mearrin69's art thread...

[Tiana]

In Intruder Alert, I'd definately hike up the contrast at the edges where the wall meets the floor, and just overall, more extreme color and lighting differences. It seems a bit too bright for a nighttime picture to me.

I'd also have a grappling hook and no figures, but that's just what I imagine.

Consider hunting for reference stock on places like DeviantArt--there's accounts dedicated to stock all over the place there. You might be able to find some good ninjas. Photo references are always good though--I have a massive collection of stock. A good trick for quick detail in things like the wall is to download textures and apply these to your brushes in Photoshop--open up the brush window and there's a spot for 'textures'... I have a few brick wall textures that I use from CGTextures, and well, a whole lot of other textures too--ranging from wallpaper textures to rocks, rust, and clouds and water. It's a good, fast way to put down detail to paint over, and I can see it coming in handy in your digital landscaping.

I'd consider myself a digital artist so I'm always happy to lend advice. ^_^

[philipstephen]

the buildings look good from the thumbnails... i have trouble with buildings... mostly i just draw faces... so i am challenged by doing much more... even though i paint whole scenes and such, as you can see on my website...

but in most of my paintings i keep it pretty simple...

it looks like you have a good sense of shape and composition... so it is just a process of refining your details i guess...

and for that? practice is likely the best solution...

phil

[mearrin69]

@tiana: Thanks for the feedback. Just what I need. I jumped into playing with color on that one before the values were even close enough to defined. I do have some refs and I've been working with a couple of figure-drawing texts I had laying around but (obviously) never practised rigorously.

@philipstephen: Thanks. Practice is definitely in order. BTW, looked at your site. Very cool stuff. I like the bright colors and whimsicality (is that even a word? I like to make up words). Nice pics.

Been mainly working on maps again lately but here's a somewhat complete render of Haibianr's copper piece. I just used my sketch as a guide but cleaned it up with some circles skewed into perspective then painted with various shades of copperish color until I got it looking sort of right. Then I duplicated the layer and messed with filters and blending modes to get it to pop and look a little more metallic. This one has an emboss filter applied and (maybe) color burn blending at 50% over my original painting. Could be improved but it's probably close enough for gov'mint work.
M