March 2008 Archives

Third week of workshop and things are getting serious. This week is about direct color painting, without using a black and white version as a base.

A few observations after completing the two required portraits for this week:

- You have to block correct shades in key parts of painting and reuse from picking colors instead of going back to palette. Increases consistency of colors across painting.

- Again, brush choice is critical. As is calibration of tablet (firm tablet, flat brush with 40% opacity and 40% resat).

- Inject color from background in darker area of the portrait. Do not hesitate to inject bright colors in cheeks, nose and ears - we have a natural tendency to use muted tones.

- Pick one side for details (light or dark side) and improve details on that side only.

- Pay attention to structures in painting. Do not paint shaded areas in isolation. See the whole interaction between parts of the portrait,

Week two of the workshop detailed the techniques of painting in black and white to capture Value and then, add a color layer over the black and white painting as a Digital Glazing.

It was very inspirational to see how far everybody progress just by watching a few video tutorials.

A couple of things I picked up during this week :

- Don't get discouraged when the painting is ugly and wrong. It will stay wrong for a long time but eventually things work out. Don't give up before they do.

- Work on a small size with large brush early. Things all into place a lot easier if the painting looks good at smaller scales.

- Use few brushes (one) and few colors. Limitations increase creativity.

- What made a huge difference was the selection of a brush with the right properties (sharp edges on the outside and soft transparency along the flow of painting).

- Nail the eyes, nose and lips early. The rest of the painting can be very forgiving if the facial expression is just right.

- Keep turning the color layer on and off as you go to make sure you don't lose the Value you blocked in black and white.

Lessons from week one of the workshop - use a big brush, color is hard, ears are evil.

The main lesson from the week was to let go of self imposed constraints and transform my workflow into something more fluid.

No more first sketch of the figure - instead paint with the right value directly and refine the model as you go.

I still rely too much on switching between painting and blending, which makes everything look to washed out and killed many areas that should have received more value. Instead, I should use one brush only and play with size and opacity.

The interesting part is to watch how much progress can be made simply by looking at other people's intermediate paintings and practicing again and again.

Don suggests to spend time to make a dozen drafts of a portrait, one hour each, before jumping in to the final version. It will be difficult to find that kind of free time but I can tell already that taking the time to do a few versions helps tremendously.

I got the chance to sign up on a workshop from CG Society before seats ran out - Face and Figure Painting with Don Seegmiller.

Don Seegmiller is widely known for his professional digital painting work around Corel Painter. His long experience with traditional painting and teaching head and figure painting at the Brigham Young University Fine Art and Graphics Departments will make this an exciting course to follow.

Hopefully, this will be boost I needed to get back to more creative work and reduce my dependence on 3D elements in my scenes.

Edit: I started an album at flickr - CG Workshop 2008 - to document my progress during this very exciting workshop.

I had to remove my short tutorials about Vue for the time being.

Some were obsolete given the progress of Vue since I wrote them and the others seriously need to be redone.

In the meantime, I invite you to check out the Community Page of the Vue forum at Renderosity for links to tutorials, tips and resources regarding Vue.