure of: the sword effects and the color on the pants. Discuss.
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And yeah, Inquisitors are known to be a bit "flamboyant" in their dress, especially as a puritanical demon hunter like our boy here.
That's that whole having no background dropped in problem I mentioned. He should be stepping up onto something that I just have not yet drawn in.
What setting is this bloke from, by the way? Something of your own?
You can find it here.
With that in mind, yeah, colour scheme is fine, I think.
First thing is anatomy. Nothing on this is correct, its like his bones are melting along with the rest of him. You need to find a reference for this, like say pose yourself. If you say that you purposely made the anatomy wrong because its your "style", its still wrong.
composition as is is just a dude colored in extremely saturated colors on a white background. I know you said it was a WIP and you were going to add in a background, but this brings me to the next problem -
Work in stages. You need to have everything drawn out before you start coloring, and before you even start finishing an area of a painting, make sure to everything just about equally worked on. Build up, dont just skip around. This will cause things to just clash in the end with no uniformity.
And coloring. At this stage I dont think you should be trying to color things digitally, but since you insist heres a couple of things to keep in mind. LIke I said before, work in stages. This will help keep your color scheme together, along with the tones and shades, highlights and shadows. The way you are working now is just asking for trouble. Coloring on a solid white background is going to horribly throw off your since of color, so its best to work on some kind of midtone. The current color scheme isnt working. You picked the brightest colors you possibly could and they just dont go together.
With the lighting you have no lightsource with light coming from every direction. This is realyl bad especially since you have so much chrome. Which by the way, isn't just random shades going everwhere. Chrome reflectes the entire world in it, so again workin in stages will allow you to know what its actually reflecting and allow you to draw it correctly.
The teeth are excellent though.
The folds of the pants look randomly placed too...you might want to find a ref for the pants...fabric is really tough
Color scheme isn't terrible, just make sure that it fits in with his surroundings when it's done.
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I don't understand how you can fully render a character interacting in a scene without having any kind of background. With the lighting you have on him, he'll have to be standing in the middle of a ring of spotlights for your shading to make sense.
I think when it was still a pencil sketch it was probably pretty nice, but your rendering needs a lot of work. Try finding a scene with shading/lighting similar to what you have in mind, and then start trying to apply that kind of exposure, light and shadow to what you're drawing.
As far as the lighting... I got a little carried away. My photoshop experience is limited and I got really excited about certain effects. I do need to work on getting thigs straightened out overall in the sketch stage instead of getting ahead of myself and working outone part that I like instead of getting the whole piece done at once.
Thanks for the comments and hopefully I can work on these problem areas soon!
Like Wakka and Rolo said, you've got a ridiculous number of light sources happening here, few of which actually jive together in a way to legitimately denote any sort of form through contrast.
Now, I know how it is. You color in your local colors (shirt is red, pants are purple, skin is...skin, etc). Well and good. But then you've got all these lines! Oh crap! And they all need to have some kind of shading on them, or else they'll look...unshaded. And they....need to be shaded, right?
So you work on every little bit individually- zoom way in, throw down some shadows, use that "shiny" looking effect you saw in some cartoon or comic somewhere that seemed to work. You shade each piece one after the other, you might as well have every little bit on a task list: "8:00-8:30- shaded folds 28-59". So you get done with all 3000 bits and zoom out and you've got....what? Something that doesn't look like it has any form. "Why not?", you ask, "after all, everything is shaded, isn't it? After all that time I spent, it's just not fair that it doesn't look right!"
Well, what happened was is that you let yourself overcomplicate the situation by a mile. What makes shading work to indicate form isn't the million little tiny bits of shading, it's the major, huge, massive planes- the simple bit of just hashing out where the most significant light source is and isn't hitting the object. Work out the broad solution first, and all those small little bits will follow.
[Disclaimer: The following paintover is meant as a demonstration of how to think about lighting, not an insinuation of "here is how this should look" or anything of the sort.]
As you can see, I attempted to boil down the figure into just the basic planes here- where the light is, and is not hitting the object. Even in this ridiculously paired down state- no belts or wrinkles or fingers or whatever- there is already an indication of form occuring. That's the essential part when it comes to shading- the basic indication of form.
By keeping things simple to begin with, you will have a much easier time making the overall forms work, as doing this will ensure that the object has a good contrast of light and dark, as well as allowing you much more leeway in manipulating the light for whatever dramatic effect you desire to achieve.
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So now the key here is to think less about how you paint a figurine, and more about how to paint what a figuring looks like on the table after it has been painted. Man, I can't even imagine how what I have just written will be helpful. But I have my fingers crossed.
Any suggestions on ways to do this effectively in Photoshop? Please remember that I'm still really new to the digital art thing and am much more adept and mixing paint and slapping it ion the canvas. If I had the means of providing pictures of older work, believe me I would do so.
Thanks in advance!
Do not rely on photoshop's glow tools to do it for you. This includes but is not limited to: Render>Lights, Layer>Blending Options, or even the dodge/burn tools. It always seems like a good idea and a neat effect at the time, but the only time those tools work accurately is if you're designing something that's totally flat, like a logo.
The best way to do a glow is simply to paint it in with the colous you have going already, applying them to the other colours you have going underneath. Take bright colours and blend them in to the picture you already have, using a low opacity so you build up the look slowly. If it's really problematic you can try putting them on a separate Screen layer, but again that can cause some real blending and color banding issues later on.
And easy(er) fix would be having a cherub or bio-nic lacky in the background, and maybe something representing the emporer's word somewhere. Also, some grit, WH40k is the grittiest, darkest fiction i can recollect and it should be represented
It is a beautiful work, and following angels points is definately the way to go, its just that so far, it looks like a FF character with 40k regalia.
Yeah, more dirt... in time...
Needless to say, I think your drawing is excellent. There's always something to work on but you obviously have some excellent artistic skills already.