Preserved Topic: painting help.

Ok, I've seen all those bad ass paintings everyone's been doin' with the airbrush/paintbrush/dodge/burn etc. Now I'm givin' it a go. I'm not having any luck at all though. Here is my image thus far:
http://wind.prohosting.com/~thedorm/

My plan is to make a piece of skin stretched out cuz it's been nailed down. the grey is the painting which isn't very good at all yet and the background is the skin. (When finished the skin texture will be applied to the painting or vice versa. The skin won't be the background though.)

Any tips or pointers? I'm really going at this haphazzardly so any help at all plz

Schitzo

[This message has been edited by Schitzoboy (edited 02-19-2002).]

My initial feeling about it is that the mask (painting) for the skin has way to smooth and uniform edges. It looks as if someone cut the waveforms at the ends.

I'm not sure, but I don't think skin stretches that much. Try to rip a bit of cloth and just spale it to a board and look how the wrinkles turn our around the staple points. You should see a lot of wrinkles close to the pins where some of them streches out further and more prominent into the cloth than others.

I'm not sure where you're going with the greyscale image. If you are going to use it as a heightmap for displacement, I think you're in for a bit of trouble. All transitions are very smooth, so at the moment I think it will lokk as if you've wrapped your texture around something. Something stretched will have sharp wrinkles as well as soft transitions. Make your bed and look at the sheets

And most important of all: Determine source of light, so that your shading is consistent.

(We would need HS sig here!!)

Good luck!

Ok updated it a bit. I cut the skin out and tore it up around the edges. Made it bleed too. The old painted layer was all wrong when I looked at it this morning. So I started over. I tried airbrushing some stretch marks like sheets on it but it was just bad. Any idea on what brush to use? or should I be dodge/burning instead? I tried a lot of stuff but nothing was lookin' right when it came to the stretchmarks.

When I`m doing stuff like that, I`ll either use the airbrush (hardness set to 0, start at 10% or so, see what it looks like. Go from there.) Blur, fade, smudge, etc.

Or, I`ll do the same thing to an Alpha channel to use as a displace map if there`s more than 1 layer that needs to be affected.

Then dodge/burn, brush to taste.

My banner sig was mostly done with a d-map, but was touched up with the air brush.
Does that make sense ?

I'm sure I'm missing something. You want to paint bad ass by hand? So whats with the prefab texture ? Texture is made the same way - painting on the work itself.

Airbrush, dodge/burn, D-maps, filters, prefab textures - omg!. Hah. Avoid them for this sorta work. You can pull off all that stuff cleaner (sharper - with pixel level control) using the simple ole brush tool and its blend modes. Honestly - it's the difference between painting a photo from a blank canvas and painting an imitation of something.

Weadz