[wolfchick]

Hello all!

You guys do such amazing stuff and I just had some questions. I mostly paint and have only done a few small digital pieces like this one:



It took me FOREVER! I think I would have been better off just painting him with real paint on a real board.

Do most of you start with a color photo and then manipulate the colors?

or

Do you create a sketch, scan it and work from there by adding color and so on?

Some of the creations on this site are incredibly realistic and lifelike. How do you guys do it??

^!!^

[Gort]

Well I will first say that I am nowhere as talented a digital painter as most here are, but I do find working digitally to be a lot less painless than traditional methods. You just have to keep working at it and develop your skill. Don't get too frustrated - keep working on it!

[Ian Jones]

99% of the stuff you see here is done all by hand with a tablet in photoshop and painter, no photo-manipulation. Except occaisionally, and you should tell ppl if you have used a photo.

To create realistic pictures, takes lots of learning, observation, and practice. Understanding light and shade, and form, anatomy, perspective, proportion etc.. all comes in time.

I think observation is a key aspect. If you look at the world around you, and observe it carefully, then you should be able to reproduce it. "It's sooo complex though" I hear you say, but if you break things down to their most fundamental things, and work thru them, you can usually succeed.

Hope that gave you a abit of an idea. Just post your work in the work in progress or gallery, and ask for help and explain what you are trying to achieve.. eg. realism or a stylish picture? Just ask for crits.

[ January 10, 2002: Message edited by: Ian Jones ]

[[Shizo]]

Ian Jones: "99% of the stuff you see here is done all by hand"
HHA! 99%.. of course


wolfchick: that drawing of a horse is crazy (to put it in kind wording) it breaks down to this - lines (sketch) and render/material/texture.
The first part looks good, the rest doesnt

You should really check out some painting tutorials to understand what you should do after you got the sketch ready to be "painted". I have to sleep so i wount look for specific tutorials, but look at Dhabih's one and only tuttorial even... it shows the whole process.
Other way is to paint without a sketch, but that might be a little harder.

[Ian Jones]

Shizo, you probably read it just after I forgot to include... the "with photoshop and painter and tablet" bit... sorry. I Edited it immediately.

[nova]

Personally, i paint completely in Photoshop unless I really want to use a neato pencil sketch. There have been a few cases I wanted to study skin tones or colors or something and I sampled colors from a photo. Usually it goes like this for me:

I almost always start with a 1000x1000 size canvas, 72dpi.

1] Fill the entire canvas with a color, usually a slightly darker shade than the general color or background I want the painting to have.

2] Make another layer, sketch with a darker version of the bg color. Sketch until it's time for color.

3] Color on a layer underneath the sketch, first use colors that are midtones [a color you will add highlights and shadows to]. At this stage, I go back and forth painting on the sketch and color layers, also I crop off what I'm not going to use resize the pic to 1200 pixels high or so.

4] Merge the sketch and color layers. Keep painting until things look ok.

5] I make another layer for 'shinies', extra shiny spots on the eyes, cheeks, lips and chin. Hooray for shinies!

Um.. it took me like 2 years to be sorta satusfied with where I'm at. There's a LOT to learn, like color theory [tons], rendering, composition, design, and style. People go to school to learn how to paint digitally. Take one step at a time, like learn anatomy one month, shading another month, and so on. Draw with pencils, pens and if you can, paint. There was a time I painted only in black and white and it helped me with my values. Then I studied color.. I'm still learning color.

Oh yeah, don't depend on tutorials to teach you stuff. The way I learned was to 'copy' other artists, picking apart their work and techniques. After a while I developed my own way of doing things out of what I learned from other people.

Anyway, i hope some of this makes sense.

[ January 13, 2002: Message edited by: Nova ]

[wolfchick]

Thanks guys! I will keep trying, learning and watching this site.

*Bows down to that great digital art gods*