November 11, 2008

THE GRUNT PROCESS

Hi guys,

Been a hectic week with the workshop and weddings (not my own but one of my best buds) so I am in recovery mode and getting back into the swing of things. The character design workshop went really well, thanks again to: Rachel #1, Rachel #2, Melissa, Bob, Savannah, Ashe, Emily (I believe that was your name but I know it started with an E), Cindy, Derrick, Myra and Stephanie for showing hope. I hope you guys had fun and learned something from me babbling.

Anyways, I started a demo in class on how to color line art and I promised to finish it by this Friday. Well, I like to keep promises and since I did not want to look like a fool I knocked it out last night. Hopefully it turned out well. I have included some process shots for you guys to look at.



So I think what really helped me with this character is that I was watching a WW2 movie while painting him up, this helped me get into the mood of the character and I had reference on hand to look at for colors and such. All in all it took about 3-4 hours to complete him. This is basically the first time I took a character from start to finish entirely in Photoshop.

STEP 1: So I have my loose line art sketch, my main thing in this phase is to get all my shapes and forms working so that this character has gravity to him and feels 3-dimensional. I have seen a lot of students forget about that and their character falls flat and becomes unbelievable.

STEP 2: I found a random texture online just to give my character some grit and to tone the canvas so I am not just working on a blank white page. This helps me get started so I don't get the "deer in headlights art phase" and stare at the blank white page for hours on end, not knowing where to start. Gotta trick your brain sometimes.

STEP 3: I block in local colors (local meaning the color of things before light or shadow affects them) using a color layer. Applying it like thin washes of watercolor just to get things rolling.

STEP 4: After my washes are applied I just start painting, I usually start with head and try to bring that up to a finish so I can judge everything off of that. When that is finished I work my way down the body but as I work I always make sure to zoom out so I can see how the whole figure is shaping out. If you stay zoomed in too long you end up noodling an area too long and forget about the big picture.

STEP 5: I tweak the colors adding an adjustment-color balance layer, I cooled down the whole image and lowered the saturation a bit to help harmonize the painting.

STEP 6: Final tweaks, highlights on the metal parts and helmet, sign and put a black border and add a ground shadow to secure him to my ground plane.

THE END

Hope that was helpful to you all. Again, I will be posting more soon. I have a couple more characters and I will try to save more process shots of those as well. Thanks for looking, drop a comment if you have time and I will be back soon with more art!

-Pat

3 comments:

Simon Scales said...

awesome mate - looks like eveyone would have learnt some stuff from the master :)
a little crit - i thin his right foot is a little too front on - could angle it in a bit more for just a little more dimension!!
keep it up my man!

Daniel said...

crazy stuff Pat! peru? seriously? awesome!

Unknown said...

cool progression holmes.

i'm tagging you. read my site for the rules. and play along dammit.

&rew.