Mark McDonnell: Marker Rendering (Part 01 and Part 02)

Here are two new videos that are PART 01 and PART 02 on the topic of MARKER RENDERING for the Animation and Entertainment Industry. These videos talk about how and why markers are such an important medium to use in the quick paced world of the Animation and Entertainment Industry. Whether for a concept design project or for sketching on location, here's some tricks and tips.

PART 01:


and

PART 02:




All my best,

MAC

Rad Sechrist: Head construction

There are a million ways to construct the head. Try mixing and matching as many different approaches as you can, and see what works for you. There is one thing that unifies all approaches. In the end, when you finally put your lines on top, you have to have good design principles.

Florian Satzinger: Toon Gravity

To give my characters better balance and weight I developed a tiny motorpunkish machine and placed it safely underground right under their feet.


All jesting aside, it's a kind of "meta-help" to me. Like an invisible marionette puppet master who's drawing down the characters. The machine illustrates the gravitational pull. The characters get more contact with the ground and stand (to my mind) like trees do. This here is not actually a proper drawing technique but more a "meta-thinking" thing. Technique is not everything - good drawing is also a matter of "meta-control" and playing a little I guess. Have I confused you enough already?

By the by, there is a brilliant post about "thinking around the form" over at Drawn!: CLICK HERE (opens in new window)

Before I forget... shall I post the drawing and colouring process of this fat motorsuit here as well before I archive this piece? Interested?

Update: Here's the entire process from start to finish...

And this is where the inspiration and colours came from:

Source: Modern Mechanix Blog

Leighton Hickman: Painting Parker

My goal during the first sitting is to establish the drawing structure using accurate colors and shapes.

This is my initial lay-in:



First I painted a light wash of the average skin in light, keeping very abstract and loose but defining the overall head placement. I started defining her facial structure by finding the corner of the eyes, then sketching in the basic landmarks of the face. The shadow side of the face was receiving a soft overhead cool fill giving it a slightly greener hue, whereas the shadows on the light side of the face were receiving a warm bounce from the models skin. From there I found the bottom of the nose, muzzle, and chin. I indicated the placement of the cheekbone with a little local color also found in the bulb of the nose and chin. Finally I indicated the placement of the ear and further defined the head by sketching in the shape of the hair, neck and clothes with a few simple brush strokes.

The hard work put in during the lay-in will make completing the painting merely a matter of pushing and pulling at values and modulating hues.



I began this sitting by brushing in a background color to help the shadow side of the face turn. From there I indicated the shape of the lips and ears and began refining the flesh tone on the light side of the face. It was important maintain the redness in the cheeks and bulb of the nose compared to the desaturated yellows and purples in the surrounding areas. I also made sure to keep the greatest contrasts around her left eye to create an emotional focal point.



Here I finally acknowledge the third light source in the image: a low cool rim light I placed behind the model in order to add interest to the shadow side of the face. I indicated the brows and refined the eyes paying attention to the established perspective. In order to frame her face better I brushed in the hair behind the models ear. It’s also important to note that I began paying greater attention to edges at this point by squinting down to see which edges are sharp and which ones are lost.




I focused mostly on my highlights and darkest darks here, trying to capitalize on the established forms by increasing value contrast. The highlights along her cheekbone, brow and eye add a finishing spark to the image that brings it to life. The final stage of the painting is where I refine details: adding anything that’s missing and removing anything that shouldn’t be there.

"Parker"
9”x12” Oil on Linen.

Mark McDonnell: Tonal Drawing 02

Here's a new video that is on the topic of TONAL SKETCHING. I classify it as "Non-Traditional" use of tone. Both Direct and In-Direct lighting was used to tell the best story telling elements within in entirety of the character/drawing.

Above is the final image done during this video. It was about an 8-10 minute drawing.

Best to everyone,

MAC

Florian Satzinger: Drawing And Colouring The Fat Bird

Nine times of ten, my whole drawing and colouring process has just 5 steps:

I put up a small version of the fat bird's PSD file for download (zipped). So you can check out how I have it structured. Just click on the image below:

Octavio Rodriguez: Making faces out of shapes....

Here is one of my methods to quickly knockout some shapes for faces. 

First I'll start to draw a bunch abnormal circles, as below:

Then use those shapes as the foundation:

To make these rough sketches:

Here's another example, just a little more dissected:)

Draw some shapes:

Draw the accents for the face (nose, hair, ears, etc...)

Ending up with this final result:

This process I find helps to keep you loose and also keeps it fun as you discover shapes you wouldn't normally create.  Because your focus is on the specific details from the beginning then looking at the overall design:)

Rad Sechrist: Drawing from memory

This is a good exercise. This was done from life, but it's also good to try it from a photo. Look at a photo for 30 seconds and try to remember a few things and then draw without the photo. The nice thing about using a photo is you can look at it again and check how well you did.

Louie del Carmen: Visual Illustration

Here are some ideas on how to improve visualization in a philosophical and hopefully, practical way. Drawing starts in our minds and it helps to always be in that mind frame even psychologically.

Brian Wong: Drawing videos

Hey everyone, a couple more drawing videos.. I think there's one more left that's being processed.. and after that.. I'll try and make some new ones.. where there'll actually be some kind of commentary on them.

Edit: Here's video 007 as well!

David Colman: Design Basics of Character Costume_Using The Model

It is important to know what is necessary and what is extraneous when dealing with your character's costume. Too often people get caught up in areas that can be omitted. Remember that the drapery draws the form, its tells the story of what the form underneath is actually doing. It can describe the volume, pose and overall feel of the character. Look for points of tension, key bends at the points of articulation, folds that describe the mass underneath,etc. The following is handout that describes the process of designing costume by using a model in a classroom setting. There is no wrong or right way to approach this, or anything for that matter. This is just a 4 part process of thinking that I use.
1:Envision: The forms and pose under the costume by identifying key landmarks displayed by the drapery
2:Drapery Describes(Tells A Story):
3:Designing The Costume and Drapery:Go for Main Shapes and Streamline Folds
4:Dont Be Arbitrary: Use Design Principles when Dressing Your Characters; Straight against curve...etc

I have broken it down into 4 parts but eventually your should see string it all together making the process fluid and lyrical.


I will later explain how the construction of the character's costume can really tell who they are all on its own, and have its own communication channel with the audience all for the sake of the character narrative.

Sam Nielson: Painter Brushes

Let me start this by saying that you will never get what you want out of your brushes in a digital art program (at least not with current technology).  You'll save yourself a lot of frustration if you accept this fact and learn to be happy with what is available.  Also, I'm not going to do a tutorial on Photoshop brushes because I haven't found anything I love yet (though CS5 might change my mind).  This has nothing to do with program superiority, just preference.
Here are some of my favorite brushes.  Most of these are are out-of-the-box brushes that come default with painter.  Before you try any of these out though, use the "Brush Tracking..." feature in Preferences (edit menu on PC, Apple icon on Mac I think).  Do a few strokes in the box typical of your pressure and speed and it will automatically calibrate Painter's settings to match your drawing style.  If you don't do this you may not like the "feel" of a lot of these brushes.

I'll start with the brushes I like to draw with:

The markers make ugly, soft, messy-looking drawings, but they're great for roughing things in, especially because of the way the marker strokes build on top of each other.
I use the round tip pens for inking, but I changed the Minimum Size of the brush to zero so I could have lots of scale variation.  If you make these brushes very big you lose a lot of control.
The charcoal is the closest I've found to pencil if I'm touching up a pencil drawing I scanned in.
The Liquid Ink looks great but is a bit hard to control, especially when the brush size is small.

Next up, my favorite cover brushes.  These brushes have little or no bleed, so it's easy to get fully saturated color:

"Custom 1" (settings below) is essentially an airbrush with the tip changed to something a little harder.  What's nice about this brush is you can use it for soft falloffs like you would with an airbrush, but if you want to get a heavy stroke with a fairly defined edge you just dig into the pressure a bit.  It sometimes has strange artifacts when using on layers of different types (like Gel).

The captured acrylic is my most used brush. I like the combination of the cover style of the brush with just a touch of bleed.  The only problem is it goes very slow if you make the brush very large, so use something else for your large strokes.
I don't use the square pastel often but it's a great brush if you want heavy texture in your strokes.  I often use the fade tool (Ctrl+Shift+F) to get lighter strokes since it's at full opacity.

My favorite "painterly" brushes have heavy blending at low pressure and apply color at high pressure:

I don't particularly like the Smeary Round but I included it because a lot of people I know do like it.  I never got very good at oil painting and it feels a lot like oil painting to me: everything just smears together.  I bet you could get great results with it if you were patient.
Custom 2 (settings below) is a very digital-looking painterly brush, but it gives such smooth yet slightly varied results that it can be really appealing when used correctly.  This is very similar to the brush Ryan Wood uses and until a couple years ago was one of my most-used brushes.

The Loaded Palette Knife is a lot of fun and gives a lot of texture and direction to your strokes.  The only change I made to this brush was setting the Angle of the brush to the "Bearing" of my pen.  This only works with Intuos pens.
Custom 3 (settings below) is about halfway between the palette knife and Custom 2.  I haven't used this one much lately but it's a great brush (I'd forgotten, but this tutorial reminded me) and I think I'll try to use it more often.

There are two other brushes I occasionally use:

The Glow Brush is great for glowing things.  Don't overuse it because it starts to look like cheap trickery pretty fast.
The Digital Watercolors are really nice for initially applying color over drawings.  I know Painter has some super-advanced watercolors now, but the old digital watercolors are faster and more approachable.  Just remember "Dry Digital Watercolor" in the Layers menu when you're ready to paint on top of them.

One final note:  Even the best brushes won't make you a better artist.  What brushes can do for you:
1-Speed up your process of applying and mixing color
2-Add visual interest with your brush strokes and layering of strokes
However, I've found that 1 and 2 don't usually go well together.  In fact, usually the more interesting a brush looks, the harder it is to paint with and vice-versa.  So adjust your expectations accordingly: if you prefer quick and easy-to-use brushes like me, don't be terribly surprised when your final results look like the digital airbrush job on some guy's truck.  Or, like me, you can just accept the cheapness of the results and be happy with the extra time you have because of it.  But if you really want things to look great, you need a lot of patience.

Brian Wong: Drawing videos (shape)

Just another video but this one was using more of a shape based approach to the drawings... (though some of the drawings in the end went back to the regular approach)

Also just a note, I've created a new channel for all these videos... so all of the videos are in one easy to find place.. (was using my friend's account for the first 3 videos before)

Brian Wong: Drawing videos

Not sure if people were interested.. but..here's sort of a follow up on my previous post.. just thought I'd show some videos of my process of sketching on location.. I have a couple more that are still being processed, but here's the first 3.

EDIT: forgot to mention.. the 3rd video (003) has a brief part at the beginning where the camera tilts up and shows the lineup that I'm looking at..

Sam Nielson: Another painting process-adding color to grayscale

I know a lot of people who like to paint their values first in black and white and then apply color to their values.  I've never found an ideal way of doing this, but I've learned a couple tips that help it work out a little better.
First off, I don't let any of the values get too dark, except where I want things to drop completely into shadow (ie. black)  In this case, I lightened the "grayscale" image before applying any color to it.  You can see the original values I painted on my blog.  I usually don't spend a ton of time working detail into the values because I often have to paint in all that detail again when I get to the colors.

Then, I use a multiply or gel layer to control values.  The "Color" or "Colorize" layer types often result in values different than what I intended.  Painting a "Gel" or "Multiply" layer with bright colors will gives a similar result, but I like the option of bringing the values down where things aren't working out.  This is what the layer looks like when it's over a white canvas (or a white layer between the canvas and the color layer, that way I can just change visibility if I need to pick colors off the canvas).  Notice that I put in color changes from light to shadow; otherwise, the image looks like you've colorized a grayscale image because all the light has a uniform color.

This is what the image looks like with the colors applied over the values.  I usually only take this coloring step so far---it's useful for blocking in big colors and even playing with the values a little, but once it's looking pretty good I collapse the image so I don't have to wrestle with the layers anymore.

Now that the image is flattened, I use a "Screen" layer to put in light reflections and a "Lighten" layer to add some sub-surface scattering.  Then I collapse again and use a small brush to paint in all the details.

So when should you use this method?  Sometimes it's easier to handle the values separately from the colors, especially when your lighting is fairly simple but you've got a difficult composition.  Another time it's useful is if you want patterns or value changes across a surface without messing up the values (painting these things across a lit surface can be a pain to figure out).

The reason I don't often use it is the pain of dealing with the value shifts when colorizing.  If I already spent a lot of time working out the values, I don't want to work all that out again.  If the values are very detailed I sometimes feel like I'm painting the whole thing twice.  However, this process suits some people's patience and way of thinking so hopefully it's worth sharing anyway.