bags 2d art: mars 2013

lördag 16 mars 2013

CRAIG MULLINS TUTORIAL from "gfxartist.com" nr:4 "Myth"

DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER!

I did NOT write these, nor create any art for these tutorials!!

I take NO credit for them what so ever!

I chose to mirror them here because the original site died.

These mirrors are completly NON-COMMERCIAL, I do not make any money from these, nor do I EVER intend to!

It's just a shame these tutorials haven't been mirrored until now, many art students have learned great lessons from these since their original posting. (I know, the "gunman" tutorial is mirrored on another site, but without the pictures that go with it, hence why ill make my own mirror, but with the pics)

Im not sure if im breaking any "copyright laws" by mirroring these (i urge you to create your own mirrors, that way they'll hopefully never disappear from the internet (again), but they'll stay up here until I get an angry email from someone who "owns" these tutorials, until then: enjoy!

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Illustrated with a few pictures, Craig describes how he made this promotional piece of artwork based on the style and design of Frank Frazetta for the game Myth II by Bungie. Excellent Tutorial. To see a super high resolution JPG of this image click here. (2000x3000 pixels. 1MB)

low res

high res (Bag's note: high res added here cause link in text is dead)

The style of the art and design of Myth 2 are based a genre of fantasy art that was first created by Frank Frazetta back in the 50's and 60's. He has influenced many artists over the years. Frazetta started as a comic book artist and worked in black and white. You can see how Frazetta's painting style was influenced by the comic style, just black and white with no gray. There is usually one light source and the shadowed sides of forms are flat. No fill light or secondary light sources or ambient fill. It is very dramatic and the resulting 2-d shapes are very strong and well designed, again, like good comic art. Many times the boundaries of objects are lost as they overlap and create one big shape. I try to work without "losing" areas in shadow- there is always some texture and detail. I hope it resembles good photography or "well exposed" in other words. But I do lose some of the strong shape design, and that can lessen the graphic impact of an image. My challenge here was to make an image that alludes to Frazetta's style without duplicating it.

The first image shows how I start blobbing paint around and see if anything emerges. You really have to have an open mind and not worry if this takes awhile. You can start with a very low rez file at first, even a couple of hundred pixels. Once your composition is set, then you can resample as high as your hardware allows. Since there are no details or other specific textures or edges, resampling does not lessen quality. I like to work at 3000-5000 pixels.

I imagine most people are more comfortable starting with line, since line is what they usually start with. I like to start with solid areas of value and color. Most linear styles use a line to delineate the edge or silhouette of a form, so why not use a block of value to do the same thing? Maxfield Parrish, a great illustrator, could not draw a figure without doing a paper cutout first. We all have our neuroses. I like to combine shape, color and value at first, as opposed to separating them. It can be more complex, but when you are squibbing around with paint looking for something, it can help something emerge that might not have otherwise.

It is important to get rid of the white of the "paper" right away, so you can start comparing values. I like to work from a middle value to lighter and darker. You might even fill the gray with a texture, creating something like Canson paper. Stretch it, invert it, run a filter, flip it, whatever. It is so easy to do digitally that it doesnÃt make sense to not play with it. The best thing about digital painting is that no change is permanent, and you can go back to any stage at any time. Also, there is no "media buildup," i.e. in traditional media things can get thick or abused very quickly. You can paint endlessly, and on floating layers. If you are a traditional artist, learn to take full advantage of this.

The three versions you see here are a good representation of the stages a painting goes through. As you can see, things can change quite a bit, either from client input or your own ideas. One good trick is to flip the image. You will see it "for the first time" all over again

When you can see something emerge, slowly begin refining. Many times it helps to use an adjustment layer and take the contrast out of the image to create area of activity contrasting to one of flatness. Take the contrast down on the whole image, and painting on the mask, bring back selected areas that will be lighter. Think in terms of big shapes, the overall design of light and dark. Don't get bogged down in detail at the beginning. When I was a kid I would start at the upper right hand corner of a picture and paint it finished all the way down and across. It was difficult to break that habit, to try to think simply and broadly at the beginning. If you don't, the image will not be well "designed," and whatever care in the finish and fine rendering you put into it will not be to the greatest advantage. You have seen art that looks photographic, but was somehow missing something? The art lives in the big shapes. Sometimes simplifying makes things much better. Can you increase the contrast of an image until it is just black and white and have it still look good?

If you are having problems with something specific, Is the structure (drawing) correct? Lay some section lines out if you are not clear. You have to have a clear mental picture of what your forms are. If they are correct, do the values describe them? Analyze the direction of light and what your values are describing. Play with color only after structure and value are correct. Convert a copy of your painting to HSB and look at the B channel. It is kind of like troubleshooting a computer- isolate the variables until the problem is identified. The archer above was giving me trouble, so I did a drawing on paper and worked it out that way.

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CRAIG MULLINS TUTORIAL from "gfxartist.com" nr:3 "Revising Golongrias Picture"

DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER!

I did NOT write these, NOR create any art for these tutorials!!

I take NO credit for them whatsoever!

I chose to mirror them here because the original site died. (gfxartist.com)

These mirrors are completly NON-COMMERCIAL, I do NOT make any money from these, NOR do I EVER intend to!

It's just a shame these tutorials haven't been mirrored until now, many art students have learned great lessons from these since their original posting. (I know, the "gunman" tutorial is mirrored on another site, but without the pictures that go with it, hence why ill make my own mirror, but with the pics)

Im not sure if im breaking any "copyright laws" by mirroring these (i urge you to create your own mirrors, that way they'll hopefully never disappear from the internet (again), but they'll stay up here until I get an angry email from someone who "owns" these tutorials, until then: enjoy!

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Ok this time I will describe how I took someone else's drawing and developed it a little further. The original image here was done by Golongria and it struck me as something that had potential. The hair and pose overlooking the ocean were appealing to me: the image told a story.

My first idea was to lower the eye level so the viewer is more on the same level as the character. This allows us to see into the distance as I imagine the character to be doing. The eye level in the original pic is much too low. If we accept the viewer as looking down on this plane, the horizon would be well off the top of the picture. Also, the silhouette becomes much stronger because the contrast between the figure and the background is higher. There is also contrast in materials, as the textural ground and figure contrast with the relative flatness of the sky. If I had kept the original higher eye level the horizon would have been lost off the top of the picture.

I did a rough line sketch in a mask channel and then put a flat color in the background and a flat color in the foreground on a separate layer. This way I could add and subtract from the silhouette easily. I find that this additive and subtractive approach is very helpful in giving variety to your shapes, and can be used not only in drawing outlines, but in general painting as well. But down a big shape, and cut away at it.

The first rule- get rid of the white of the paper fast and work out the big areas as soon as you can. Beginners (I did this too!) like to start at one corner and finish as they march across the image. Don't think of things as objects that need to be separated logically. What would you really see? Look at the leg and ground- the edge is lost where they share the same value and color. This is another mistake beginning painters make- edges and boundaries where the eye would see none. I see it a lot in 3-d work as well.

At night look at some trees where they meet the sky. Because the light level is low, the edge is softer than it would be in the daytime. The eye has a harder time differentiating two values in lower light. So in the shadow side of an object, the edges tend to be a little softer. This is probably the most important determining factor of edge quality. Look at a good head painting: the shadow side has softer transitions. The softest edges area probably where the hair meets the background in shadow. In places you might loose that edge entirely! Most beginners think "there's the hair, and there is the background, there has to be a separation there somewhere." This is where painting from life would help. I did this image from my head, but I could not have without a lot of life drawing and painting.

There are other considerations about edges as well. There is a hierarchy of edges in every image. You play up the sharpness of some edges and some fall away. Yes it is a matter of contrast, but also a matter of manipulating the viewer, and part describing materials. The spear is sharp and precisely drawn: this by contrast gives the figure a softer appearance, feeling more like flesh. The hair is softer still. If you were rendering a face, you could play up the differences between hair, soft fatty tissue, bonier areas, metal implants, etc.

Another consideration is to play up the difference between form and cast shadows. Since the lighting is diffuse, or from a large source, as opposed to a point source, this is not really an issue, and if you don't know what I am talking about, we will get to that subject in a later column!

In many Frazetta paintings the feeling of action and tension is accentuated by hiding the far arm or leg behind the body. This is good example of what is left out is more effective than what is included.

Also in the interest of simplicity I only included the most important landmarks of the body, the rib cage and then the arm and shoulder on top of that. The body bends below the ribcage. The weight of the body is being transferred through the shoulder to the arm and out to the hand on the spear. This is causing the arm and shoulder to ride up and around the ribcage. It is important to show this to give the body a feeling of weight, and in this case, a feeling of fatigue.That the hair is stringy and matted also helps here.

I work a lot with silhouettes and if you look at the figure and the ground, they function together as one. I saw the body emerging out of the ground as one shape, and as you can see the edge between the leg and the ground is totally lost.

I had originally planned to play up the texture in the body to contrast with the flatness of the sky, but I ran out of time (I loose interest when the problem is solved in my head, or in this case, about an hour). The hazy sky is like a summer afternoon thunderstorm, with the humidity in the air exaggerating the atmospheric perspective. This gives the feeling of a large open space, and makes the figure seem more alone in a large universe. I will talk more about atmospheric perspective in a later column. The ocean in the lower right is out of focus, which is actually an error, but it didn't bother my eye too much. Those rocks are a lot closer than the sharp edge of the clouds in the upper left, and they should both be in focus. I don't play with depth of field much, as it is a characteristic of bad model photography or bad lighting that requires the lens of a camera to be opened up for a given film speed. There are much better ways to show depth.

The low level of lighting dictates a similarity in the basic color and contrast of materials. The wooden shaft of the spear, the metallic head, skin, hair etc. are all the same color and value, or nearly. As I said before, I did differentiate them with edge quality, but if there was more light on the subject, you would see large differences in the treatment of materials. The edges would also sharpen up as well. That's about it for now, I know this is a sketchy pic to gab about this much, but I hope you have gotten something out of this ramble. I will have a plan in the future and keep each column to a specific subject, and not all over the map as I have done here. Maybe with that degree of focus I can communicate better.

I have to find my audience here, I am not sure that people understand what I am talking about always, so let's have some feedback if people feel I am too technical or to simple. What would people like to hear? Technical stuff or drawing and painting stuff? If you know me, you know I have an opinion on that one :)

Craig Mullins / www.goodbrush.com

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CRAIG MULLINS TUTORIAL from "gfxartist.com" nr:2 "Macross"

This image was commissioned by the Bandai toy company through the advertising firm of J Walter Thompson. The Art Director was Demian Fore, for JWT.

The original schedule for this job was pretty tight, about a week, and I had other work to do as well. In the end, I ran over a little bit, but it was OK. The printed ad is 300 dpi and 12 inches tall, so resolution was not that high, or lower than what I am normally painting at these days, so that was also fine. The one rub was that I had one picture of the subject only, and I had to use it because of the time it would take to regenerate another view. It could have been done from this one angle, but there might have been some guessing, but I guessed a lot in finishing the plane anyway. Time was the problem. Here is the original scan provided by Bandai:

Demian Fore requested that the Macross (as I now understand it to be called) be taking off after laying waste to a city. The lighting in the original scan is diffused from above, so nothing of that image was used other than the silhouette and drawing. I cut it out with a pen path and got to work and completed this sketch in a few hours.

As is usually the case, I like the sketch better than the finish, and try to keep some of the spontaneity, but I am not always successful. The challenge was to reverse the lighting on the vehicle and set an overall mood. I changed the angle on the feet so that the exhausts pointed downward. I felt that this gave the feeling of a liftoff rather than a slowing of forward momentum in preparation to land. Damian felt that the rockets should feel as if they were housed in the legs, so I kept the exhausts in line with them. Overall, the sketch was approved.

I then started looking more carefully at the original scan of the plane. There are many strange things with the perspective, with things not lining up and vanishing points all over and many different eye levels. Wishing again I could start over, but time moving on, I had to go forward. I tried to establish what type of lens was used to match my background to, and it looked like a very wide angle. I cheated the background because the vertical vanishing point was so close it would have looked too forced to use the correct one. More fudging. Here is a way you can find the vanishing points of something- just paste a lower rez version in a big grayscale file and line up points until you have convergence. Then trace the left and right with a horizontal line and you have the eye level (if they match). They usually don't match exactly and this is due to distortion or bad construction. As you can see I fudged the eye level up in the final for design reasons. I don't like doing this, as it really hurts the image, but sometimes you have no choice

I then generated a proper grid in a 3-d program using the above image and a guide, so at least the city would be consistent with itself.

I toyed with the idea that the plane would not share the same grid with the city, but once again time restrained. But I guess the plane might be facing straight down the street, it makes some sense. It did simplify things somewhat. I then pasted the grid into a channel and got to work painting.

As the worked progressed, there was some concern about the finish on the plane, and about the overall darkness of it. I have been getting a lot of complaints about my work being "too dark" lately. It comes in cycles and tends to be self-reinforcing. My portfolio has dark images, people who want dark images tend to hire me. I am actually a pretty happy guy, honest, I can paint in a higher key, no problem*. So I brightened up things a bit as I went along. Also, I left the highest values to the end, as I work from the middle valued generally. So a half completed image may feel matte and a little dark. I liked the plane a little beat up, like it needs a shower after leveling a city.

I would have liked to include more flying debris, as the camera is on the ground and in the wash of high-speed exhausts. For this amount of chaos, I would expect to see all kinds of stuff in the air. But this would have obscured the plane somewhat, so I dropped the idea.

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CRAIG MULLINS TUTORIAL from "gfxartist.com" nr: 1 "Gunman"

DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER! DISCLAIMER!

I did NOT write these, NOR create any art for these tutorials!!

I take NO credit for them whatsoever!

I chose to mirror them here because the original site died. (gfxartist.com)

These mirrors are completly NON-COMMERCIAL, I do NOT make any money from these, NOR do I EVER intend to!
It's just a shame these tutorials haven't been mirrored until now, many art students have learned great lessons from these since their original posting. (I know, the "gunman" tutorial is mirrored on another site, but without the pictures that go with it, hence why ill make my own mirror, but with the pics)

Im not sure if im breaking any "copyright laws" by mirroring these (i urge you to create your own mirrors, that way they'll hopefully never disappear from the internet (again), but they'll stay up here until I get an angry email from someone who "owns" these tutorials, until then: enjoy!

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Here is an excellent look into the early stages of Craig's work, beginning at how he establishes a loose sketch and progresses into how he lays out broad areas of light and shadow.

Draw your outline or silhouette in a mask channel so you can use it as a selection to paint through and behind throughout the process of painting.

Now go to your RGB color channel and make a gradation like you see here. I have in mind a dark green picture with a diffuse overhead source. Keep in mind the type of lighting when you make this grad, as it will direct everything you do from here on out. Don't go from very bright to very dark, you can do that later if needed. Of course you can experiment. Have fun, it can work, this is only one way.

Load your silhouette mask channel so that your figure is selected. Use the levels or curves to darken this area. Since you are darkening a range of pixels, you still have a nice grad in the figure, it is just on a lower scale.

Inverse your selection so the BG is selected. Using a paintbrush se to low opacity or using a wacom, make a few abstract shapes behind your figure to suggest something behind. I varied the color a little here and there. Keep the shapes big and general, no rendering yet. You can see that I made a lighter warmer grad at the bottom to indicate light hitting the floor. A soft blob for the shadow from the figure. I put in a vertical circular step to add a little dimension

Inverse your selection so the figure is selected again. I was losing the outline of the figure at the top, so I lightened it up a bit with a big soft brush. It is not really needed, but I thought it might help.

Now the form definition begins on the figure. You have the middle tone created by the initial grad, so now you have to go up in value and down in value to show the form as revealed by the overhead light. So the logic here is a surface that is horizontal is in halftone and will be left alone. The darks are surfaces that face downward or are recessed in between objects or anything that is in shadow. Block these in with nice big general shapes. Do not make them black, remember, we are working from the middle values out, we have not gotten to the dark darks yet.

Now go a little lighter than your midtones and any surface that faces upwards gets a lighter tone. I also added a few more darks here and there. Sometimes going lighter suggests where your darks can be refined a little more and vice versa. Work them back and forth. I also changed the basic tone of the weapons, as the would be of a different material from the armor suit. A little darker and a little cooler. Then do the darker and lighter block in procedure on the weapons as well.
Now you can make your darkest darks. The real darks come where surfaces come together and shade each other from all light, both direct and ambient. Also dark surfaces in shadow can go very dark.

Now go up to your lighter lights and you are about done. Now that all your major values are about where they should be, you can go on and render till you drop. I added a little definition of material to the floor. Keep in mind that you can keep any and all steps on separate layers if you want. Don't be afraid to work slowly at first. The better your block in the less noodling it will require later, and if you do detail it out, it will be on a solid foundation.(for more tutorials go to gfxartist.com or click here)

vistit Craig Mullins' website: goodbrush.com

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onsdag 13 mars 2013

stuff

just a quick

bags 2d art