Printed out a ref photo a couple times in non-repro blue and tried inking over it in different styles using brush/crowquill, in another stab at one day maybe acquiring some skill at inking.
I'd be lying if I said I thought any of these are particularly successful either as representations of the intended style or as drawings in general, but I think the practice is helping (though I wish my hand would catch on when my brain tells it to stop wobbling all over the place. Kinda hoping that just practice will solve that physical issue, but maybe I should just get one of these things and see if it helps.)
Also I always try to not complain about it because I always think it comes off like I'm just making excuses, but I swear my scanner totally blows and makes me completely hate everything I scan, and trying to fix it with Photoshop magic never seems to totally work. What scanners do you guys use? My current one is a Canon LiDE 200, and I wouldn't be too surprised if it's just terrible all around since it was the cheapest scanner I could find at the time, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the problem is with me not knowing the ways of scanning/cleanup magic, or if I'm just having a negative reaction because I'm getting fresh eyes on it, and the work was never all that to begin with.
@Angel_of_Bacon - I use the exact same scanner, except the 210 version. I imagine they're almost identical, though.
Have you disabled all of the automated garbage? Like auto-adjustments for value and color? Because those ruin my images 100% of the time if they're on. I turn absolutely every single adjustment off and just do them by hand in Photoshop where I have much more control. Is there something in particular that is changing when you scan your pieces? Are you losing texture detail or something? I haven't noticed anything wrong with my scanner, only that the default software that comes with it needs to be burned and sent to outer space.
@NightDragon spoilered to not distract from arty-arts.
I've got a very limited set of options to play with- I thought at one point there were more options, but maybe that was an older scanner/version of Photoshop/version of Windows, I dunno. So if you look down at the picture, that's the sum total of options I have to fiddle around with, unless I'm missing a key software component here.
So maybe it's making a bunch of crappy automatic decisions that I apparently have no control over, or maybe this is as raw and unadjusted as it gets, I honestly have no idea.
The issue I have is that the scanner tends to add a lot of grain and 'speckliness', and it blows things out in a very unflattering way.
Below you can see a side-by-side comparison of raw, unaltered scans next to a quick snapshot from my phone. Beyond just being lighter overall (which means it always loses a good deal of the lighter values from blowing everything out), you can see in the inked hair how much contrast there is in the darks- certainly there is value variation there, but the iPhone picture is a lot more accurate to how the picture actually looks- those dark values are much much closer together, and read mostly as a single value rather than this exaggerated 'damascus steel' effect occurring in the scan.
Because it doesn't pick up any data in the subtle light values in the first place, I can't adjust those back into existence (and as far as I can tell, the scanner brightness/contrast settings are only software settings and don't change how it's scanning the picture in), and trying to flatten out those dark values, and make the darks dark enough without crushing out detail elsewhere, is a huge pain in the ass. So the raw scan I hate, and trying to adjust I to make sure the whites are white and the blacks are black, tends to make everything wind up having this unpleasant, severely contrasty look (as you can see above).
So maybe I'm just dumb, but I honestly think I might get better results setting up some lights and shooting the work with my DSLR, where I'd have a lot more control over what's happening with the hardware.
Maybe this is just what I get for getting a scanner that I expect is designed mostly for documents rather than photos/art.
Or maybe the art just sucks to begin with and my mind is scrambling to find flimsy excuses, I dunno.
@Angel_of_Bacon what does that "custom settings" option allow you? My scan software is different, but I usually go for custom options or advanced options if they're given to me....just because they tend to be truly "blank slate" settings, whereas the other types have default things built-in.
But yeah, the blowing out the darks might be kinda standard, just because the light from the scanner itself is as bright as the goddamn sun. Every scan I've ever created requires cleanup in Photoshop and a brightness/darkness adjustment. I usually need to lighten the brights and darken the darks. I don't think that's anything wrong with the scanner itself though.
As for the graininess, you might be getting that from your DPI settings being set to 150, and/or compression. I tend to scan my stuff in at 300 DPI - it makes the compression/graininess show up on a very small scale, which means it isn't at all apparent once I reduce down to 72 DPI for showing the work on the web.
The custom settings option is a mystery, because you select it and nothing happens- no menu, no popup, nothing. So I have no idea what it does.
Also on further investigation I think maybe this is just the default Windows version scanner interface rather than actual driver software, which would explain its barebones-ness. (Oh yeah I usually do set the DPI to 300-600, 150 is just what it defaults to- my screencap was there just to demonstrate that there aren't a lot of options there.)
Maybe the issue is just that I usually scan stuff right after working on the art, and when I'm an 'I'M FINISHED!' mindset I'm in no mood to then have to fiddle with a bunch of curves adjustments and cleanup at that point, and rush through it out of impatience. Maybe the solution is just to take a deep breath and hold off on scanning it until the next day when I'll be less cranky about having to do it. (Still wish/think this thing could be doing a lot better job out the gate, though.)
Lets see if I still remember how to use these image tags.
Also, trying out doodling on my surface pro3 with the new felt tip pen. Diggin' it. Diggin' it.
@NightDragon Nice! Is that from imagination? The lighting on the front shot is super convincing!
Something about the profile, especially in the eyes/brow area looks a bit feminine. At least that's what looks slightly off to me. Might be something else for you!
@NightDragon Nice! Is that from imagination? The lighting on the front shot is super convincing!
Something about the profile, especially in the eyes/brow area looks a bit feminine. At least that's what looks slightly off to me. Might be something else for you!
Thanks for the crit! And yeah, from imagination technically. I used a few different faces for reference.
Trying to do a self portrait each month in 2017. First one I'm 50/50 on, proportions are jacked all over the place & I think I should grow back my beard.
Full Time Artist. Rescuer of Reptiles. Engraver of Things. Occasional Coyote.
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Golden YakBurnished BovineThe sunny beaches of CanadaRegistered Userregular
edited January 2017
I was wondering if anyone here had any advice on lighting multiple characters in a scene? I'm having a hard time getting results I like.
For example, I have a bunch of wacky creatures like this...
And this is what they look like just under regular non-colored lighting and all.
But then, I want to put them in an environment, like a standard blue-ish grey metal spaceship corridor, where there's some colored artificial lighting going on. Maybe paint them with a bit more shading variation so it's not quite as stark and cartoony. I got blue light coming in overhead and some red behind. But I'm having a hard time picking colors for them that help them fit into the scene naturally.
I've tried this sort of thing before but I never get the characters looking like they belong together in their environment. I was wondering if anyone had any advice or resources to look at that would help me with this sort of thing? My first impulse was to throw a hue/saturation layer over everything based on the color of the corridor...
And then overlay patches of color based on the lighting, but... I don't know, I feel like whenever I try to light characters this way they get washed out and flat. I never feel like I've chosen the right colors to shade them in. Any advice would be appreciated!
@Golden Yak
Is this for strait animation, games, or just illustration?
Theres some tradition to having characters cell shaded and popping out from the background, its not always totally successful, but if you do it right it usually works
This is super rough, and I didn't do any shadows, but it sorta shows what I mean. Painted backgrounds and more hard shaded characters give a kinda saturday morning cartoon feel, so it depends on what you are going for.
@Golden Yak
Is this for strait animation, games, or just illustration?
Theres some tradition to having characters cell shaded and popping out from the background, its not always totally successful, but if you do it right it usually works
This is super rough, and I didn't do any shadows, but it sorta shows what I mean. Painted backgrounds and more hard shaded characters give a kinda saturday morning cartoon feel, so it depends on what you are going for.
@Iruka It's for illustration. Currently, my style is more cartoony/cell-shaded oriented - that style is what the professional work I'm doing requires, and I've been drawing that way for a while. But it's mainly been concept art and straight images, for example stuff like this.
It's fine and fun, but it's not really the art I want to be doing. I want to move towards something more heavily rendered - I guess a good example would be like this Torchlight II cover - still stylized, but more realistic in terms of lighting and shading.
I did the characters in toon-shaded style just because it was quickest for me, I put these images together in half-an-hour specifically to make that post, I'm hoping to use them to help find a system for working out lighting before I tackle something else. The background doesn't need to be as detailed, I just want to be able to place characters in a scene and pick how it affects their lighting properly. Just needed a general 'they are standing in X environment'.
You maybe running into a problem where you are looking at the question too narrowly. Your quick application of paint isn't so terribly wrong that it jumps out as a complete lack of understanding. You place characters in a scene by correctly mapping the shadows, color mixing so the base colors seem like they are correctly affected by the tinted light, and differentiating your materials for how they should act in the situation. Its much easier to write that as a sentence than it is to actually do those things though, Which is why its hard to give quick tips.
An easy way to start challenging yourself is seeing how your painting can hold up without lines. Once you take out black outlines, all your forms have to stand up to a lighting scheme that actually makes sense, or else it will look wrong, flat, or unreadable.
The schoolism class was a good collection of exercises and lectures, and I feel like Sam Neilson's sensibilities would apply well to what you might be going for. Otherwise I suggest doing physical studies and trying to replicate the light. If you do some still life drawings, or copy some of the work you are interested in to truly understand how it works, it should put you on the right track.
You maybe running into a problem where you are looking at the question too narrowly. Your quick application of paint isn't so terribly wrong that it jumps out as a complete lack of understanding. You place characters in a scene by correctly mapping the shadows, color mixing so the base colors seem like they are correctly affected by the tinted light, and differentiating your materials for how they should act in the situation. Its much easier to write that as a sentence than it is to actually do those things though, Which is why its hard to give quick tips.
I'm not sure I understand your first two sentences, but the bit I bolded sounds like exactly what I want to learn.
I tried setting up some shapes and lights in 3DS max to see if that would help.
Then I did a bit of painting, focusing on just one character (who has rapidly become my favorite).
Raww
I tried removing the lines as suggested and shading to suggest curves that the lines depicted before.
I feel like I want/need strong edges to details though.
Also took another quick-ish paintover stab. Eliminated a lot of that central white light to better show the blending between light and local color, and to demonstrate the importance of establishing terminators- where the form rolls into shadow- in dealing with multiple light sources. If you've got a red light and a white light hitting the same spot at the same time, they'll add together to have the effect of a pink light, and this can be visually confusing to the viewer- and is also pretty confusing to a lot of artists who try to overpower that white light with the red one, making the area darker rather than lighter. Not adding these lights together or separating them from each other so they don't overlap tends to have the effect of making that red light look more like the area has been spray-painted red, rather than as a red light.
(See that rimlights link for a more thorough explanation).
Doing this has made me realize I really should spend some time working out a thorough explanation of the logic of specular (where the light source is being reflected directly on the object) vs diffuse (where the light is being absorbed by the object), and why exactly it is that if you have a pure green surface lit by a pure red light (or any other set of colors on opposite ends of the color wheel, orange+blue, yellow+purple, etc. ), the diffuse of that object is going to turn out black more or less. I don't really have time for that right now (also I need to go re-read a 5th grade science textbook to make sure I'm getting my terms right), so I hope some of my previous stuff is helpful in getting some of this across- certainly the resources Iruka provided and doing 3d mockups like you've done should prove helpful.
Golden YakBurnished BovineThe sunny beaches of CanadaRegistered Userregular
Thanks @Angel_of_Bacon. I'll be taking on board everything that's been shared here and elsewhere and I'll see what strides I can make in the next few days. It's all been very helpful and I have lots of good stuff to go over.
The wolf thing feels a bit flat, and since it's looping around, makes everything else look a bit odd? Regardless, this looks like Esiotrot drawing am Iruka character like McJohnstable and I APPROVE OF THIS.
Posts
Not really in a place to make a new thread but here's some WIPs & sketches that aren't comic-related (I hardly art outside the comic now):
Georgia O'Keeffe
Be sure to like my Comic Book "Last Words" on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Last-Words-The-Comic-Book/458405034287767
and Magenta the Witchgirl!: http://www.drunkduck.com/Magenta_the_Witchgirl/
I'd be lying if I said I thought any of these are particularly successful either as representations of the intended style or as drawings in general, but I think the practice is helping (though I wish my hand would catch on when my brain tells it to stop wobbling all over the place. Kinda hoping that just practice will solve that physical issue, but maybe I should just get one of these things and see if it helps.)
Also I always try to not complain about it because I always think it comes off like I'm just making excuses, but I swear my scanner totally blows and makes me completely hate everything I scan, and trying to fix it with Photoshop magic never seems to totally work. What scanners do you guys use? My current one is a Canon LiDE 200, and I wouldn't be too surprised if it's just terrible all around since it was the cheapest scanner I could find at the time, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the problem is with me not knowing the ways of scanning/cleanup magic, or if I'm just having a negative reaction because I'm getting fresh eyes on it, and the work was never all that to begin with.
Twitter
Have you disabled all of the automated garbage? Like auto-adjustments for value and color? Because those ruin my images 100% of the time if they're on. I turn absolutely every single adjustment off and just do them by hand in Photoshop where I have much more control. Is there something in particular that is changing when you scan your pieces? Are you losing texture detail or something? I haven't noticed anything wrong with my scanner, only that the default software that comes with it needs to be burned and sent to outer space.
So maybe it's making a bunch of crappy automatic decisions that I apparently have no control over, or maybe this is as raw and unadjusted as it gets, I honestly have no idea.
The issue I have is that the scanner tends to add a lot of grain and 'speckliness', and it blows things out in a very unflattering way.
Below you can see a side-by-side comparison of raw, unaltered scans next to a quick snapshot from my phone. Beyond just being lighter overall (which means it always loses a good deal of the lighter values from blowing everything out), you can see in the inked hair how much contrast there is in the darks- certainly there is value variation there, but the iPhone picture is a lot more accurate to how the picture actually looks- those dark values are much much closer together, and read mostly as a single value rather than this exaggerated 'damascus steel' effect occurring in the scan.
Because it doesn't pick up any data in the subtle light values in the first place, I can't adjust those back into existence (and as far as I can tell, the scanner brightness/contrast settings are only software settings and don't change how it's scanning the picture in), and trying to flatten out those dark values, and make the darks dark enough without crushing out detail elsewhere, is a huge pain in the ass. So the raw scan I hate, and trying to adjust I to make sure the whites are white and the blacks are black, tends to make everything wind up having this unpleasant, severely contrasty look (as you can see above).
So maybe I'm just dumb, but I honestly think I might get better results setting up some lights and shooting the work with my DSLR, where I'd have a lot more control over what's happening with the hardware.
Maybe this is just what I get for getting a scanner that I expect is designed mostly for documents rather than photos/art.
Or maybe the art just sucks to begin with and my mind is scrambling to find flimsy excuses, I dunno.
Twitter
But yeah, the blowing out the darks might be kinda standard, just because the light from the scanner itself is as bright as the goddamn sun. Every scan I've ever created requires cleanup in Photoshop and a brightness/darkness adjustment. I usually need to lighten the brights and darken the darks. I don't think that's anything wrong with the scanner itself though.
As for the graininess, you might be getting that from your DPI settings being set to 150, and/or compression. I tend to scan my stuff in at 300 DPI - it makes the compression/graininess show up on a very small scale, which means it isn't at all apparent once I reduce down to 72 DPI for showing the work on the web.
Also on further investigation I think maybe this is just the default Windows version scanner interface rather than actual driver software, which would explain its barebones-ness. (Oh yeah I usually do set the DPI to 300-600, 150 is just what it defaults to- my screencap was there just to demonstrate that there aren't a lot of options there.)
Maybe the issue is just that I usually scan stuff right after working on the art, and when I'm an 'I'M FINISHED!' mindset I'm in no mood to then have to fiddle with a bunch of curves adjustments and cleanup at that point, and rush through it out of impatience. Maybe the solution is just to take a deep breath and hold off on scanning it until the next day when I'll be less cranky about having to do it. (Still wish/think this thing could be doing a lot better job out the gate, though.)
Twitter
Hello new year
Georgia O'Keeffe
Be sure to like my Comic Book "Last Words" on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Last-Words-The-Comic-Book/458405034287767
and Magenta the Witchgirl!: http://www.drunkduck.com/Magenta_the_Witchgirl/
Lets see if I still remember how to use these image tags.
Also, trying out doodling on my surface pro3 with the new felt tip pen. Diggin' it. Diggin' it.
I'm not 100000% happy with the profile, but............. WHATEVS
Something about the profile, especially in the eyes/brow area looks a bit feminine. At least that's what looks slightly off to me. Might be something else for you!
Thanks for the crit! And yeah, from imagination technically. I used a few different faces for reference.
Trying to do a self portrait each month in 2017. First one I'm 50/50 on, proportions are jacked all over the place & I think I should grow back my beard.
For example, I have a bunch of wacky creatures like this...
And this is what they look like just under regular non-colored lighting and all.
But then, I want to put them in an environment, like a standard blue-ish grey metal spaceship corridor, where there's some colored artificial lighting going on. Maybe paint them with a bit more shading variation so it's not quite as stark and cartoony. I got blue light coming in overhead and some red behind. But I'm having a hard time picking colors for them that help them fit into the scene naturally.
I've tried this sort of thing before but I never get the characters looking like they belong together in their environment. I was wondering if anyone had any advice or resources to look at that would help me with this sort of thing? My first impulse was to throw a hue/saturation layer over everything based on the color of the corridor...
And then overlay patches of color based on the lighting, but... I don't know, I feel like whenever I try to light characters this way they get washed out and flat. I never feel like I've chosen the right colors to shade them in. Any advice would be appreciated!
--edit--
Threw in some more lighting like how I usually do
Is this for strait animation, games, or just illustration?
Theres some tradition to having characters cell shaded and popping out from the background, its not always totally successful, but if you do it right it usually works
This is super rough, and I didn't do any shadows, but it sorta shows what I mean. Painted backgrounds and more hard shaded characters give a kinda saturday morning cartoon feel, so it depends on what you are going for.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Be sure to like my Comic Book "Last Words" on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Last-Words-The-Comic-Book/458405034287767
and Magenta the Witchgirl!: http://www.drunkduck.com/Magenta_the_Witchgirl/
@Iruka It's for illustration. Currently, my style is more cartoony/cell-shaded oriented - that style is what the professional work I'm doing requires, and I've been drawing that way for a while. But it's mainly been concept art and straight images, for example stuff like this.
It's fine and fun, but it's not really the art I want to be doing. I want to move towards something more heavily rendered - I guess a good example would be like this Torchlight II cover - still stylized, but more realistic in terms of lighting and shading.
I did the characters in toon-shaded style just because it was quickest for me, I put these images together in half-an-hour specifically to make that post, I'm hoping to use them to help find a system for working out lighting before I tackle something else. The background doesn't need to be as detailed, I just want to be able to place characters in a scene and pick how it affects their lighting properly. Just needed a general 'they are standing in X environment'.
You maybe running into a problem where you are looking at the question too narrowly. Your quick application of paint isn't so terribly wrong that it jumps out as a complete lack of understanding. You place characters in a scene by correctly mapping the shadows, color mixing so the base colors seem like they are correctly affected by the tinted light, and differentiating your materials for how they should act in the situation. Its much easier to write that as a sentence than it is to actually do those things though, Which is why its hard to give quick tips.
An easy way to start challenging yourself is seeing how your painting can hold up without lines. Once you take out black outlines, all your forms have to stand up to a lighting scheme that actually makes sense, or else it will look wrong, flat, or unreadable.
I used to have along blog post about this from @Angel_of_Bacon, but since we've all updated hosting, I dont have the associated images anymore, I dont know if he ever got them re-posted on the internet somewhere. You could take a look at the schoolism class a group of us were doing for a bit: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/202628/schoolism-lighting-for-story-and-concept-art/p1.
The schoolism class was a good collection of exercises and lectures, and I feel like Sam Neilson's sensibilities would apply well to what you might be going for. Otherwise I suggest doing physical studies and trying to replicate the light. If you do some still life drawings, or copy some of the work you are interested in to truly understand how it works, it should put you on the right track.
Might want to pick up: Color and Light and How to render if you dont have them.
You might also be interested in this program: https://gumroad.com/l/ColorConstructor?recommended_by=collection
I'm not sure I understand your first two sentences, but the bit I bolded sounds like exactly what I want to learn.
I tried setting up some shapes and lights in 3DS max to see if that would help.
Then I did a bit of painting, focusing on just one character (who has rapidly become my favorite).
Raww
I tried removing the lines as suggested and shading to suggest curves that the lines depicted before.
I feel like I want/need strong edges to details though.
This sounds like it would be very helpful. Thanks for the link. I'll take a look at the other links and threads you posted too.
http://www.artofkevinoneill.com/webfiles/Info/colorlightchart.jpg
http://www.artofkevinoneill.com/webfiles/Info/marshtomp_rimlights.jpg
http://www.artofkevinoneill.com/webfiles/Info/severed_bluehead.jpg (This one was done as a response to another poster, for context)
Also took another quick-ish paintover stab. Eliminated a lot of that central white light to better show the blending between light and local color, and to demonstrate the importance of establishing terminators- where the form rolls into shadow- in dealing with multiple light sources. If you've got a red light and a white light hitting the same spot at the same time, they'll add together to have the effect of a pink light, and this can be visually confusing to the viewer- and is also pretty confusing to a lot of artists who try to overpower that white light with the red one, making the area darker rather than lighter. Not adding these lights together or separating them from each other so they don't overlap tends to have the effect of making that red light look more like the area has been spray-painted red, rather than as a red light.
(See that rimlights link for a more thorough explanation).
Doing this has made me realize I really should spend some time working out a thorough explanation of the logic of specular (where the light source is being reflected directly on the object) vs diffuse (where the light is being absorbed by the object), and why exactly it is that if you have a pure green surface lit by a pure red light (or any other set of colors on opposite ends of the color wheel, orange+blue, yellow+purple, etc. ), the diffuse of that object is going to turn out black more or less. I don't really have time for that right now (also I need to go re-read a 5th grade science textbook to make sure I'm getting my terms right), so I hope some of my previous stuff is helpful in getting some of this across- certainly the resources Iruka provided and doing 3d mockups like you've done should prove helpful.
Twitter
hello, it's been a while since I've shown my face around here.
not sure how I feel about this, it's someones WoW character but something feels off about it and I can't really work it out, bah.
I think it was going alright 'til that last one. More study and practice!
Very nice.