[Dangeruss]

Hey - First post here. Wasn't striving for realism considering the 'toonish nature of the sketch. The lighting is a bit flat, any suggestions?

[leakey]

Very cool.

I really like your style. As you said, the lighting is a little flat, maybe look at working with the lighting you have but just try and make it more dramatic. Some nice lights and darks.

[LordArioch]

Looks good... nice color and texture.

[frostfyre]

Nice color scheme! I really like the texture you've put into the armor and even in the flesh tones. The grungey rust really adds to the image as well.


As far as flat lighting goes-

First, think about your primary sources. His gesture suggests that he'd actually in a much lower light environment than he's currently colored in. The shadows on the character and on the floor seem to indicate a strong light source from the from and above, and an intense lightsource from nearly directly above. These competing shadows probably aren't helping to "round out" the character.
I would probably take down the lighting intensity a notch, and give his face just a hint of indirect light from the light on his head. Soften up the shadows, and get them a little more sculptural, and I think you'll be there!

Mind you- I have problems with lighting flattening stuff out too, so PLEASE take my opinion with a large grain of salt.

6:00 am: Woke up early, saw this, and thought, what the heck, lets try to put my money where my mouth is insted of waving around words like "sculptural". Here's a quick paint over, to kind of illustrate the points I discussed above, along with a breakdown.



1) higher contrast in general when it comes to values. across the original, if you run the mouse over the image with the info palette up in Lab mode, you see L has very little variance in it. I made the majority of the image darker, excepting areas nearest the light source, and boosted contrast where I could.

2) more darkening of values. The surfaces here were recieving as much light as the ones right next to the light source. I also tried to remove the "hot" highlights from this region. There was a lot of cool detail in the coloring on the suspended things in back, but it was fighting for attention with the nice texture work on the gun.

3) I brightened up the light source, so that it and the hot highlights would be the brightest spots in the image.

The last thing I did was to bring down the overall ambient lighting, by hue shifting the backdrop to something more closely resembling the lighting on the character.

I don't know that its more 3D or not, but I do think it emphasizes the light sources available more. Anyways, I hope this helps! And thank for the good excersize! (beats aerobics any day)

One last thing- if I wasn't feeling lazy, I would have softened up the shadow on the floor a LOT more, and made it less distinct, shape wise.

Thanks again-

[ June 05, 2001: Message edited by: frostfyre ]

[masticator]

nice work.
as the others said, damn nice texture work.
somehow that pic lets the word fallout come to my mind

[Ctrl+Z]

where can i get some images like that
i need to find some new practice coloring.

thanks

[y0]

hey dude, nice! lol, any new themes coming out? seer is my desktop right now

[Dangeruss]

Thanks frostfyre! That's just the advice I was hoping for.

I grabbed this image at:Feng Zhu's killer web site

New themes: A few are waiting in the wings, I've been playing with this sort of stuff lately.