The explorations of an artloader.
Digital Art Tag
This book cover piece is for a John Fulton short story called “The Bull In The Basement”.
For this one I experimented with a major change in my workflow, namely, I skipped the line drawing phase and went straight into painting shapes.
Continue reading “Project JKF-1: The Bull In The Basement Book Cover”
This book cover is for a short story called The Whisperer by John Fulton.
I tweaked my illustration workflow again here by putting more energy into doing more studies. Each study focussing on one particular component of the illustration.
Some of my mates suggested I tarnish my logo a little since that would be more steampunky so I wondered about using Vertex Painting in Blender.
This Blender Manual page on Vertex Painting gave me a good overview but I also found out that for vertex painting to be most effective, I had to have a lot of vertices.
It was no good having a really simple mesh like the one I started out with so I had to subdivide my mesh a fair bit.
Vertex Painting is awesome though! It allows you to paint directly onto your 3D mesh – a very natural way to add colour to your 3D models.
Now my logo has a nice bit of tarnishing:
Continuing from my Blender planetary ring experiments with the Wood texture type yesterday, I thought I’d try out the Blend texture type.
I created a ring mesh by extrude-scaling a circle.
It took me ages to understand the different Blend texture parameters but I’ve found the following settings yield good ring-like patterns:
I then had to play about with the Mapping – Size X and Y values.
After that I made a concerted effort to finally learn how to use the Blender Colour Ramps (they’re flippin difficult to understand to begin with but once you learn how to use them, they’ll help you to world domination!)
So here’s the result of tonight’s experiment:
I’m working on an environmental picture of the Dark Temple Of Mymosule. It will be dusk and the planetary rings of Undomea are to be visible in the sky.
I’ve decided that I cannot draw the perfect arcs of the planetary rings by hand so I’m breaking out the heavy machinery: 3D modelling in Blender.
Firstly I created a sphere with a ring around it:
Then I positioned the camera as if it were on the surface of the planet looking up at the rings.
After that came the time consuming bit: messing about with the Blender textures.
The following was achieved using a Wood procedural texture along with a lot of tinkering about in the Texure – Mapping section:
Lots more to do but time for bed now – I’m a bit tired after a friendly bout of food-poisoning the other night, but you probably don’t want to hear about that.
I’m done with my winged panther digital painting. The background was done using Manga Studio’s water colour brush set at a really big brush size. I also tried out the snap to grid feature when drawing in the gold border. The total time taken was 5 hours, less than half the time of my previous picture so I think I will stick with this new process.
I’ve given Iyeon the Winged Panther some more definition on his hind legs and also given him some armour. The membrane of his wings now also has a redish tinge to it which I thought would look more natural – not sure when I last saw a winged panther in the wild though …
I’ve been working on a winged panther digital painting. Again I’m skipping the line drawing stage and going straight to painting. Time spent is at around 3 hours so far in Manga Studio.
Here he is, Iyeon the Winged Panther:
After the blocking in of colour I’ve started adding in the shadows for my full body ecomic concept art picture of Benevolen.
This picture has taken me 11 hours so far and has made me realise that my process is very inefficient. I spent a lot of time adding details to the line drawing which is getting painted over anyway.
I think what I should do in future is just do a very quick line drawing and not add the difficult detail till I’m painting in the colours.
For this concept I’ve changed my technique slightly. In Manga Studio, instead of having the line layer on top and the paint layer beneath, I’ve switched it so that the paint layer is on top. This means that instead of having the line layer always visible it will now disappear as I paint over the top of it. I feel that this approach will allow me closer control on areas of detail as I paint whereas before, the line-work was obscuring the paint-work.
Total time spent on this is now at 10 hours and I have just completed “Blocking In” colour:
