NAG Mascot Challenge: Submission thread

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  • Here is my first possible composition. A mother and son trying to escape a war zone.

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  • Beautifully Painted toddler with his sippy juice and ear muffs...

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    Thanked by 1AngryMoose
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    haha, my concept is also following a mother and child chain of thought
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    this is probably my winning starting rough. trying to capture the "wonder of tech and gaming" on the advent of new VR without reaching for the scifi heydey trope.

    Please don't wait for mine for the mgsa comp though, I haven't been able to prioritize it enough to actually start yet. I rather have the challenges become more challenging and seen through the process than hold it up
    Thanked by 2dammit garethf
  • @elyaradine A4 300dpi's not too bad, it can probably be blown up reasonably, though with the relatively clean lines you got there in majority, one could probably clean it up well enough so that it looks crisp at much bigger sizes with just a few hours of touchup.

    Looks blinking awesome :) Very Mass Effecty outfit :)
    Thanked by 1Elyaradine
  • Just a bump to check on progress with @garethf, @johnny_final_02 and @damousey. :)

    I've been watching some videos with Ross Tan, and I think I need to add me some colour dodge, and I'd like to polish it some more if it's going to be viewed so publicly (after the this current batch of "real life" work).
  • Colour dodge is the shit, man.

    Sorry for the lack of updates, but in the immortal words of Orc Peon: "work work".

    Also, I'm struggling a bit with my piece.

    1) I'm not sure about the colour scheme.
    2) I'm not sure I have the skill to pull off the piece, yet. Colour is a weak area of mine. and what I'm envisioning is not something I'm sure I can execute.
    3) I'm not sure whether to start over and leave out most of the extraneous landscape stuff, just do the character design.

    Meh. Anyway, here's some small progress.

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  • I can try spend a bit of time painting over it next week if you'd like? (I mean, unless you're leaning towards to starting over, in which case I don't want to waste my time. :P)
  • I'd be happy for the feedback! :)

    I dunno, I kinda do want to take a stab at it, even if it ends up not being great. Practice!

    (I'll be away next week, so may respond to any feedback the week after :) )
  • I think the biggest thing that stands out to me is that her proportions seem wrong: her torso+hips seems too short and her legs a bit too long. I think it's largely because you've envisioned some foreshortening going on (I think you've shaded it that way), but the contours that go around her body (like her belt and the thing around her neck/shoulders) don't really bend enough to show exaggerated foreshortening. If you want to do foreshortened stuff, it's really helpful to have a perspective grid in there for comparison, and to draw your character with just cubes and cylinders to make sure you've got the tilting right (especially the ones that are towards and away from the camera).

    I'd personally change the arm positions. In animation/acting, there's something called "twinning" (I think) that basically describes symmetrical movements/poses, and they're told to avoid that because of its making things more static and less interesting. It can also help an enormous amount to pose in the mirror or ask someone to pose for you, just so you can see where they're putting their weight, and where their limbs go, where they look, when they're acting out the scene. (In some cases, I'd even go as far as taking a photo and painting over that. It does mean I lose out on practising drawing a more dynamic pose, but there's so much else to practise anyway, that taking a few shortcuts might be worth it to focus time and energy on other things.)

    If you're struggling with colour, it might be useful to paint in greys first. There are some things that are rules for "normal" paintings that might not scientifically make sense in space (i.e. potentially no atmosphere, or no gravity, or in a vacuum), but if it looks wrong you may want to revert back to the more common treatments. Usually, when you're looking at something through a thick layer of air, the colours appear lighter and less saturated. So when you look at the sky, it's usually darker and more saturated at the top than at the bottom, and mountains in the distance are usually lighter in value than mountains in the foreground.
    Thanked by 1garethf
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    Thanks, man, that's good stuff. Especially, yeah, now that you draw my attention to it, the twinning is particularly bad.

    Regarding painting in greys - I struggle with that a lot. 1 in 20 times it works by some happy accident, but mostly it looks dull or muddy when the shifts in hue don't match the shifts in value.

    I would love to split painting into 2 phases, first value then colour, seems like it would be a lot easier. And I've watched plenty of tuts and practiced, but somehow it very rarely ends up somewhere that I'm satisfied with.
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    Yeah, I think I know what you mean. I haven't nailed a process I'm comfortable with enough to recommend unfortunately. @damousey or @kidult might be better-versed with that. The best I can recommend is to look for reference of photographs and paintings that capture the mood you like, and compare what you've made to theirs (especially in terms of light and colour), and try and analyse why yours looks bad in comparison. :P It's about the only thing that I can recommend that's helped me consistently.

    --
    Oh, and I just watched a video about the moon landing, and apparently when there's no atmosphere (like on the moon), the sky is completely black. (It could have stars, but those are only visible when you expose your camera/eye for them; when you do that, just about everything else in your scene becomes completely overexposed.) It's mostly advertising, but a pretty interesting video anyway.
    Thanked by 1garethf
  • Interesting, I'll give it a watch. :)
    The best I can recommend is to look for reference of photographs and paintings that capture the mood you like, and compare what you've made to theirs (especially in terms of light and colour), and try and analyse why yours looks bad in comparison. :P It's about the only thing that I can recommend that's helped me consistently.
    Heh, yeah, that's kind of what I did. The look I was wanting to mimic is the old pulp adventure stuff, like John Carter of Mars or Conan. But yeah, complex colour work, I don't know if I have the skill to execute it, yet.

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    Whoa. XD

    [edit] This is actually great, being able to see what you were aiming for. So I think in the reference, they're generally going for a warm, yellow-orange for a light colour, and for shadows and ambient stuff it's mostly cooler green-cyan. But the vast majority of the painting's in the cooler palette, with the warm light (which isn't very consistent, but artistic license!) being used for the main characters, and as little rims and things elsewhere. The darker areas that are cool (green-cyan) are also quite desaturated, almost grey, but the warm areas get quite saturated.

    In your painting, almost everything (definitely all of the important bits) uses the warmer colours. The only part that really uses the cooler greens is in the top left corner, and that corner's not really important. I think that makes it feel a bit as if there's a brown film that's covering your painting.

    Anyway, I'm no expert at colour, but that's what I'm seeing when I compare them. (Out of interest, I sometimes use some filters to get rid of the forms and leave only the colours so I can make comparisons more easily. It's difficult to make comparisons about colour when your eyes keep on trying to recognise individual shapes and forms. I've used the Filter>Pixelate>Mosaic and Filter>Filter Gallery>Cutout filters here in PS.)

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    Thanked by 2mattbenic garethf
  • Very cool, those filters are helpful for analysis.

    And yeah, I know what you mean about the cooler green palette vs the warmer light.

    But I was trying to do a technique I've seen traditional artists do, where they do an underpainting in ochre then paint over that, so you get these red undertones. Which is what I suspect was done in that John Carter piece, you can see red tones under the green in the background lion and apes.

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    Admittedly, I don't think I did it very successfully at all, I probably need to practice on something simpler before trying something of this scope.
    Thanked by 1Mexicanopiumdog
  • @garethf

    I know Elyadrine said he'd do a paint over for you so I just smooshed this together to help a bit.
    You current format of a landscape image is quite cool and could be used as a double page spread (DPS in designer language) with info etc. on the left but the original mascot brief from Rage would most likely have been a portrait format for a magazine add / poster.
    So I've just gone and tightened things up composition wise to focus more on the character, her head falls on a 3rd to become the main focal point. The strongest contrast btw light and dark is also around her face to help with the focus. I made your silhouetted bad guys overlap your character more to help create depth. Overlaps are one of the easiet ways to create depth in an image. (I realize I made a horrible tangent with her leg and the spear but again was a quick smoosh)

    I think you've done a good job on the colour so far, it's got that old sci-fi pin up feel too it, but as Elya pointed out it you got a green patch off to the side. By squishing them together you get a nice balance btw the warm reds and the cool greens. The cooler colours will work well in the background and in shadows, while the warms will make your character stand out more. (A general tool for warm / cool colours is to split the lights and darks into cools and warms. So you can have a warm light with cool shadows or vice versa) You could also up the saturation a bit like I did for a slightly more modern feel. It can also be used as a tool to bring focus to the character with brighter looking colours.

    For the landscape bits, don't be scared to just throw some photo textures in and save heaps of time. Just make sure they blend well with the rest. I use this search engine for CC images you can use http://search.creativecommons.org/

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    As for the grayscale or value painting, I use that mostly for concept art stuff that may need to be re-coloured later. For illo stuff like this I just go straight to colour and check values as I go along.. I do however start off with some values at the beginning of the image to work out my value composition. To check your values correctly in photoshop go to the view menu - proof setup - custom and choose the dot gain 20%. Now when you hit ctrl-y it will make it grayscale with the correct vaules.
    I'l be honest and say that I'm a bit lazy to type out a long post on values and using them but if you're up for a google hangout or such I can show you stuff there.


  • @kidult, that is awesome! I really like the new composition! Gets in all the elements I wanted with a much a much better focus on the character. Thank you!

    And I'd definitely like to hang out sometime and talk values and such. I'm going to be out of town for a week or so (won't be working on the image while I'm travelling anyway), but we should definitely talk art when I get back. :)
  • This thread is awesome interaction <3

    As far as doing the grey values first and then the colour goes...
    The grisaille technique can be really tricky to get a handle on, I tried it out for a while and was never properly happy with the colour results I got through it, making me think it'll take an extra chunk of effort to to actually master, as an alternative I recommend setting up your working proof colour space to a grey variant so you can use ctrl+y as a quick toggle between the colour and greyscale versions, use the greyscale view often and let it lead your decisions in composition tweaks and colour choices, even paint in this mode (the advantage with this method over other methods, like a black layer set to saturation above it all is that you can sample through it.) I've found that even if you sample a colour while here that's entirely the wrong hue but the right tonal value, it invariably adds interest and a little bit of a "mixed on the canvas" impressionist effect that helps combat the overly controlled digital process.

    I'm sorry I don't have a distinct "here's how you do this" for this, just a "this is how I would approach this"
    Thanked by 1garethf
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    I recently saw a Gumroad tut (I think it's just straight off her Patreon) by Lena Richards on how she colours greyscale images. I mean, for the most part, when I've seen people do it the overall piece ends up pretty monochromatic with a few complementary highlights, but while her collection of work mostly does do that, she does also have work that's quite colourful and vibrant. Been meaning to pick up that tut, but haven't found a gap in work to be able to watch it. :P

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    Thanked by 2garethf damousey
  • @damousey - not sure if you are aware but using the saturation filter or doing the black layer set to colour gives incorrect values. This rather handy tutorial explains it in depth: http://www.artofscholes.com/checkingvalues/

    @garethf - weird I missed your post btw mine and elya's - that's known as under painting, where instead of starting on a white canvas you start on a coloured canvas to get a colour mood seeping through your painting. This is a more fine art technique for paint, where the paint doesn't fully cover the underlying colour and it shines through. I use this for oil paintings quite a bit. In photoshop it can be used too but it's easy to break it by covering it up as pixels dont work like paint. Doing a colour overlay gets better results imo on photoshop

    And for the google hangout, I'l be away the week after you so once I'm back me can make a date. I'l drop a link on the forum if anyone else wants to join and listen to me ramble about art.
    Thanked by 2garethf damousey
  • Thanks for the advice and links, folks, and cool beans, @kidult. :)
  • @kidult, yup I am aware, that's one of the reasons I specifically recommend the Proof Setup ctrl+y method over using those, I just wasn't going to explain that all here. Thanks for the link though, because even though I knew this from my own experimentation, I didn't have a written resource to corroborate it.

    One of the downsides of the ctrl+y method is that the entire gamut may be shifted, but to me it's of greater importance that the values you're assessing are correct relative to each other.
  • @damousey - Really? Did not realize the gamut gets shifted, how did you pick up on this? (sorry for thread derailment)
  • And while I'm being all helpful if anyone else would like a paint-over or some feedback, let me know
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    I did a pass earlier this week adding glows and stuff, but I dunno. Just still feels amateur to me. When I've got time again, I'll be digging through some reference, trying to break them down and figure out what I'm getting wrong, but if you've got suggestions I'd love to hear them.

    In terms of execution, I'm kinda trying to make it look as polished as the stuff these guys do:
    https://www.artstation.com/artist/jasonchan
    https://www.artstation.com/artist/Milancho
    http://marko-djurdjevic.deviantart.com/gallery/

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  • Sorry about thread sidetrack, I think is the end of it, happy to delete once done, it's overly technical :|

    @kidult , it came from investigate what "Dot Gain 20%" means, so if you're using that preset you're actually viewing your image through a curve that simulates the visual effect/anomaly created by overlapping printing dots. Similarly, although inversely true, your perception of the "lightness" of your own monitor will be affected by the distribution/spacing and technology...er...type of pixels through which you're viewing. Trying to correct for this will put you squarely in Venn space of negligable difference, it's only really applicable when your output has an unusually high demand in grey fidelity, I've only encountered that once, and it definitely is beyond the scope of assessing your values during painting.
    Thanked by 1kidult
  • @Elyaradine - Yeah for sure I'l have a look. Just would like to point out that Jason and Mark have been beastlord artists since I just started myself so now their skill is beyond mere mortals.
    Thanked by 1Elyaradine
  • @kidult: Yeah, I know their reputations. :P Oh, and I'd add Jana Schirmer and Maciej's older painterly work (not really a fan of the photobashed aesthetic myself) to my "be that good one day" list.

    Thanks for the help!
    Thanked by 1kidult
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    Hmm, yeah, the added glow doesn't quite seem to be working.

    I'm no expert, but it seems to only be affecting certain surfaces/materials while leaving others untouched, and not consistently from any direction? That kind of blown out glow on white surfaces usually only happens where there is either a LOT of light bouncing around the scene or some sort of powerful directional light, I think.

    (Trying to find references images...)



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    If your character was in a bright white room, standing under a spotlight or directly in front of a white hot sun, maybe.
    Thanked by 1Elyaradine
  • @Elyaradine - So here's some extra notes on eye movement voodoo and poses which will hopefully add to the theme of this thread. I may be nit-picking a bit here as it's still working and you'l see in the paintover (coming soon) that the solution isn't a huge improvement. Just feel it may be of interest to show how a pose can convey character.

    At an earlier stage of your image you changed the pose and the new pose isn't as strong on a technical level as the current pose. I would chalk it up too the fact that you changed a part of the pose instead of re-doing the pose. However the current pose is much better suited to the brief, it's a stronger looking pose. The current one says business card, the previous one seemed more for social media or close friends.

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    So the lines here are a bit messy but and this falls under the somewhat voodoo art of controlling the viewer's eye movement. Trying to get that sense of flow and direction towards your focal point or around the image. Pink lines 1st, in the previous pose you can see how her pose and positioning cuts the frame at an angle and then compliments that line with her upper body center line. This pulls you into her face. The green lines shows the nice triangular shape you've got on her which helps bring the arm into focus too. Good way of conveying confidence. The red line is the gesture line, that nice curve you have to oppose all the lines and angles you have yet still sweeps towards the head. Again re-enforcing that focal point. This is some what missing from the new pose but you can see how the new pose helps the focus on the hand more with her leg lining up. The new pose is also a bit awkward. When you're leaning back like this with the outer leg carrying the weight, the inner leg tends to bend or it can point outwards. The current legs look more suited to a non leaning pose as both legs seem to be carrying weight. 2 legs carrying the weight is generally a strong pose and as such conveys it to the viewer. Perhaps the foot pointing outwards more would help the weight issue. In the paintover I try meet the 2 poses halfway.

    Any thoughts from you on change of pose? Curious as to what your idea behind it was.
    Thanked by 1Elyaradine
  • @kidult: Sure. I changed the pose because of personality. From the start, of that painting I wanted her to be a badass. With the old pose, I thought she'd be leaning against something because she just didn't care, but it felt more flirtatious than badass, and there was a weight-distribution problem there that I didn't like. I balanced her weight to make her more like someone who "owns" her space.
    Thanked by 1kidult
  • Ok here's the paintover. Didn't do any major changes but it's the same size as the one you uploaded so you can drop them both into a PSD and check the changes.

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    So pose 1st seeing as I had some extra notes. My rough hack job has a slightly more relaxed leg and doesn't really make a big improvement as I said before but maybe it gives you some ideas. I also changed the wrist a bit, your wrist had a curve to it that maybe her armour look bendy. If this was intentional then perhaps bring in some more bendy looking bits to give the idea of bendy armour. Also adjusted the thumb a smidgen, felt her thumb was a little too long.

    Next design: I added some armour to her shins, bit of a personal preference as it felt like she was wearing two different outfits. Armour on top but almost biker pants on the bottom. I added in some extra details on the floor and railing as the designs were very simple. It doesn't need a ton of extra details being the background stuff but you can add details like this very easily. I painted some quick details on a separate layer as if its being viewed straight on. I then just used the transform and distort tools to have it follow the perspective. Almost like you would say add a texture to a 3d cube, which is then viewed at an angle. (if this doesn't make sense let me know and i'l try elaborate more as its a very handy technique) I also changed her pants in the crotch area. The triangular shape with a line running through it can easily be seen as representing her genitals or at least drawing attention to her crotch. The belt area with the chains looks pretty epic though, maybe an extra strap or two on the rest of her could work too. Lastly on the design front, I didn't make any changes but her gun could do with some better designs or details. (And straighter lines. it clashes somewhat with the very straight lines of the railing and floor) Do you ever do concepts for illustrations like these or just design on the fly? Maybe doing a few quick designs can help bring interest to objects like this.

    Onto lighting and rendering. As Gareth pointed out your lighting isn't quite as realistic as it could be but in this case I think it actually works. There's a reason we have the phrase "artistic license". I did try to knock back the highlights on the leg near the gun as it feels like it should be in the shadow of the gun somewhat. Next up I tried to add more contrast into her. With adding the glows and such she started to feel a little washed out. If you check the values on my paintover you'l see that her lower half isnt standing out as much from the background. Her top half has such a nice contrast of values with the black on white that it stands out very nicely and helps build on the focal point. By having the lower half blend in more value wise, she seems more placed into the environment or image.
    Brushmark wise you seemed to have again cut her in half with the top parts being rendered much more tightly than the bottom half. I going to assume its due to the painterly look you like in the god-tier artists you posted and perhaps going for that tighter brushwork near the focal point getting rougher as you move away. The reason this may not be working is the background is pretty much all tightened up. Same with the edges very tight up top but very blurry down the bottom. Being familiar with your other work i feel you are well on your way to achieve the style you want, just needs more practice. I found for me personally doing life studies (just general objects) helped the most when it came to tuning my lighting and rendering style. Also even if you are going for a painterly look try to work on the gradation of your forms more.

    Can't think of much else to say but if you have any questions fire away. I'm thinking of perhaps doing future paintovers in a google hangout or streaming it so I can ramble while I paint and hopefully convey more info and help that way.
    Thanked by 2Elyaradine dammit
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    Thanks for the crits, dude! :D The little changes to the environment really make it more interesting. I do want to go in and "painterly"-up the background; it was something I bashed from some stuff I generated using some texture generators, which unfortunately make things pixel-perfect. Lots of other little notes on things that only look like problems now that you've mentioned it. Woot!

    Still got some contract stuff to finish up, but I'm itching to fix this thing up!
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    @Elyaradine

    I saw @kidults paintover and wanted to add my own two cents also :P Hope you don't mind!

    The main thing I am in disagreement with are the legs. I think for that power pose, I'd actually spread her feet even wider, give her a sturdier stance, she seems the type that would take up space.
    I'm a fan of her armor, preferred the muted colours on your original.
    Do agree with the groin area on Kidults paintover, pants wouldn't hug so tight.
    Wider legs also creates triangle, silhouetted with gun, pointing back up to her face.

    The next thing was a few anatomical tweaks. I gave her a jaw and tweaked her nose and mouth, pulled her pointing arm up a bit at the shoulder, shortened her thumb and made her hands bigger, then straightened the forearm on the other arm. Lit up side of her face and put a sheen in her hair.

    Finally tweaked the scarf for a fuller silhouette, also made it look less choking, smoothed out her pants to give her knees. Widened her waist and thighs a bit too, a more solid build.

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  • @Jelligeth: Winning! :D Thanks! I dig that pose!
  • Made some of the above fixes. I repainted face, because even though the reference I was using does that funny lip-cheek thing. I threw away the reference and painted something less extreme.

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