[Freebooter]

Because my last WIP thread was so highly useful to me I'm going to share another process with you guys. In this picture our beloved Conan the Barbarian will be battling giant apes in somekind of exotic enviroment. I'm planning to make the basic composition and shapes with grayscale, then adding colours and textures and final details with coloured brushes. I've never used this kind of technique before so any suggestions are welcome.

First version.


Fire away lads.

[Tzan]

The sword looks too short considering he is holding it with two hands.
Looks like a one handed sword.

[designboot]

i agree with Tzan
keep it up!

[Capt. Fred]

Omg, he is looking AMAZING, great light set-up on him.

Some obvious observations:
- there is no thigh behind his knee and it's all skinny there.
- his body-crossing arm is anatomically confusing. Is his his shadow-side shoulder in front of or behind his chin? at the moment its ambiguous whether he reaches forward to the sword or whether he reaches across his chest to his side. The lighting says one thing and the drawing says another. It looks like you need to bring the right hand shoulder and chest forward and out of the shadow, and bend his elbow.
- the dark gorillas do not stand out against the background.

The anatomy is generally awesome though! Do you ref it?

I love the contrast of the big open sky and his strained wiry figure.
Have you tried changing the angle of the sword?

Those bears are going to look awesome

Ignore unsolicited comments as necessary

[Freebooter]

Is the sword big enough for you nitpickers?

Capt.Fred thanks for your input, it was really helpful. I think the arm looks a lot better now don't you agree? The gorillas-not-standing-out isn't too big a deal at this stage. It's gonna get fixed.



Ok guys I need opinions about this new contrapose. Is it for better or worse? I've had mixed comments on this and I'd like to know what's the consensus.

PS. There was a strange problem with gamma when saving as .JPG.

[Sumaleth]

I dont like the new pose. There's something a bit dainty about it, and it's a little bit flyswatter.
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[Joe84]

yeah the pose looks weaker than the 1st sketch

[Tzan]

[Freebooter]

Thank, you confirmed what I were thinking: the first pose is a lot more founded in reality than the silly all-too-dynamic contrapose. I only made it because a good friend kept bragging about that the original pose wasn't dynamic enough. I shouldn't have listened to him, but I wanted to give it a shot as he was so certain that the first pose didn't work at all (I really can't see what the hell he meant).

So now it's like 10-1 in "my favour" geheheh. I guess I ought to be my own judge and not listen if somebody has a beef with my poses.

Tzan, now I see that the rabbit is crucial for my composition! And as for big swords I believe conan doesn't need to compensate for the lack of.... wit.

Sumaleth, Joe84...and tzan, thanks for input .

[designboot]

now this sword is too long Tzan ..

[3nasty]

hehe I like that rabbit ..this is lowpoly?.. right? looks like ..cute

[neff]

bwahaha Tzan, you made me spit coffee on my keyboard X-D
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[Tzan]

[3nasty]

[Freebooter]

Ok new version.



I radically rethought the enviroment, it makes a lot more sense now. I'm not sure if the apes are interesting enough as they are and if you have any ideas how to put them I'm all ears.

Next version is going to be in colour. Any tips about applying colour over grayscale in PS are welcome.


EDIT: Capt. Fred I forgot to answer your question. No I do not use reference in pictural form. I do however touch myself in a non-sexual way while drawing to get the muscles right.

[B0b]

looks really nice - the background looks like its suffering from foreshortening from a long zoom lens tho'

and he should have a battle axe not a sword..

use a multiply layer to colour?


oh and it looks like he's just swung the sword which would have hit the first ape?

[Freebooter]

Bob, I don't know about the lense thing. Does it really matter/bother though? As for the weapon of choice Conan does prefer swords over axes so who am I to decide it for him .

The sword in fact did hit the ape, I just haven't painted the gore yet. �'m going to paint that last.

Cheers.

[Naeem]

freebooter> awesome! really like where you're going with this. looks awesome so far. my only crit would be that the ground is too light in value, considering that its in the foreground. it kind of conflicts- for me at least. keep it up!

[Capt. Fred]

This is ace work, freebooter you are too good!

crit:
-all the action is now on the right edge and off the bottom, with loads of empty space on the left. the stone head is looking great, but is maybe taking too much space away from the action

I tried colouring your pic (it looked like fun, hope that's okay) and painting on a colour layer is one easy way to go. you might be able to get some mileage out of using the b/w version as channel to colour the lights and darks differently.

[Joe84]

Wow the environment is kickass, i eagerly anticipate the next update

[Freebooter]

Capt. Fred can I see that colour overpaint?

[Capt. Fred]

Just mucking around, kind of psychedelic: Link

[watmough]

Freebooter,this looks fantastic,you've improved so much!
Really like Capt colour version,too.

[Freebooter]

Thanks for the support guys!

First coloured version. I found it very difficult to colour it and not destroy values and drawing beneath. I don't know if it is any good.


I was thinking of going Frazetta way with colours, but it would require a humongous revamp of values. I'm clueless and lost in a maze of colour theories and blending modes.

[Joe84]

my 1st impression is that its very desaturated overall

[Tomasis]

it looks nice with bw version. Why not paint from scratch for colour-version? have bw version as reference so you can play with coloured values confidently.

some small crits: hands movement, it looks like he is not going swing around with full weight. Why not try put the sword with hands more above and back so it would look as he is going swing very broadly using full weight of the sword like as golf or tennis player. Another crit: maybe this sword is not too short but it is too thiny for this type of Conan (especially the bit around hands). I would like to see a more thick sword instead.

anyway, your skills are rising at rocket speed :)

capt version is cool!

[Freebooter]

Thanks Tomasis. The golf swing wasn't the thing I was going for, more like a desperate slash followed by sharp pull to bring the sword back to front in order strike again. You maybe right about the width of the blade though.

I flattened the image and went on painting applying colour with small grainy brush. The skin is propably too saturated already.

[Jlpicard]

i say this is stinning! Really, bravo to you!

I followed the thread since the beginning without a word but there is it!
You maybe should darkened your background for more contrast...
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[Misc]

Looking pretty damn good! Dont have any critique other that if you want conan to already have done the slash then his wrists should be tilted differently in order to do a correct slash I think.. I have two questions though

[Mikko K]

Misc:

In short: if you use lots of contrast in both value and chroma (saturation) in a single image, the end result is usually painful to look at. In general, the more saturation you plan to use, the less value contrast is required.

The grayscale illustrations usually have a lot of almost metallic contrast in the skintones etc, just to make them pop out. You can see this in Warhammer illustrations for example. It's a stylistic decision. To make the same values work for a colour version, you'd need to consider the image in colour when you do the grayscale. For example, you'd need to make the foliage quite dark, just because the "green" will make them look brighter when you add saturation.

Freebooter> Make sure you use a harmonious colour scheme. Don't push the reds and greens at the same time, it can be difficult to pull off such a complementary palette. Reduce some of the black if you wish to go so high with the saturation. Note that a lot of the Frazetta images online have so much black because they're poorly scanned/photographed/edited.

I'm not a fan of the dark edges you've done, especially with the background gorilla. It makes the forms look a bit "flash photographed" with a strong frontal light causing the dark rim.

I can do an overpaint later, maybe after work tomorrow if I'm not feeling to ill because of this damn flu.