36 replies to this topic

[Ra-ul]

Turned out really nice, though it looks a bit dark to me (at least on my monitor at work), specially the Mechs. Even if they are painted in a dark color, they should not be toned down too much unless they have 0 glossiness (which looks a bit odd). Another suggestion, the water should reflect the color of the yellow-reddish sky. Keep it up

Edited by GraySho, 15 November 2011 - 05:26 AM.

[phelanjkell]

Very cool indeed! Great work!

[Silent]

I don't care for the stock brushes you've used to represent the grass and other foliage. I could pick that out a mile away and it looks lazy.

The colors are a bit muddy and dark, and it looks like you've used pure black in some instances for shading. You should really steer clear of pure black and white.

Do you lay out all the basic colors for a piece beforehand before you start detailing or do you detail as you go and build up to the finished state?

Edited by Silent, 15 November 2011 - 05:16 PM.

[Taliesin]

Silent, on 15 November 2011 - 05:14 PM, said:

I don't care for the stock brushes you've used to represent the grass and other foliage. I could pick that out a mile away and it looks lazy.

I disagree with that. I could spot that they were stock brushes, but that's what they're for and the end result is, I think quite pleasing to the eye. It has an almost classical painting style to it.
I do agree about the mudiness on the mechs, however and the use of pure black and white. The mechs could definately stand some more definition.

[John Clavell]

Silent, on 15 November 2011 - 05:14 PM, said:

I don't care for the stock brushes you've used to represent the grass and other foliage. I could pick that out a mile away and it looks lazy.

The colors are a bit muddy and dark, and it looks like you've used pure black in some instances for shading. You should really steer clear of pure black and white.

Do you lay out all the basic colors for a piece beforehand before you start detailing or do you detail as you go and build up to the finished state?

Actually, the brushes used to create the foliage and grass are all custom brushes I made. There is a stock brush in photoshop which is suitable for grass having three blades, however I used my own singled bladed brush for the bulk of the grass, and another multi-bladed brush for the larger grass. So in this instance your very much mistaken. However, there is some general repetition in the foliage, I certainly could and should of put more effort into this area.

This was painted using Adobe RGB then converted to sRGB. A good deal of further darkness comes from this conversion. The image is meant to be a sunset type setting, but I'm not saying it's perfect, and there is a dark muddiness. I certainly don't profess to be any good at digital painting. Colours where blocked out, then I just try to refine these larger shapes as the painting progresses.

Generally I'm pretty rubbish with mechanical drawing, it's never been my strong point. And this was the first digital painting i'd done in some years, however, my motivation was just to do something inspired by the new game, and getting back into MechWarrior. I'm certainly my biggest critic, and I'm well aware of the weaknesses in the painting. I was most happy with aspects of the trees, and some of the general colours. I think the weakest point of the image is certainly the Mechs themselves, and I struggled the most with them.

Overall I'll continue to practice with sketching and painting Mechs. Doing this did inspire me to spend more time with digital painting to try and improve. And I certainly welcome good crits, input, and tips. Below I've included some further WIP images.

Edited by John Clavell, 16 November 2011 - 01:35 AM.

[Silent]

Yeah, the foliage could be broken up a bit more. Sorry I accused you of using stock brushes, they look pretty similar.

I like the lighting and color scheme you've used, I just think it could be ramped up a bit more. That first WIP shot you just posted, color-wise, pops a lot more than the ones you've posted further down. The richer gold in that really makes everything else pop, especially the darker Mechs. Adding some reds and purples would also help, just a bit more color to the sunset and lighting. The Mechs look awesome, really. I noticed looking at the WIP shots that you painted them organically; maybe for your next piece (and I hope you do more) experiment with laying out the initial forms of the Mechs with the Polygonal Lasso and then detail the shapes from there. That way you get nice hard geometric shapes that pop against the organic backgrounds. While the Mechs look good their edges are soft which makes them blend in a bit too much with everything else.

Keep it up, man.

Edited by Silent, 16 November 2011 - 01:59 AM.

[John Clavell]

Silent, on 16 November 2011 - 01:58 AM, said:

Yeah, the foliage could be broken up a bit more. Sorry I accused you of using stock brushes, they look pretty similar.

I like the lighting and color scheme you've used, I just think it could be ramped up a bit more. That first WIP shot you just posted, color-wise, pops a lot more than the ones you've posted further down. The richer gold in that really makes everything else pop, especially the darker Mechs. Adding some reds and purples would also help, just a bit more color to the sunset and lighting. The Mechs look awesome, really. I noticed looking at the WIP shots that you painted them organically; maybe for your next piece (and I hope you do more) experiment with laying out the initial forms of the Mechs with the Polygonal Lasso and then detail the shapes from there. That way you get nice hard geometric shapes that pop against the organic backgrounds. While the Mechs look good their edges are soft which makes them blend in a bit too much with everything else.

Keep it up, man.

Thanks Silent. The original block out colours in the sky got dumbed down with a colour filter, at the time I felt it was the right thing to do, however look back I think your correct. That added contrast would of made more sense with the overall darker shades on the Mechs. Mixing in the reds and purples would of really helped it pop more.

Regarding the mechs, yes, I did paint them organically, and I was frustrated with the process, it did not look right to me and the edges are all too soft, making them blend into the background way too much. I appreciate your feedback, and agree with it whole heartedly. I will start working on more stuff, and take onboard everyones input. It's most encouraging.

Edited by John Clavell, 16 November 2011 - 02:17 AM.

[John Clavell]

Silent, on 16 November 2011 - 01:58 AM, said:

Yeah, the foliage could be broken up a bit more. Sorry I accused you of using stock brushes, they look pretty similar.

Originally I had envisioned to add a bit more detail to the foreground, maybe some rocks, and defocused shrubs to break this area up. I did get lazy here. I was actually spending too much time on this when I should of been doing other work, so I just cut my losses and went nuts on the grass in the last leg, having lost a lot of time trying to get the Mechs right.

One thing which I find interesting in Alexander Iglesias work on the MWO websites background is how much hard detail he has in the rubble and terrain, I'm guessing he must have a set of really hard edged custom brushes? For me the big take aways here are (aside from colour, and the mechs) brushes, brushes, brushes. I need to start making more of them. I really enjoyed making the brushes for the leaves on the trees, I think they came out pretty well. I needed to make more brushes to give different details, I reused the same brushes too much, and the effect is not so awesome.

Edited by John Clavell, 16 November 2011 - 02:38 AM.

[Silent]

John Clavell, on 16 November 2011 - 02:31 AM, said:

One thing which I find interesting in Alexander Iglesias work on the MWO websites background is how much hard detail he has in the rubble and terrain, I'm guessing he must have a set of really hard edged custom brushes?

The details you are seeing are usually textures and photographs blended into the painting. The vast majority of the detail in that background (rocky landscape, debris, explosions, etc) are carefully blended textures and not really painted. I am sure there is plenty of custom brushwork in there to get it looking right, though. A good resource for that sort of thing is cgtextures.com.

Edited by Silent, 16 November 2011 - 03:03 AM.

[Taliesin]

When using brushes to do things like leaves and grass, (and assuming you're using a pen rather than a mouse) you can set not only the size and rotation jitter but also opacity, colour and hue. This will give even more variety to the leaves and grass when painting them in. Keep it subtle though 3-5% usually does it.

And yes, a lot of the background detail in Alexander's images will be photo elements blended in. This is a common concept art time saver and nothing to shy away from.

Edited by Taliesin, 16 November 2011 - 03:56 AM.

[Taliesin]

Regarding painting hard surfaces, I (and a lot of the concept guys where I work) often make up a block model in a 3D program and paint over it. It's what I did for this image
It helps to keep perspective right and allows you to set up basic lighting information too. Something as simple as Sketchup will allow you to do this, but I appreciate, however that this is quite a leap for someone not used to using 3D software.

[John Clavell]

Silent, on 16 November 2011 - 02:57 AM, said:

The details you are seeing are usually textures and photographs blended into the painting. The vast majority of the detail in that background (rocky landscape, debris, explosions, etc) are carefully blended textures and not really painted. I am sure there is plenty of custom brushwork in there to get it looking right, though. A good resource for that sort of thing is cgtextures.com.

Taliesin, on 16 November 2011 - 03:54 AM, said:

When using brushes to do things like leaves and grass, (and assuming you're using a pen rather than a mouse) you can set not only the size and rotation jitter but also opacity, colour and hue. This will give even more variety to the leaves and grass when painting them in. Keep it subtle though 3-5% usually does it.

And yes, a lot of the background detail in Alexander's images will be photo elements blended in. This is a common concept art time saver and nothing to shy away from.

Thanks for the insight and suggestions here, I'll certainly have a play around with blending in textures. Yes, I use an Intuos 3 tablet. I did use jitter for some of the brush work, but not all. Opacity was set to pen pressure. However, I did not use colour and hue jitter. I'll endeavour to try this out, I was just manually trying to grab lighter / darker colour shades from the picker.

Taliesin, on 16 November 2011 - 04:18 AM, said:

Regarding painting hard surfaces, I (and a lot of the concept guys where I work) often make up a block model in a 3D program and paint over it. It's what I did for this image
It helps to keep perspective right and allows you to set up basic lighting information too. Something as simple as Sketchup will allow you to do this, but I appreciate, however that this is quite a leap for someone not used to using 3D software.

That's actually a good idea! Also, nice Vulture!

[Taliesin]

Cheers, fella. It is, I admit still quite soupy but that's just my painting style.

[Adridos]

Nice work. I would advice to paint the mechs a bit differently, though. They are almost pure black and not seen the sketches, I would hardly knew it's Warhammer and would have no idea what the other mech is. Except for that, it's really a good drawing.

You don't have to change anything, it's just my suggestion.

[John Clavell]

Adridos, on 16 November 2011 - 09:49 AM, said:

Nice work. I would advice to paint the mechs a bit differently, though. They are almost pure black and not seen the sketches, I would hardly knew it's Warhammer and would have no idea what the other mech is. Except for that, it's really a good drawing.

You don't have to change anything, it's just my suggestion.

At this stage the image is done and finished. So I wont be going back to it. However, I will be taking everyones input onboard when I come to do some further work. I hope to start on a new mech illustration as soon as I have a chance from my normal work. So watch this space

[Stingray Productions]

i really like the shading.

[CyclonerM]

Wow, it is nice, gives me a god "Old School" feeling