[AliasMoze]

Another one for the stack. This is a case where the idea impresses me as much as the painting.

[DuKEZ]

Ah the ole patented spooge style.. lovely as it may be.. i too somwhere along the line (probably art in highschool :P) was taught about always detail.. detail this detail that (fine detail).. (never enough for the teacher :P) so my drawings would usually become all dirty with scribbles of lines everywhere and gunk

As for spooge.. i like your style now as may alot of others.. but in another thread when you posted your robotech valkarie painting, how you quoted in liking your own rough pre-paint.. but i found your finished detailed painting more interesting.. i love both of them dont get me wrong.. but i kinda agree with the previous.. wish i could see more detailed (well the correct word maybe more DEFINED) spooge paints

[This message has been edited by DuKEZ (edited August 10, 2000).]

[Francis]

Actually, if you take this image into Photoshop and reduce it (to say 25% or so) it still reads pretty photographically. I think most of Spooge's "real" work is a lot bigger than 800 pixels, which this image is. The finished detail you see comes from seeing the original (say 3000 pixel) drawing at a smaller size.



I think this image is cool because you can see all the brushstrokes and simple yet full-of-information movements spooge puts into his stuff. It's very economical - just enough stuff to suggest detail rather than laboriously putting it all in.

Still painting mine. My car's in the shop today (new oil cooler hoses and other little fiddly yet expensive crap - tab 400+ bucks , so maybe I can work a little more on it.

------------------
Francis Tsai
TeamGT Studios

[This message has been edited by Francis (edited August 10, 2000).]

[Sumaleth]

Spooge;

A few Q's;

Before you lay down the first brush stroke on an image like this, how much of the final "look" is in your head already? Do you try to plan it out as much as possible - values, colors, textures etc - or does it develop as you're working on it?

Also, relating to Danny's comment, if you were to take an image like the ship above all the way to a movie-quality matte painting, how much time would it (roughly) take from this point?

How long did this image take?

I really like the image anyway. (although I'm looking forward to seeing some more refined commercial stuff sometime

--

Francis;

Another thing to consider when adding an overlay layer is that you dont necessaily need to use it as it comes in - you might get a better look if you change the brightness or contrast of the image.

--

On the matter of "the rules of art", I think in the end we all ended up just reiterating each other .

Summary; for the learning artist, the many "rules and tricks of art" - compostion, color theory, detailing, plus the multitude of other things that you learn as you gain experience - are all worth learning so long as they are viewed more as guidelines/tips than serious rules.

Frost did bring up another interesting point on this topic however - the need to understand -why-, not just how.

The 'Beginner Guidelines of Composition' (or whatever they should be called ) are filled with phrases like "guiding the eye into and around the image before settling on the focal point.' The color theories generally aren't accompanied by any such reasoning which is odd.

I took some painting lessons a couple of years ago (more the "approach to painting" more than painting itself unfortunately) and the instructor took us outside just as the sun was going down one night and showed us, in the real world, just how true that 'warm-light, cool shade' rule is. Literally everywhere we looked this lighting condition was present.

She never explained why it was like that though. Frost suggested that it was the atmosphere that cooled the shadows although I've often read that the opposite effect is also true - 'cool light, warm shade' (eg. night time) - and in this case the atmosphere could not explain it.

My theory has always been that it's really an optical illusion; the warm colors on surfaces in direct light tend to make the places not getting this warm light look cool, even though they probably have some warmness about them too.

But I don't really know.

Sumaleth.

[WacoMonkey]

Spooge - very nice. I really like the roughness of the brushwork in this - the ship itself has a really strong Berkey feel to it (one of my personal gods) - painterly but utterly solid and three-dimensional. Looks like a little use of smudge for the highlights on the floor, correct? gives a nice effect.

[Danny]

The whole highlight/shade colour temperature issue wouldn't be complete without a reference to argueably one of the most famous examples history has produced. Monet's Haystacks series. I urge you to look at these links and remember words spoken by the man himself: "Everybody discusses my art and pretends to understand...when it is simply necessary to love". Isn't that what it's all about?

http://www.art.com/artgallery/default.asp?sid=EBD8D2A6B83341769AA0F38B98A29482&lsiteid=lNWWKFSwUDc-SY3zLQEA&item=TIX0029190

http://www.vincent.nl/?/gallery/paintings/a536.htm

It doesn't get any better than this...

Danny

ps.. damn those scans are crap.. Nothing beats seeing the originals...

------------------
[email protected]

Trust in Trance

[spooge demon]

Loki,

Is this what you are meaning?



Wacomonkey, yes, smudgy tool

Sumaleth, with this image I did have something specific in mind, those ordaz ptgs from ROTJ. Flat and graphic. The only information is the halftones in the reflections. Pretty neat. It is high contrast, you would see a lot more if you were standing there, but it does give the feeling of �new.�

If I were doing this for real, I would start over completely and make sure the drawing was VERY accurate. A sketch to show a director would look very much like this. I would do it at high rez, and be just as loose, but at a finer scale. See the metal tubing couplings on the floor? Instead of a single blob, I would paint it nice and loose, maybe a top plane, side plane and a few joinery lines. A shadow and your done.

this took about an hour. That�s all I can give to these sketches.

It is neat collaborating, because if you just work on your stuff, you might end up repeating yourself. This forces you to explore something different. I doubt anyone including Francis would say this is a highly original subject, but I did learn from it.

Danny, yeah, it�s pretty rough. To me God lives in the foundation, not the details. I just like to do enough to solve the problem, then move on. I get so freaking bored noodling. I really don�t know how you do it. I love it when it�s done, it�s a thing of beauty... but hire someone else to do it

With the FF stuff I am doing, I have to be very detail oriented. maybe that is why I am looser here.

Oh, almost all the rules you have heard about composition are total crap. Break them with great Joy.

[Freddio]

Why would Spooge demon spend hours refining a little forum pic just for the love of it...

if you want to see his awesome detail stuff.. go to his site then.. Im sure these pics are just rough helpful guides to original artist, and all of us at the forum.. not to be amazed by his skills

[Francis]

quote:

---

Originally posted by spooge demon:
I doubt anyone including Francis would say this is a highly original subject, but I did learn from it.

---

Hey, I'm pretty sure no one's done a pseudo WWII era figher plane looking spaceship sitting in a giant light rimmed doorway docking bay with reflective floors and unnecessary lights until I came along. Seriously, it was just a painting exercise, and I'm beginning to realize the importance of having a really tight layout to work from for a more "final" painting. Just like how you can tell a drawing or model of a head somehow doesn't look exactly right if something is tweaked, if there is some fudgery in the perspective, it's hard to pull off a convincing painting.

Thanks for all the effort you put into this Craig (and all the others involved in the "rules" discussion - very insightful stuff for someone who never really learned the rules). These little lessons are invaluable.

------------------
Francis Tsai
TeamGT Studios

[Anthony]

Looks great all. No need to praise you guys more, better to paint some more.

------------------
-Anthony
Carpe Carpem

[Loki]

Spooge: yeah ... pretty much. How'd you do it? As far as I know you, you did it by hand, didn't you?

And ... why am I not surprised that the FF stuff is very detail oriented?

[balistic]

An easy way to do a glow pass is to copy the whole image and paste it. Adjust the new layer's tone curve so that only the brightest highlights are visible and everything else has been pegged to black. Run a gaussian blur over it and then make the layer additive. You'll get nice blooms over any areas that pass the threshold you set in the tone curve.

I do variations of this technique all the time on rendered stuff, its really versatile.



------------------

Brian "balistic" Prince
3D Artist
Eggington Productions

[Loki]

Thanks dude!

But ... I've used this technique for years. There are many instances where it doesn't work though - the problem is, that you can only run a gaussian blur of one size over the whole image.

Imagine an image of a street running off in the distance at night. The streetlights are on. One is really close to the camera, and the other ones get smaller and smaller in the distance. So you're got different sized lightsources in the images.

When you now want to give them a glow, you run into a problem: If you adjust the gussian blur, that it works with the biggest lightsource, it blows away the smaller lightsources' glow, because they're too small in size for that blur.
Other way around too: you set your gaussian blur that it gives one of the smaller lights a nice halo and all of a sudden the glow on the biggest one is merely a blurry rim.


There needs to be a fourier sensitive blur. One that goes for frequencies in the image. THe KPT6 Equalizer does that more or less. It's unsharp masking gone crazy.

If you want to simulate this, go to unsharp masking in the filter menu, switch the ammount to 150%+ (so you can see what exactly is happening) and crank up the radius (usually set around 1.0) to a huge value (64.0+). Threshold shoudl be down to 0.
What you get is basically a frequency-sensitive blur/brightening thingy. Play with it, I got quite helpful result every once in a while ... aaargh!

[balistic]

I use Photo-Paint primarily, but if Photoshop has a "maximum" filter, you can use that to expand your highlights after you adjust the tone curve. You can then do a gaussian to smooth it out, and all of your light areas should get more or less the same amount of bloom.



------------------

Brian "balistic" Prince
3D Artist
Eggington Productions

[roetevs]

Very impressive.

[Farwalker]

Great thread.

Francis your intial painting was looking like it was really coming along well.
Can't wait to see it all done with the added advice of others.

Loki, your painting of Francis's sketch was great. Your really getting good.

Spooge, another sweet take on Francis's painting. I really love the rougher look. I do think that Francis is right about Spooge doing the paintings in extreme high rez and then downsizing. Maby?

Great stuff, 3 different paintings from 3 outstanding artists. Love to see how each person renders the lights, shadows, colors etc... differently.

Fred, Danny, Micke etc...(anyone) want to take a shot at it?

Good stuff all!


------------------
www.gamingvault.com

[Loki]

Yeah - Pangrazio did most of the bay stuff in SW3. I loooove his paintings. He's so ruthless with his brushstrokes. One thing I noticed is, how much they added in the optical compositing process. They put a glow-pass over the whole painting, which gives all the highlights a nice kick, and adds athmosphere to the whole painting. I've tried for quite some time now to come up with a digital way of doing that, but it's really difficult and I didn't get very good results. I ven tried to overexpose screen-shots taken from the painting, but hmmm ... didn't turn out the way I liked it ...
The closest I got was with KPT6's graphic Equalizer ...

[micke]

Farwalker:
No, no no This stuff is way too complicated for me. I don't know how to shade a box properly. How about in 6 years

[Danny]

Well now.. didn't this thread turn out awesome? Some fantastic pictures, fine debates with interesting opinions and in the last minute a cool Loki/Balistic word of advice.

Spooge, I feel the complete oposite about my approach than you do. I just love to paint in more and more detail. It's sometimes almost an obsession which really needs more restraint. I must confess that the foundation is without a doubt MUCH more important than detailing, obviously. If my skills in setting up foundations were as evolved as yours I'm sure I'd be equally bored by noodling in details. Until that happends (if at all it might be cool to collaborate on a painting with you sometime. You laying down the roughs, me finishing and polishing it. If you're at all interested and time permits, drop me a mail.

Finally I feel the need to thank Francis for kicking off these cool threads with his great paintings! Your stuff always lightens up the forum...

Danny

------------------
[email protected]

Trust in Trance

[waylon]

Well, I decided to get in on the fun, and make my own version too.



Modeled in Max3, ~1000 polygons. It's in DESPARATE need of some texture maps. (Icky default Max coloring with icky Max smoothing!) If anyone wants to do some textures for it, let me know. I just don't have the time right now.

[Sumaleth]

(and just when you thought the thread was going to die...)

Quote from Spooge;
"Oh, almost all the rules you have heard about composition are total crap. Break them with great Joy."

Spooge; You disagree with both color and composition, two aspects of art that are generally taught rigorously in art schools - I was wondering what aspects of "art" you think can be taught successfully (ie. truely -useful- aspects).

I can name two that you might say - one is to study and learn the way light bounces off primative objects (cubes etc), an exersize that translates readily into more complex scenes which are often little more than an arrangement of primative shapes.

(Incidentally, someone just brought that old subject back up again and I don't think we ever really nailed the subject satisfactorily first time around.)

Another one I remember is the varied use of sharp and soft edges.

What other sorts of things are actually worth spending time gaining an understanding of, if not the traditional things like color and composition (which I assume you believe to based more on 'what -feels- right' rather than what is right according to the books?)

Is there a list? How's that book coming along?

Sumaleth