Recently in Digital Painting Category

surfBoards, originally uploaded by jfrancis.

I've been going through old hard drives and uploading to this Flickr set anything that seems worthwhile.



"You never know what you gonna get..."

wings_DSCN1904, originally uploaded by jfrancis.

Matte Painting Reference - Feathers and Wings...

The brightly colored front- and back-lit feathers in the rest of the flickr set were reference photos I took in order to create some test animation for the 'Glowbird' for the 3D stereo film 'Journey to the Center of the Earth.' The job ended up being awarded elsewhere.

clouds_DSCN1897, originally uploaded by jfrancis.

Matte Painting Reference:

Skies and Clouds.

smoke_DSCN0152, originally uploaded by jfrancis.

Matte Painting Reference:

Some photos from May 2001 of a fire in Hollywood, California. The location of the fire is La Brea Avenue somewhere between Hollywood Blvd and Santa Monica Blvd.

debris_DSCN0086, originally uploaded by jfrancis.

Matte Painting Reference:

Some older images taken with a Nikon Coolpix 990 consisting of various demolition sites under sunny and overcast skies. Could be useful as reference for digital matte painting work.

One way to make cartoony rocket exhast in Photoshop...

1) Make some marks on the page. Some wide. Some thin.

2) Motion blur them.

3) Warp them into shape.

I forget exactly what I did, but it was something close to this.

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The logo in use.

When you shoot using your camera in a vertical aspect ratio, you don't do anything special but turn your camera. To match Maya to your DSLR you need to make an extra little adjustment. When you swap the resolution x and y, you have to swap the horizontal and vertical film aperture values as well...

Here is a rectangular polygon mesh just the right size and shape to fit into a Maya camera resolution gate after it has been set to mimic a Nikon D200. (as described here)

A horizontal Nikon D200 full resolution frame is 3872 x 2592.

. . . if you simply change the resolution . . .

. . . and if you simply rotate your plane 90 degrees you'll see it still no longer fits . . .

You need to swap the values in the 'Horizontal and Vertical Film Aperture' fields as well. It may seem obvious, but it's easy to forget.

Another solution is to leave the 'Film Aperture' values as if for a horizontal camera match, and change the lens from a 50 mm (in this case) to (it turns out to be) a 33.5 mm lens. But who wants to do the necessary work to figure that out?

So to match a horizontal D200 to a Maya camera, don't forget to set the

Horizontal Film Aperture = 0.622047244, which is 15.8 mm in inches

Vertical Film Aperture = 0.929133858, which is 23.6 mm in inches

Then your Nikon D200 lens should match your Maya lens.

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A 'full frame' Nikon D700 has a chip size of 36 mm x 23.9 mm.

At 1.417" x 0.945" Maya's default camera back equates to 36 mm x 24 mm. So Maya default cameras equate directly to Nikon D700 lenses.

Don't forget to swap places with the 1.417 and the 0.945 values when you go vertical with the resolution.

After I completed the image of Apnea - The Knife Thrower's Assistant, I realized the target looked previously unused. It needed a history of knife impacts. After trying to place impact holes manually, I realized I could create a Photoshop brush to scatter the holes around.

I used a stock Photoshop 'sponge' brush squeezed into a slit shape. I turned the scatter way up, and introduced some random rotation. Finally I added some noise and additional image processing to the scatter cloud to give some degree of unique shape to each impact hole, so they wouldn't all look essentially identical.

I picked up Alias Sketchbook Pro 2.0 at the SIGGRAPH promotional price of $149, and I'm quite happy with it.

It's marketed for "sketching" but if you design your own pressure-sensitive brush and use the method I outline in the image above, you may find the software can achieve painterly blends.

Draw something from reference. Let's say it's a skull.

Hide the reference and draw it again from memory. Focus on essential planes and basic forms, not little surface details.

You will be imediately confronted by what you don't know about it. Is the mastoid process above or below the teeth? What is directly above the last molars? Things like that.

Write your questions down.

When you use terms like "above" and "below", make sure your questions are phrased in terms of the imaginary axes of the object itself -- not the axes of the paper. If you ask questions like "In this particular view, is the base of the nose above the base of the back of the skull?" you will be memorizing a drawing -- not an object's form. The idea is not to memorize a series of drawings, but to learn the object itself, so that later you can use what you learned to draw it from any angle. In the photo above, the blue lines are not a fixed grid in paper-space; they are the edges of cubes. When you turn the skull off axis, mentally turn the cubes off axis as well.

Draw it again from reference. Answer your questions.

Repeat the process with and without reference until you have fewer and fewer questions and can draw the object well without reference.

Move on to another view of it and repeat the process until you don't need reference for any view at all.

You may be surprised at how fast you can develop a "conception of form" for a complex object.

The feedback question / answer loop is better than staring at an object and trying to memorize it through sheer force of will.

The nineteenth century French artist Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran was a pioneering proponent of this general sort of learning method.

When rendering a sphere, people often put the highlight in the wrong place. The highlight does not belong "at noon."

It is true that a diffuse sphere, like the Moon, will be brightest where the sun shines most directly -- where it is "noon."

However, a sphere with any "shinyness" to it will have its hot spot not at "noon," but in the place on its surface midway between the angle to the light, and the angle to the viewer.

You know your lines need to converge to a common vanishing point. But what do you do when that vanishing point is so far along the horizon that it is not within your composition?

Here's a guide I put together on how to plan a perspective grid in Photoshop when the vanishing points are far off the page.

For a really good example of why you should develop your painting in all areas at the same time and not just throw in a background later, check out illusion #3 of these three optical illusions from echalk.co.uk:

Even if you know it already, it will amaze you to see just how much context influences your color judgement.

...and on a somewhat related note, here's an old (pre-blog) page of mine on how to hone your color judgement using Photoshop and a digital camera.

When I paint in Photoshop, I blend colors using variable opacity under the control of a pressure-sensitive Wacom pen.

Grad-based blending from one color to another is not true digital color mixing, however. A linear blend from yellow to blue, for example, goes through middle gray without producing any sense of green.

If you want to simulate color mixing with opacity falloff blending from one color to another, you might want to help the blend along by adding a third color along the way.

Color mixing (which has the unfortunate and misleading name subtractive color mixing) is closer in behavior to multiplication, or the sandwiching of color filters. A yellow filter that only lets through pure yellow light (a single wavelength at around 570 nanometers) sandwiched with a blue (475 nm) filter will not create a green color, because neither filter allows green (510 nm) light to pass. It's the same deal with pigments.

A little crackle medium, available at most art and craft supply stores, can give your digital paintings an aged realism.

The two most important brushes in Photoshop are the hard-edged circle and the soft-edged circle.

The most important tool is a tablet with a pen.

Set your brush's opacity to respond to pen pressure.

Most things in the world have hard edges. You'll use your hard-edged brush a lot.

Many color transitions on or within objects are soft. You may find your soft-edged brush comes in handy in those cases -- but not as handy as you think -- don't over rely on it.

You can get a huge amount (maybe even most) of your work done with with a pressure-sensitive hard-edged circle.

How do you blend one color into another with a hard-edged brush?

Use a light touch (low pressure) and paint this color into that, and that color back into this.

Your two best hot keys are the size changers, ] for bigger size and [ for smaller size, and the eye dropper key (alt on Windows)

Don't eye-dropper colors from photos. Try to estimate them by eye. Feel free to sample your own colors from elsewhere in your painting.

Personally, I prefer not to let pressure control brush size; only opacity.

If you use the pressure sensitivity feature for any brush settings, take the time to go into the Wacom software and adjust the pressure sensitivity of the tip.

There is a slider that remaps pressure values through a curve. I like to set my pen tip to be one notch to the right of (firmer than) the default setting. I find this brings out the subtlety of the light touch, and helps prevent the tip from slamming from "barely on" to "fully on" without a smooth transition.

Using opacity falloff to model color mixing isn't "true" color mixing. The opacity blending method will only take you so far. If you feel there is a step missing in your blend, you can "help it out" by sticking the color into the blend yourself.

There are other ways to more accurately model digital color mixing within Photoshop. I talk more about that in my Digital Color Mixing with Photoshop post. Here's a sneak preview:

I don't actually use "multiply mixing" that much in Photoshop. It's not convenient. When I paint, I lay down direct color and opacity-blend it as described here. If I need to help a color mix along manually by introducing a third color, I do so.

If you don't like this style of painting and color mixing, look into Corel Painter as an alternative (and in many ways superior) digital painting application.

And don't miss Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green by Michael Wilcox.

I was experimenting with techniques for creating an organic, varied line weight in vector apps like Adobe Illustrator and came up with this approach.

Cartoony illustration is not really my thing, but I thought it might be a good choice for a poster for local Jazz Festival. To get the varied line weight, I drew each line twice -- first forwards, then immediately backwards -- loosely retracing the first line. I let Illustrator fill the resulting closed loop. No stroke was used -- only fill. I was sort of going for a style like that in the old Anna Nicole Smith tv show main titles.

In one-point perspective, all parallel lines perpendicular to the image place recede to or radiate from a common point in the center of the image. That center can only be moved by cropping the final art in one place or another. The "speed" with which lines parallel to the image plane "pile up" can be altered by changing one's sense of camera lens and placement.

When talented artist Robert Chang mentioned on an art forum that he was experimenting with layouts to explore the depiction of depth in 1-point perspective for a new work of his, I decided to take a closer look at the issue myself.

I was intrigued by a tutorial I found on artist Scott Robertson's web site drawthrough.com on how to freehand draw ellpses. I found it extremely educational, and wanted to play around in 3D with what I learned there.

If you paint a monochramatic gray underpainting and colorize it by simply multiplying it by a base color, you'll get a dull image. Even if you hand pick and paint every color in your image, if you rely only on the luminosity slider, you'll have the same problems. You see this luminosity slider reliance a lot, especially in the skin tones of the work of beginning painters.

When a form turns away from light it usually experiences a hue shift. This often happens simply because the fill light is a different color from the key light. Regardless of why it happens, however, it usually looks better when it happens. So when you paint or light 3D, identify or invent a reason to shift the hue warmer or cooler, and sell it.

Here's a related link:
Avoiding Ugly Color Falloff in 3D

I was curious to see to what extent 3D computer graphics could integrate with 2D digital work. I was especially keen to acieve styles in 3D that had a "Non-Photorealistic" (NPR) quality - more illustrative or painterly looking. I found I could get some interesting results by modelling 3D primitives in a fairly crude way, and then selectively blurring certain edges (such as the interior edges in these marshmallow fluff couds.)

I thought another promising direction might be to use Painter to fake together some rough "paintovers."

It's not "real" painting, and it's not real "NPR," either, but I see potential in the end results, especially for still images in a print context, and I may explore more along these lines in future.

Artists stuggle over getting correct colors, yet often neglect to get correct values, in spite of the fact that of the two, values are more important than colors at revealing an object's form.