Preserved Topic: Paint With Weadz (big cookie) (Page 1 of 2)

okee dokee. why ? dont know. but in the last week ive heard it said so many times that ive been brought to this. yes. i have written a tutorial. at least... of sorts... hehe

what have i been hearing? that its hard to make good 3d in Photoshop. that faces are harder, and well, thats not really true. so welcome to Paint Along with Weadah #1 - Values -

okay so before anything else, dig this : there is painting from life (memory), there is painting from photos (copy) and there is 'painting on a photo' (matte).

painting from life is the most useful skill to learn and the one recommended. matte is an extremely useful technique to learn, but it wont come easily (as easy as it may sound) and painting from a photo (trying to copy what you see in it) is just plain wrong (read : worse than a lens flare). photo's dont see things the way we do with our eyes, shadows are never full black for example, and a photo is just flat colour after all.

too often folk will lay the colours down without realising why those colours are there? so dont get into the habit of using photos as your only reference.

sooooooooooo having said all that *takes breath* here is a mini tute on 'how to paint from a photo' (yes i realise i said it was bad, that was for effect, sometimes there's no choice nyuk nyuk nyuk)





ive stopped at this point as the final image didnt require much more, but you could go a little further on this. the point is that all the values are set now, and he's ready to colour. there are big advantages to painting in greys and thats one of them. its easy now to just run a brush (set to multiply) over him in the correct skin tones and walla - your done -

okee so hopefully you will have lots of questions (or at least one or two) and i'll come back to give some answers (or at least one or two). hehe

and give it try yourself - if you do, post it up here! - pick a good photo of someone and make up an image. it wont be good to start with but this really aint hard =)


----------------
Weadz

Nice one Wead. Maybe I'll give it a try... I don't know though.... using photoshop filters is so much cleaner than all that stuff you mentioned.



- Michael -

geezzzz, and i though we had sucessfully got ridden of that darkgarden dude......

um.... i will have to get back to you later. it is like 430am and and um..... i have been doing history for 8hrs today/yesterday.

I STILL wanna see a picture of you... or your brain that is wired directly to your motherborad on your 'puter...

Izzy.tired.pyro.

This is actually an exercise I've been doing. Another one I've tried is painting clothes on nudes. Heh.

One of my teachers once said, "There are no lines in real life, only changes in colour."

Good job, Weadah.

you sir, at one time, told me you could not draw worth a damn. You lied.

Jason

fantastic Weadah.. I can only strive to reach your level of skill.. if you ever get the time to expand that tutorial , I am sure it would make a great addition over at GN.. ~Vp~

edit:removed sig to save on BW

[This message has been edited by vogonpoet (edited 05-13-2001).]

Thanks weadah . You`ve already answered some of the questions i had, but I didn`t see anything about layers , Did you do all that on 1 layer ?

I`ll give it a shot, see if I can make it work for me. I`m sure I`ll come up with more questions later.

Weedah, that is BLOODY AMAZING!

I definitely think you should put that on GN. And once again, your talent is awesome. I love to see stuff that's not just follow steps a through b and apply appropriate filters. True artists are always set apart from the crowd.

Time to fire up PS and see what I can do.

where is his right eye? and what about people that actually have a full head of hair? like me.... how would you go about painting that?

My only questions would be about layers, like DB brought up, but did you do that with a mouse or your spiffy GXT Tablet.

No I lied, I have some more questions: Did you teach yourself most of the stuff you know or did you go to Uni? If so what Uni did you study at.

You probably don't know this but I'll ask anyway: Do you happen to know anything about the Design courses at RMIT (Royal Melborne Institute of Technology). I've looked up some information on them in the past and they look good, but I've never actualy asked anyone about them. Thought you might know or have talked to some people who have done them seeing you live down that way. There just aren't any decent design schools in Brisbane! Well, I lie, there are decent ones, but there aren't many CG related courses up here, and none of them really seem to be what I'm lookign for....

WARNING, My usual Rambling below:

To those of you who say that you'll never reach that skill level:
Don't be scared off by how amazing this looks, it is actualy quite easy after you've practiced it a bit. Most of the stuff I do in PS in done in similar ways. Filters may be rather clean but they are extremely limited, and filters can only be used for special effects of sorts. You don't have to be able to draw well to do something like this, your not drawing, your just colouring in. Further more, a peice of paper doesn't have an undo function, nor are erazers as effective on paper.

I used to paint a lot of miniatures (Ever heard of Warhammer??) to the point of being able to win many painting competions (Miniature Painting that is). All I was doing was effectively colouring and shading using a paint brush to make a tiny metal thing look real. I gave this up some years ago but I still use the same skills in PS almost every day. Some of you may have rememberd the 'All Things Glass' Thred's. All of the works that I poasted there were done without using filters with an exception for metal ring around the outside od the gem. Picture below.



Other work I've done using similar methods is for a Counter-Strike Clan web site I'm currently working on and an old image I was thinking about using for one of my personal sites. you can find a links to thess images below:

CS Site Image

Old working Image

If I have time I'll get cracking on some other images to put up here. I've never attempted a Head so I suppose now's as good as ever.

Your work is truely insperational Weadah!

Dracusis

Edit: Wanted to ask some more questions.

[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 05-13-2001).]

woo! hey cool, and cheers guys.

hey just a couple things i forgot to say - the original sketch work was done at about 5000px wide.
the intended final image was 300px. A bit of a reduction hehe

painting big , then shrinking down, then detailing again is the key perhaps. you can paint extremely ruff at that size and reducing it squashes everything in to a nice lil package, for you to run your final details over.

Taxon : you can paint hehe without filters - ive seen you do it =)

Eye (1) : hehe pix of the 'crusty ole one' as milker put it? naw, well mebbe but not here hehe

Warjournal : your teacher was right - as loose as that is - pick the right colours, and everything else almost takes care of itself. if there's some interest mebbe in a week or so we can look at colour and how to paint it ruff? anyways...

JK : hmm and you know, i still cant draw worth a damn. take a look at sketch one - looks like it was drawn by krets! (or one of his pupils hehe). this is painting. make a mistake, paint it over and make another, then paint that over hehe on an on. this is much more a technicality than an art thing? paint from the middle values out, easy

VP : thanks mate =) and im hoping that you might give this ago, perhaps if only to practice some. what i was thinkin, is that if we get e few questions and crits on work, it will expand here, in this thread and some kind Guru (Warmage im lookin at you man hah) might come along and extract the info. the text above is about all i could find to say, but if you can prompt me a lil, we might have something heh a do it your self tutorial? hmmmm

Bob : I was hoping you might jump in on this, your stuff has been kickin ass of late. so yah thats all painted on the background layer. theres only two reasons for doing it that way - one was for simply for the practice - just a personal thing - and the other is the blend of paint.

theres really no reason to not make the glasses on one layer, the beard on another etc for example, and thats prolly the best way to go when you begin. makes it easy to test ideas without spoiling the good stuff below. in the end you are gonna have to flatten the image and work it over at least once in that state tho. so both techniques have thier advantages. i would suggest that you try both - but steer towards using few layers (one) and painting out your mistakes then painting them back in, fantastic practice but try both yup

Silence : again - thanks. and yup fire her up and post what you make, we can do some crits and point stiffs out so get thee workin! hehe

Eye (2) : shit! i owe you mail! today - i swear!
his right eye is in there, but not finished. theres a lil darker patch beyond the reflection in the glass - that it hehe. naa like i say for the final version (now hanging at The Path Of Thorns) i wanted a slightly unfinished look. that prolly sounds like a cop out, but it was starting to resemble a filtered photograph and i stopped there.

hair is super simple believe it or not. and a head with hair is easier to paint (it seems anyways) there are a couple basic tutes out there (look for one by Enayla - she rocks) but the basic idea for hair is the same as everything above.

paint big and shrink down!
use only a few colours (hair ones) and paint from the middle values out
clump colours together - then go smaller brushes and lots and lots of fine lines (in higher/lower values) for finishing. straight hair is a piece of cake. curly requires you to use small loopy type action sorta folding the colours underneath each other. mebbe we can look at that soon too yes?


Dracusis : yah with a tablet for sure - tho - dont let that put you off, painting stuff with a mouse can be done. if you have or can get a tablet then i seriously recommend doing so as it makes Photoshop a very complete package. anyways.......

yupper self taught. cant draw or paint in real life. got into grafix n code about 4 years or so ago - surfing around - fell in love with Doc's work (visit his bulkdex, thats the reason i started) did his tutes, got into 3d (models n render), then back to PS where ive been ever since. Photoshop is god. teehee

i think BunchaPixels would be your man to talk to about schooling perhaps, we're kinda a lil behind the times out here man, hehe no idea about schools, but if your passionate about really learning it - you will find (mebbe like i did) that the internet is your best resource. the internet and play - hours n hours n hours of it

and i totally agree - this isnt hard.

as im fond of saying, its all in the doing. dont plan it for too long, just get some paint on the canvas and it starts to flow. paint from the middle values out, cant go wrong =)

if I missed anything ask it again ? im kinda thick teehee


[This message has been edited by Weadah (edited 05-14-2001).]

trying hard here .. one layer.. pencil, paintbrush, burn, dodge... long ways to go

edit: oh ya.. and smudge

edeat2: v2

[This message has been edited by vogonpoet (edited 05-14-2001).]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE


*runs and hides*

Hey Weadz, what type/size of brush do you start out with? Do you start with 50% grey or a little lighter shade???

VP : yup - cool. but too black and too white too early =)

if you were to smudge that silly (smoothing it right over) you'd find that theres now no room for shading. shading is subtle, the variances in value are very very small from pixel to pixel, so in this case the changess are too harsh (dark next to light too soon)

what you can do tho is run the whole thing over with some dodge (set to shadows) and bring up all the values. then you can go down again with your normal brushwork/shading....

good start mi man =)


Krets : that will depend on the final output size mostly. always start these things as big as you can. 5000px wide is a good start but even 1000px will give a good result when reduced and detailed.

so Petes up there was 5000px to begin with, blocked in with brush sizes between 100-200px (with fairly fuzzy edges). then about image 4 he ws reduced to the final size and brushes start getting smaller and harder.

the final detail is done with the smaller - to the smallest brush (hardening the brush edge as it goes down in size)

so the finer your details the finer and harder the brush
but start really loose - paint ruff, shrink down =)


for a start size of about 2000px i would block in with brushes around the 100px mark (bit more, bit less) always swapping brushes around

dont forget your '[' and ']' keys cycle thru the brushes (shift+]or[ etc) too!


oh i was just reminded of another thing too! your brush tool (even with a pressure sensitive tablet) is ALWAYS set to a low opacity - thats how we blend right! - shoot thats so important too

for all your tools - use the opacity - set it low and use several strokes to blend from one value to the next - low opacity does this ! <--- vary important! hahah doh! (thanks Krets)

[This message has been edited by Weadah (edited 05-14-2001).]

http://www.geocities.com/wakkorotti2001/techie.html


I made this painting with pencils, of course, after dry brush filter, but i think that the technic is to really paint it, get a program as painter, where you can set the pressure of the pencil and the material (wet papaer, soft or hard watercolor, etc.) and paitn it as ypu like, then acentuate the lights and the shadows!!, weel i´m not a painter, but my dad is, and he said me that......




[This message has been edited by Wakkos (edited 05-14-2001).]

Thaks for all the tips there Weadah, I was having some trouble with the blending... Espically since you said to keep to only a few colours. I was trying to do this with the smudge tool even though you said not to use it much, and with an image 2000px wide on my PC, smudging things takes forever!!! You sure there isn't anything else you left out, like keeping you eyes open while trying to paint, that one's rather important to isn't it. Thanks again!

Dracusis

Well, here's my second attempt. I arr.. lost the first one... yeah that's it! I lost it...

Ahyhows what do you all think?



http://www.eccentrix.com/music/faithclub/myhead01.jpg

Dracusis


Edit By Weadah : added link. image hasnt shown all day but its there, or it was? =)

Edit: Trying to fix the URL ??

[This message has been edited by Weadah (edited 05-15-2001).]

[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 05-15-2001).]

Hmm, never really tried the more classical art like this....well not classical, but portraits and whatever. I think I'll give it shot later on. Cool tut Wead!

bookmarked this tutorial ... thanks weadah

~velvetrose

wakkos - that rocks man! way cool portrait!

hey no worries Velvet, more to come i think hehe

and yah mbridge - its worth noting that the 'paint from middles out' and 'paint in greys then colour' techniques are used for everything - not just heads or skin, but everything you can paint - pretty much all your game textures and models are done in a similer fashion..... so.... yah, its worth trying =)

anyways smudge - as we know is evil, but you do needa use it from time to time.

smudge will get sticky - around the 40px mark was soooo slow on mi old box, brushes always getting stuck, 'puter spinnin etc- so how to fix?

seemple

turn the spacing OFF for you smudge brushes! problem solved - turn off spacing for those bruses only tho (cuz zero spacing is an uglee stroke) but the tool glides like silk and thats the main thing (brush/spacing options are in your brush palette)

Drac - kickin ass man, you've kept the lite very consistant down his right side and it pays off, great stubble stuff too =)

prolly the forehead could use a lil more, mebbe some feint lines across the the top, some frown lines etc , but bloody good man - really like it!

VP : love the 2nd one alot - really shapely. only crit at this stage would be a lil too much dodge at the high points but kick butt non the less

[This message has been edited by Weadah (edited 05-15-2001).]

oh heres a tip - if your not sure about the 'read' of your image - like youve been staring at it too long or if youre not sure things are blending correctly - flip it hoizontaly. =)

it is said in the great Dark Garden of Knowledge, that real ife painters (oils etc) will use mirrors for the same reason.

thought that was worth a mention

-.-.-.-.-.-
Weadz

why am i backwards? i can draw and paint good, but i can't do anything with my tablet

i never thought of flipping your painting horizontally, ill try that next time.

your pic is really good. How do you get a flesh tone(when not gray), that's the hardest part for me.

your resolution is 5000? mines only 1024, and i'm always running out of room. How big's your monitor?

i gotta visit this part of the asylum more, last time i came i saw weadah's cool leaf thing. i think it was a barbed wire thread.

Cool wead. this is good stuff, man. And thanks. That means alot coming from somebody with a pretty good eye.

Wow, is that an ugly motherf**kin' head.

heh

All right kids, Wead gave you the daemon of referenced photos to play with. Now I'll give you the devil of deep lighting. Most portraiture is about conveying power through emotional evocation. How we do that with paints (or PS) is by the use of dynamic lighting, and colour structure.

But what's that? Well dynamic lighting has to do with a slight exxageration of reality. Your highlights seem high? Well bring them up a touch. Lowlights seem dark? Contrast them a touch more. Most important though...the use of colour instead of tone.

Wead took that oogly bean, and rendered it in a great monotone. Perfect base for your paintings. Then he touched on overlaying colour. What he left out (pour moi) was using colour to define your shapes more fully. Let's start.

I did a little repaint here, just to be narcissistic..heh...and to aid in my colour blocking later. All is still monochrome, just slight touches to bring the levels I wanted to a good medium, as the master mentioned earlier

Now, understand that the main light source in the room may not be white (dear lord, please learn this now) Since I wanted a sepia toning for this, I overlayed a base shade of a brownish-yellow, and from there would construct the other shades to block with.

Since we're working in a bit of a yellow trend, I used an off green-yellow for some shadow blocking to establish where the light fades off. Remember, these are all flat colours laid in place, then smudged. Maximum 2 Layers were used for this at any time, and mostly one (btw, Wead mentioned that I should tell you that the colour work was all done with a trackball...no tablet....so..you've been told). Also at this step, I established a more pink toning to the lips, but kept it within the sepia hued realm. Subtle colour differences can settle the blocks of a picture so easily in people's minds. The tiny details are the things that people might not notice outwardly, but they make all the difference to the end result.

Along with the green-yellow, I also brushed in some more red hued shades toward the depth shadow edgings. This helps to give our shadows a round feel without changing much in the way of tone, just colour.

Just as we laid in the lowlights (shadow blocks) with the green-yellow, we're going to establish the highlights with a more pale, peach colour. We stick close to the ideas of skin toning, but always consider the light source. ALWAYS!!!!!!

At this step, you should be using slight smudges to blend your block colours into your base. The more shine or reflection you want, then the higher the highlight, lower the lowlight, and less the blending. For skin tones, a good gradient is needed for smoother texture with less reflection. Our light is medium (remember the Wead!) so the texturing is subtle, and blended well.

Touch Ups. Integral. As Wead mentioned, going to smaller, harder brushes, you want to bring up your contrasts step by step, and establish good lines. Your colour blocks are blended, now any area that would get excessive light, or darkness will be dealt with, and blocked from the midtones.

So what do we get for a few minutes of colour blocking?


Quick and dirty...but you have to remember that contrast is not just established through monochrome when you've moved into colour worlds. Creating your base gives you your tone edges, and colour compliments that by being able to segregate areas for the eye to imagine depth.

Ready to transfer tone to colour?

Hit us with them.

Peter

wow.... this is crazy... i must be trippin....

gone for 2 days and all kindsa crazy junk starts happinin..... that is so COOL!!! who was that that didnt like the word cool? COOL MAN!!!!!!!

Very cool... after I get finished with all this junk now i will make someting that looks just like that! or..... um.... try.... DG.... you look.... sickly..... although you dont exactly look like a mass murder.... you dont look like the type to eat pears either.... hmm.... exceptional work Weadz.

ah gosh.... i just had a great idea.... i will show ya some day... hehehehe.......

Peter...you're one ugly sumbitch.

~smirk~


s t e p h e n

It's nice to see you back DG. You've been missed.

Wead and I were discussing it, and since we both agree that photoreferencing can be evil at times, we thought we should back up a bit, and let people get a feel for how a head can be constructed from just simple shapes.

The Asylum is famous for spheres, cubes, cylinders ad nauseum (heh) So, since you've had practice shading and reshading those simple shapes...let's use them to build something now.

This big old bean is built of three basic shapes. We're not going to get into nose structures, and eye orbits etc. right now...but they're just more simple shapes broken down into this main structure.

We have a spherical ellipse for the skull. A touch more complex polygon for the jaw and cheek structure. A cylinder then defines the neck. Three shapes, one head.

How does this help? Well, let's move toward shading.

As you take the shapes seperately, and think about your established light source, you can begin shading for that light source.

Each individual shape reacts with the lighting in certain ways, causing the highlights and shadows that we've been brushing in. As these shapes interact, you can see the form of the head coming into play.

Once you have your simple shapes shaded for lighting, and arranged in perspective (just ask Wead about that part..hehe) you can see that it's just another few steps to blending, smoothing, reshaping, and creating a monochrome base.

Keep your lighting consistent, and the structure in your mind. Progressing step by step will teach you where, and when you can skip ahead

Now, where's that perspective again?



Peter

Hey, welcome back DG! And thanks for the input about colour.. That was going to be my next question... Hopefull my usual server will be back up soon so my images will start showing up again. Problem with this is that the server's moving to the UK! I have this stupidly righ freind who lets me have an almost unlimited server space for free, but he has a programming job in the UK so it's flying over there with him. No idea when he'll have it back up though and my eccentrix.com accounts are all screwing up?? Anyone know of any good free hoasts in the meantime. (Just email this infor to me as this thred's already really big).

Oh, yeah. I had heaps of trouble with my first drawing (which i lost.. yeah) because I don't have a GFX Tablet. So for my second attempt I drew the basic outlines on paper then scanned them in. A really in-depth book on figure drawing come's in handy too, and for the shading I just referenced the photograph that I based the drawing on. I also use the smudge tool a lot, trying to blend tones using the brush tool with the mouse sucked big time! And cause my PC a bit outdated now I started the image at about 1000px wide, this helped speed things up a bit.

Ok, I'll run of and try again with a slightly different photo this time.

Right! My sever seems to be up and running again !!! So I moved this post down to the bottom as most of you possibly skiped over this and wond read back up this fan now...

Dracusis

EDIT: Bout F*****G Time too!

[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 05-16-2001).]

Good to hear from you DG. You seem pretty lucid ( for dead guy ) Glad you`re feeling better.

You have a way of putting into words what the hind-brain knew all along and wouldn`t tell you.

Thanks. Can`t wait to get a couple of things finished up and try this stuff.

early days still.. but I am practicing... I aint a natural.. (obviously).. but am determined .. ~Vp~

OK, I went back and made some corrections and minor alterations to my head (yep, thats me Ugly hey...). I also decided to show you what I started with just for fun. If anyone has any comments and or suggestions for improvments and such before I go ahead and add some colour to feel free to add them. If the images don't show up below I also have links to them just underneath.




And comments and suggestions welcome. Oh yeah, I havent finished the hair yet so I know that looks bad. And I'm yet to add the seem to the neck of my shirt, I wanted to get the shading right first....

Oh and Weadah, I didn't put in any frown lines accross the top of my forhead as I don't have any! I also shaved today so I decided to shave my image too

Dracusis

[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 05-16-2001).]

VP: your certainly improving from you first efforts I have two suggestions for you,

Suggestion One:
Take a trip down to your local library and loan out some books on figure drawing, espically some that have a lot of information of drawing heads'faces and facial expressions.

Suggestion Two: (If you have a scanner)
Take a photo of someone, scan it in than trace around the magor lines with the pencil tool then take the larer into a new image and start from that. This way you'll know you'll have all of the porpotions correct and you can concertrate on the shading. Or if you don't have a scanner but do have a GFX tablet, just put the photo on the tablet and trace over the major lines then go from there.

Dracusis

I think it's just a matter of 'style' Drac...

Thanks Drac, been thinking about doing something similar to what yuo suggest. I am using the graphire tablet (not really good enough for drawing). And I am in desparate need of some basic/beginners claases in sketching /drawing. I am rather a late bloomer when it comes to drawing freehand, but am trying

I kinda like the style I seem to have when it comes to faces. I know it looks unusal, but I want to develop this form. Scanning and or tracing is ceratinly something I will try.

All the images here so far have been done without a reference picture (well nobody is that ugly right!!!) heh. so working from a fixed point of refernce could be a good start point in my case.

Thanks for your reply ~Vp~

Awesome work.
I must get me a tablet.
I can do similar things with pencil or oil/canvas, but digital....No way...

For those interested in reading a bit more about anatomy and dynamic lighting:

Dynamic Anatomy
Dynamic Light and Shading

Both by Burne Hogarth for about 18 bucks.
(at least thats whats printed on mine. A few years old though)

They both are great reading and have many examples for constructing anatomic shapes out of geometrical ones *and* how to put a little depth to them by light/shadow. Helped me out a lot when it comes to offline art anyway



-nimraw
If you can't convince, confuse!

Nimraw: You don't *need* a graphics tablet to do this, I don't have one but yeah it would help. Although I'm looking around for one at the moment. Problem is my contracting careere has hit kind of a dry spot and unemployment benifits SUCK!

Not that I can complain, getting money for failing to find work aint too bad. Grrr I hate Brisbane!, the design industry here is so small it's not just funny! At least I know I got heaps of work starting in July, but untill then I guess I'l just have to be a poor whining bastard!

Any possible suggestions for my image above?? I'm gonna go ahead and add some colour to it soon anyways

God dam, gotta get around to making a sig one of these day now... I'm just too dam lazy

Dracusis

any good webs on drawing people.. just getting the basic shapes?