woot

wooooot
here we go finally with a new personal piece. Had HUGE fun painting this one and feel that I have leveled up quite a bit with it. Gonna upload some steps for you later :)

Around 30 hours, no ref as usual :)

and as promised, some steps (actually it's a bunch of steps I saved there sometimes even I had to look where the difference was between two steps :D)

studies and PSDs

Hi everyone.

Soooooooo it's weekend again, time for some updating. First of all sorry for this kinda lame post but I've been busy with personal portfolio work which is not ready to be shared yet and all the other studies I made just suck ass, so there's no need to share these.
So here we go with some better ones and as always the fullres PSD files.
Since all the cloud studies I've been doing recently included some crazy lighting and colors I wanted to go with something more subtle for now, meaning clouds under normal daylight conditions.
It's fun studying something you have never actually done a study of before, because you don't even know what to watch out for, all the principles of light, texture, drawing etc...which pply to this kind of lightsetting and this type of clouds reveal themselves during the process. This si actually the reason why the first study took ridiculously long for the actually result (around 3 hours) and why the seccond one took only a fragment of that time (around half an hour).


So what is it that can be learned out of these/what did I learn out of these:

The first and most important thing which I learned is actually almost everything you need to get the character of the subject. knowing this you can actually use not more than 5 broad brushstrokes to show that you are painting a cloud in this particular lightsetting.

So first of all:
The lightsetting: in both studies, there is basically  a standart more or less clear sky lightsetting, meaning that there are two lightsources : the sun which acts like  a strong warm lightsource coming from one direction and one diffuse lightsource which is the cold blue light coming from the sky.
In general this means that every shadow area the sunlight creates will be filled with the blue light of the sky.
BUT (and this is what needs to be taken away from this study):
This would be true if we didn't have clouds but solid objects which won't allow light to pass through them. So if we had a big white cueball hanging around in the sky there would be a side lit by the sunlight and a shadowside which would be filled with a dark grey-blue color.
But when you look at clouds in this lightsetting something else can be noticed:
The parts of the clouds which are directly hit by strong sunlight don't just fall into blueish shadow as the form turns away, but the shadowcolor becomes waaaaay warmer at first on the shadowside for the most part and then when it turns away even more, getting even darker it eventually turns into this dark blue tone.
So why is that?
Clouds are not solid objects but they actually lett light get inside where it gets scattered. So there are two possibilities:
1. When the mass of cloud is really big the subsurface scattering happening in the cloud won't be really visible, the cloud just kinda swallows all the light and shadows will behave almost completely like on a solid object.

2. When the mass of clouds is not that huge, it can happen that light will hit the cloud, get inside, scatter in all directions, become really difuse and actually exit the cloud again on the other side.
when this happens the result will be a warm shadowcolor on the cloud.
So what does happen, and why is the warm shadowcolor this warm?
Sunlight is warm light actually it can be said that it's kind of yellowish (it can have a lot of different hues, but this would go too far right now). But when sunligh is really intense it appears almost white. Like when it hits a cloud, the lit side appears to be white , and when we look at clouds in real life clouds lit by sunlight appear really white and sometimes it's just as hard to look at them as looking directly into the sun. so even if it appears to be "just" white, it it is warm. the lit side of a cloud will rarely be pure white but mostly the lightest area will be a very light, very desaturated yellow.
SOOOOOOOOOOO again what happens with a cloud with a warm shadowside (final version :D ) :
- Intense warm sunlight hits the cloud= light side - very light-very desaturated yellow
- Sunlight actually travels inside the cloud: scatters in all directions = gets weaker and darker and actually makes the warmth and "yellowness" of the original intense sunlight visible again when it's able to exit on the other side of the cloun.
--> warm shadowside

- cloud turns away from light even more -> the distance for the sunlight traveling through the cloud gets bigger, so that it might not be able to exit on the other side of the cloud again
--> the "actual" shodow kicks in (meaning complete absence of sunlight) --> result is a "normal" dark blue-grey formshadow.

oooofff okay so this explains how it can be possible that the shadowside fo a cloud lit by sunlight can appear to be really warm
So this was the big thing for me when I painted these studies, there is quite a bunch more stuff that I noticed which needs to be taken caree of when painting stuff like that:
1. when we have the case that sunlight exits the cloud on the other side creating a warm shadowside, it also appears that the cloud itself seems to be kinda glowing on that side. this happens because teh lightscattering happening inside the cloud forces the light to exit the cloud not in the direction it entered but in all kinds of directions, so the warm light inside and exiting the cloud is very diffuse, creating this glowing effect
2. The point of determining HOW warm the scattered sunlight really is is especially interesting in this scenario:
When we look at these images there are basically only two colors : light-desaturated yellows for the light (darker yellows for some shadowareas) and eevrything else which lies in shadow and the sky itself will have a blueish tone.
So according to the laws of complimentary contrast every color which is next to a blue hue will appear to be shifted towards a warm, yellow,orange tone.
This happens here as well and when you download th PSD file you can colorpick it:
Even though the warm yellowish tones on some shadows appear to be reall really warm most of them are surprisingly grey, some of them are even completely gray, but because of all that bluie stuff surrounding it they appear to be much warmer than they really are. This obviously does only happen in this bluesky setting but it's definitely somethingt o watch out for when painting something like this in order to get a realistic effect.

Soooooooooo this is basically it for these studies. One more thing I want to mention here is that all these notes and observations MUST be interpreted further in Order to get the basic principles lying behind it in order to really learn something. So everything I wrote in here can be applied or at least must be searched for in every other painting (including clouds for example). No matter wich color the sky is, or which color the primary lightsource is, the stuff that happens with the light is always the same:
-Light hits the object and gets reflected
- Parts of light travel into the object -> light gets scattered, thus the color tends to shift towards a darker, more saturated color of the lightsource -> Object "swollows light" or Light exits on the other side of the objet
- "real formshadow" in areas where light of the primary lightsource can't travel through the object and thus stays invisible -> formshadow's color illuminated by the color of seccond lightsource (+ reflected light)

Oh man what a post again, but I gotta admit that I kinda enjoy writing down the stuff I've learned from these, even just for myself. At this point I want to stress again that all these notes are based on my own observations, I don't claim at all that they are completely flawless or that there isn't anything to add, so if you see that I missed or misunderstood something, please point it out!!

To bring this to an end, here is the link to the fullres PSD files for you to download. I have split these images up in ridiculously many layers so that you can check out the process (jeez it was so tempting to just merge everything :D )

http://www.mediafire.com/file/809891nd0h57uee/clouds.psd
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ujkccqme7s5kp7m/clouds_2.psd

cranking out some metal

Hi guys. In order to pull off one new personal piece, I decided to spend some time doing some random armour studies.
It's alsways fascinating experiencing how much there is to learn just from photostudies alone. by far the most fascinating part actually comes in retrospective after having done the study. Before I did quite a bunch of those I thought that I knew how to render metal, and armor and stuff like that. looking at this thought now it's just sooo ridiculous that I had this opinion. in other words: I learned so much doing these studies that it isn't funny anymore, and I am sure if I do some more of those I will be blown away the same way again, it's just nuts and one more proof HOW neverending this whole journey actually is (yeah I know that sentence didn't really make sense but I think that it kinda fits nevertheless).
So actually I don't know if this is of any interest to anybody but I figured it might be kinda interesting to actually write down the "major" things I think I've learned from doing these, so maybe it might help for some who are already up to make these discoveries, and maybe some of you might notice mistakes in my thoughts and correct me if I am wrong.

So when I started these I wanted to focus on that entire "environment reflection thing" on armor in general. like when you have highly reflective metal like chrome youn will have this "horizon reflection"-thing going on, like on the helmet of the knight in the first piece. I wanted to see where it happens and when it happens and to witch extend it happens concerning the structure of the metal itself.

Now maybe this is even too basic to be mentioned but thinking about it, putting this really clearly on the table for me is just so important since it is a basic principle, it needs to be understood in order to be able to render not only highly reflective armor but to understand how light in general bounces around.

First: This "horizon thing" happens in every outdoor scenario, EVERYWHERE, but sometimes it cannot be seen on first sight.
When painting this chrome armour it is as obvious as it's gonna get. Basically there are two things to be reflected by the armour: blue sky, green grass. Every part of the armour is reflecting teh part of it's environment it's facing towards. This is most obvious on the helmet. Teh upper part, facing the sky, reflects the sky, the lower part, facing the ground, reflects the grass. The horizon "wraps" around the form of the helmet according to the form itself and the perspective it's viewed from.

Soooo keeping this principle in mind you can see that ti also applies to the helmet in the seccond study but not as obviously as in the first study simply because the metal isn't as polished as in the first study, so not bein able to giving these clean reflections: The reflections of the sky, clouds and the green ground are way more diffused. Also the reflectioms are in themselfs distorted because of random bumps and scratches in the armor.

BUT (and this is the important part that needs to be taken away from these studies) ALL the reflections which can be observed in the first study are still there in the second, but they are more diffuse and distorted.
AND this needs to be hammered into the brain: these reflections, or better: the light causing the reflections (sun, sky ground) is EVERYWHERE, it's even in the cloth and the brown west but they reveal themselves in different ways, cloth and metal interact in very different ways with the same lighsources, this is why we can distinguish between armour and cloth in a picture.
it really is all about  finding out what LIGHT DOES TO STUFF, rather than trying to paint stuff "as it is" or as we think it is.

Again, obviously this is all petty basic stuff but even now, having been into painting for some years now it is still so fascinating to me seeing these basic powerful principles of light revealing themselves in front of my eyes, allowing me to see the stuff I've been seeing all the time with entirely new eyes and from another perspective. It just feels so good taking stuff out of that area which you've kinda taken for granted and experience it conciously and being able to appreciate the simplest stuff in a much much much greater way.

(uh what a rant. excuse all the typos but it's late over here and I'm a lazy mofo. I just hope that it's not too bad :D )


so on to the pictures themselves: I have uploaded the PSD files again. in the first study I kinda failed preserving all the layers, just getting caught up in ym own process and merged them without thinking. BUT in the second study I actually managed to keep all the layers intact so that you can check out the steps :)

PSD FILE (layers merged. sorry) : http://www.mediafire.com/file/s78xz87xj0v34wc/knight.psd

 PSD FILE (All layers intact, YAAAY) http://www.mediafire.com/file/62pkc58z3f5r51s/knight2.psd

uuuuhyeah........

it's weekend again, time to get some seerious painting done :) Here's todays study, directly related to the personal piece I am working on right now.

I also uploaded the PSD files. It's a bit larger than usual but it's fullres and some layers are included, so I guess that's just what you get then :)

Here you go : http://www.mediafire.com/file/n18x10bx3q1dbb0/clouds.psd

See you tomorrow !!

WIPFUNFUN

soooooo since I wanna be here more often, here's some of todays WIP action. Trying to apply yesterdays lessons in cloudpainting to a new illustration. About half an hour put into this so far, about 20 more and we'll be good :)
Next step will be tp figure out the actual design of that knight guy, lets seeeee.......

oooooouuuf......

whhhhoooow again so much time passed by since the last post, it's just crazy how quick everything goes these days, just waaaay to much stuff to do :D.
To be honest, there isn't even as much to say right now, so I'll just make it quick and dump in a few recent studies, hoping that the next update will be earlier :)

and quicky from head, around 20 minutes before sleepy time :)