Long Time No See

Ok so this post is just to fill you in as to why I've not been active for the past week.

Well first of all my little brother has been in hospital with Meningitis, and sometime last week my sister was concerned I'd also picked up the illness after showing signs of many of the symptoms. It was also my birthday on Saturday so no better time than to be told by your sister she thinks you could die! That aside everything has more or less cleared up now. Still experiencing the inability to wake myself up and get out of bed, which I thought was just a symptom of being human, when apparently it is a sign of both Meningitis and Depression, who woulda knew.

Now that's out the way here's the plan! Before all of the above came about last week, I started working on a default base mesh provided by Zbrush. I'm currently working on the anatomy to suit that of my character.

Also after talking to Simon (my modelling tutor) about my current progress of work, he as always pointed out a lack of reference in my work, so when my InDesign decides to cooperate I'll be doing a visual break down of my design, with reference material to show where my thoughts and inspirations were born.

Into The Third Dimension

So the next stage is to get my design off the paper, and into Zbrush. We have around 5 weeks left of the project, but as I plan to make a high-res & a game-res model, I'd like to get the process moving as quick as possible. The aim is to get at least the high-res model finished within the next 2 weeks, which allows me to spend the 2 following weeks worrying about textures, maps and my game-res version; this should give me the final week to gather all my work together and make sure everything is up to scratch before it's all finally sent off.

To minimise time, I'm going to be using a pre-made base mesh so I don't have to worry about making mistakes during the early stages, that will inevitably slow me down later during the retopologizing stage. I will be making more models over the course of next year, when preparing my portfolio for uni, so I will make my own base meshes during this time, when time is not a crucial factor. I will also be doing anatomical studies along side my model work.

Retrace Your Steps

Although I can't show you the changes I made to my actual design during the painting process, I can walk you through my general painting process from start to finish, thanks to the amount of layers I used.

Step One:

So here is just the basic line-work for an athletic human male. (Reference was used from Google Images, by simply searching 'Male Body Model', I'm not going to upload it due to the amount of printscreens this post will receive!). A lot of people I've seen paint prefer not to use such dark line-work, or at least go out of their way to hide it up later, but I kinda like it, and think it may become part of my style (I hope that's not a problem?).

Step Two:

Here I went ahead and blocked in the skin colour, with minor tone around the abdominal & pectoral muscles. I didn't want to spend too much time refining muscle tone because I was in the mindset that my conceptual character could afford to be really loose. I used a custom made scale pallet (Shown in the top right) to create tone; a good tip to find a darker shade of your base colour is to colour pick the sections your skin crosses over your line work.

Step Tree:

Here I went ahead and added the line-work for some character detail. The mistake I've made in the past, was accidentally adding tone and shading to my line-work before I've started painting, so everything has either come out a lot darker than I intended, or would be completely erased by the layer on top of it, rendering the time spent very pointless.

Step Four:

Same process as step two, only this time I was colouring the clothing etc. You may also notice the skin colour gets a little bit lighter. I asked a few friends for their opinions, and they said that he looked a tiny bit too dark to look Native American, so I edited the Brightness in the image properties.

Step Five:

You may not even notice the difference here, but I found the left side of his body too bare with the sash & arm band both taking part on the right side, so I decided to give him a tattoo. This tattoo was actually taken from a Native American pottery design I found whilst doing my research, and thought it would look pretty nice as a body decal.

Step Six:

It may be a little hard to see, but at this stage I decided it was time to give him some hair. I started by lightly laying down the base shape in line form, ready to be painted.

Step Seven:

I made a new layer ready to start practising the hair method I showcased in the last post (Which I was pleasantly surprised with for my first attempt). This was probably the longest part of the process, but that may be due to my inexperience, I'm not too sure.

Step Eight:

Basically Step Seven but rinsed and repeated until I was left with a full head of hair. As the hair 'strands', were created with a 90% opacity brush, the scalp was still showing through, so I simply made another layer below all the hair and blocked in a solid mid-tone beneath it to cover up the skin.

Step Nine:

I finally finished up by adding colour to his eyes, and giving him some bloody face paint just to break up the boring expression.

Walk With Me

So I didn't get to blog much during the actual painting as I was moving a lot faster than I expected, and I thought I would have stop started a lot like the previous attempts at digital painting. Because of this I don't really have as many print screens as I was hoping to provide going through the process, which sucks because I would have liked to see some of my changes in hind sight. However I will provide a break down of the process and my layer options in the next post. For now, I'd like to talk about some of the things I encountered whilst actually painting.

First of all; colour schemes! As I've never really dove into colour I've never really faced the problem before... And as weird as this may sound, the designs in my head aren't really clear when it comes to colour. I man yeah I have an idea of what colour I want things to be, but I never realised how different it turns out to be when you put your imagination on the paper. Anyway like I've said in multiple posts now, I've spent a bit of time reading/ watching professionals of the industry, and they always seem to have distinct colour pallets that just work, so I decided to get out the old Chrome surf board and do a bit of browsing!

I found This Website that has a selection of colour schemes relative to my Native American theme.

Another half time interval for Jacks words of wisdom! Really do some homework with your colour scheme if you plan to tackle a huge composition piece. You'd be surprised how much a few colours can effect the mood and feel.

This image is taken from my digital copy of the book "Beginners Guide to Digital Painting"

(I highly recommend it)

Another thing I ran into trouble with was the hair. Now fortunately I left the hair 'til last because this was a lengthy process that left me emotionally drained from painting! The main problem was the fact that (as a noob artist) I simply didn't know how to do it. Fortunately for me, after almost an hour of what I call 'The Related Game' in which you search for something on YouTube, watch a video, then avoid searching for anything else, just let the related videos decide your path (YOLO). Anyway back to the original point of this section, after an hour, I was fortunate to stumble upon This Gem Of A Tutorial. I found the method really easy to follow, I think she does a great job of explaining the process, and I generally liked the outcome. Mine obviously didn't turn out as good as hers, but I'm finally coming to terms with the 'Practice Makes Perfect' business.

Clean Slate

So I finished my draft, and normally this would be the stage where I'd take the draft forward and just refine it  until I was happy. However, I've been watching a few experienced concept artists paint, and the the most common advice given is to fix a mistake when you notice it, and if you're not happy with your work and the problem is unfixable; start again. Now the thought of scrapping a piece of work I'd spent hours across multiple days on, has always left me feeling less than enthusiastic to continue, but I recently showed someone my draft, and I kinda felt embarrassed at how poor the work was (Even for a rough draft), and so I had a bit of time to think and assess where it all went wrong. Of course it all came down to the lack of effort I applied to the foundation of my drawing, and for the first time ever, I decided to scrap the original attempt; and man was I happy I did!

Ok I realise I've created quite the wall of text for a design blog, and people will start thinking "Where all da pictures at?!" so I'm going to break it up with this small interval and relay some words of wisdom, and point out the moral of this story "If you know your work sucks, start again!"

So now I will show you why I'm glad I started again...

This is the rough draft I produced over a couple of days during the holiday (The work was on and off of course with all the Easter distractions!)

And this is what I produced in a single day after analysing what went wrong the first time, using reference, and most importantly of all, using my friends as personal critics at key stages during my painting. I think the last factor helped a lot as they were really honest and supportive, and positive feedback only fueled the fire to work harder and faster.

Originally I thought it would have been impossible to create a fully painted character design in around 3-4 hours at my current Photoshop power level (Over 9000!!!!!!). I'm aware that industry demands something of this quality in 15-30 minutes, but 3 hours is far better than any previous 'couple of days on and off' (without any painting), and I can only get faster.

The Faceless Man

I've now got round to sketching something out for my character design, and I've seen a fair amount of reference material on Native American warriors to feel comfortable enough to create my own. Here are some of my favourite pieces of inspiration.

Every man is a warrior, regardless of how many moons he's seen! 

 I really favour this one due to the 'come at me' -esque pose.

As I said before, age doesn't seem to be a factor to the natives.

This also stood out for it's sheer simplicity, and the balanced expression shown in his face.

After I started sketching, I really began to struggle with the facial features. I couldn't seem to create a face that read as a Native America, and then it occurred to me that I wasn't able to describe a typical Native American face to my friends, and if I wasn't able to describe one, I wasn't going to be able to create one.

I spent a bit of time comparing reference I'd gathered, and found 'This Thread' on Yahoo Answers, where someone managed to give an accurate description for me to work with.