CG Tricks and Treats

The Figure Painting workshop I just took got me thinking about motivation - how long it took me to decide myself to start painting and how I can be motivated to continue now that I started.

Here are a few resources I came across.

Put your money where your mouth is by Ben Mathis - a good reminder of how easy it is to slow yourself down and think about doing things to improve your situation instead of actually doing something about it.

Along the same line, this video of Digital Painting with Bobby Chiu is a good reminder that motivation starts within yourself. His other videos are great tutorials as well as thoughtful ramblings about creativity, motivation, and dreams.

Continuation from week 6 - this week is about practicing the later stages of painting.

Time to zoom in, use smaller size brushes, smooth things out with a light blender at low opacity and add edges and other details.

The problem at this stage is to always remember to zoom in and out to preserve the larger relationships between structures in the figure. The 'thumbnail test' is a good way to make sure the painting is on the right track - reduce your image through smaller and smaller sizes. It should be working at every level. If it doesn't, the areas to work on will just jump at you.

Similarly, flipping the picture horizontally helps to uncover issues in the painting. It's amazing sometimes how well these tricks work.

Still, the goal at this point of the workshop is not to recreate the exact same image. Creating skin tones with a limited palette is a good way to force yourself to create a painting that works on its own and not necessarily a perfect copy of an original scene.

There will be plenty of time after the workshop to either push the realism further or just experiment with more abstract techniques.

Last week before starting the final full figure paintings.

The focus of this week is to continue with quick one hour studies to practice the first stages of painting - blocking the shape, tones and shadows. If feel this is something I need to practice more at this point, than the final stages of adding details and smoothing out a finished portrait.

Each study forces me to focus on shape and color, and leave details for later stages. When I start getting into details too early, it is easier to wipe them out with a few broad strokes and move on.

It is interesting at this point to look back and measure the difference in results in just a few weeks of practice. I am beginning to see shapes better - how colors,shades and shapes are related. The temptation is great to paint each area in isolation, whereas they are really part of a whole.

Another major change in how I see painting now is in how colors work together. How colors from the background find their way in hot or cool areas of the figure depending on the lighting conditions.

Many times I find myself applying the same principles of Perceptual Organization I learned in college, to suggest details with a few touches with the right alignment or contrast.

During this week's research, I found very interesting tutorials up at GFXArtists and ImagineFX.

In particular, some tutorials by Ron Lemen about Skin Color (Part I and Part II) and about value.