Digital Environment Painting with Noah Bradley

Whilst searching Youtube for videos I came across Noah Bradley. His work is gorgeous and he has a lot of insight to give.

I started watching his Digital Environment Painting series, which consists of 4 parts, to understand his work process from blocking colour out to detail.

Part 1: Digital Environment Painting with Noah Bradley

Analysis:


He started with a sketch again.
Starts with block in the colour under the line drawing.
Tries to get all the values of the scene right early on.

Big brushes and big general marks to imply whats happening.

Have the thumbnail at the top in the navigation so you can read the painting from a distance
flip the canvas regularly.

Staying zoomed out helps keep the eye on the overall composition instead of getting caught up in detail.

Lighting:

• Keep the lights warm and shadows warm or visa-verse.
• Establishing value separation.
  'The darkest part of your lights has to be different from the lightest part of your dark'

Start to paint on top of the line drawing.
Keep looking at the thumbnail  to make sure everything reads as a whole.

Speed Painting:

• Try to do one everyday.
• Teaches to be efficient, texture, imply not render.
• You could also work in black and white to improve value.

Pick what you hate the most and work on it.

Brushes don't matter that much though they're handy for speed painting.
Hard round brush is good enough.

Real live plain-air painting is good also. There's a certain naturalness you'll get from it.

Observe the world around you constantly as selling a believable image is critical. You must ground sci-fi and fantasy images in reality and nature.


Look up the old masters.

• Albert Beirstadt
• Caravaggio
• Rembrandt
• George Ennis
• Thomas Moran
• Hudson River School.

Get to a museum, there is only so many colours you can see on a computer screen.

Smudge tool: use it sparingly.
Its an easy way of controlling edges. Helps you to convey depth.

Part 2: Digital Environment Painting with Noah Bradley

Analysis:

Tricks for Lighting:

• Separating Darks from Lights.
• Establishing Warm/cool relationships
• Drama - make everything else in the image darker.
  The smaller the area you make the light, the more impact.

Details of the image:

• Spend time everywhere, not just the focal area:
  People will look where you don't want them to look.
• Work on the rest of the image before you do the focal point.
• Clean up somethings like lines and edges.
• Dont be afraid to change your image even if you're sold on an idea.

Atmosphere:

• Establish depth - its as important as good form.
• Further away, values will get to a mid tone and things will get softer.
• Loose some detail.

Depth needs to happen: you have to loose a lot of the contrast to sell the foreground lighting.

Vary big and small items to keep the perspective and keep the image interesting.

Painting snow and rocks:

• Add blue and yellow and grey
• Brush strokes in background must extent to back. It'll flatten out the image otherwise.

Composition:

• Rules of composition only go so far. Study them, but take them as a guide.
• If the image feels comfortable and it works for you, the composition is strong.
• If something looks wrong and bothers you, then break the rules out.

Flipping Canvas:

• Sometimes picking the reverse is a better view.
• Set up a shortcut to do the flipping, especially with figurative work.
  
  Learn shortcuts in general, a lot of speed advantage only comes with shortcuts.

Photoshop:

• HSV sliders are better than RGB to adjust values. Saves a lot of time when picking colours.

Part 3: Digital Environment Painting with Noah Bradley

Analysis:

Technical Points:

• CMYK vs RGB - Draw in RGB. Though CMYK is for print, usually work is more regularly viewed on a screen.
•  Work at 300 DPI at a size which can be easily printed.
•  Work big: it is easier to scale down than blow up.
• Calibrate monitor

When getting work printed, don't draw with really dark values as the darkest values usually bleed into black.
On a HSV slider, stay away from anything below 10 on the V slider.

Emotion:

• Just a simple feeling is good.
• Having a narrative or a story or an implication of a back story adds lots of emotions.
• Try to push the concept just a little bit. Don't just paint a piece of a place: think of a story behind.

Reference:

• Look at many pieces of reference.
• References enriches your own work.
• Copy-catness can be avoided by looking at more, not less.
• Painted studies of references and copying them as still life is brilliant.
• Study photographs.
• Photography links into painting, learning good composition from bad composition and colours and lighting.

Part 4: Digital Environment Painting with Noah Bradley

Analysis:

Balance of technical knowledge and creativity
Rotate tool in cs4 - good for straight lines.

Work on developing everything at the same time.

Thumbnail:

• Try not to deviate from original thumbnail composition.
• Thumbnail will have a sense of energy that rendered pieces have.
• Where as rendered pieces have emotional depth.

Bounce Light:

• Makes paintings believable.
• Picks up colours as it goes.
• Light unifies a piece.
• Image harmonizes itself with light.

Research: Environment Painting Tutorials

I have gathered some resources from Youtube to watch in order to learn how professionals start and build a digital painting.

Youtube User: Idrawgirls





                                                                                                                          

 

Analysis:

Rough sketch to start. Basic line. Drawing on grey.

Lay out colour scheme using soft brush. Complimentary colours used for land and sky.
Work on establishing the fore-ground first: working on shadows, then highlights.

With this painting, the further away the object, the colour of the sky washes into the forground and bleeds in.
Keep the lighting consistent, shadows need to stay on one side of objects and highlights need to stay on the other It looks like he's using an angled, flat and slightly textured brush.

Adjusting colour : the more contrast and saturation in the front, the more it'll be separated from the back.
adds a sense of depth.

Texture brushes can be used to help add in the extra detail.

                                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                          

Youtube User: ScotDrake






                                                                                                                           








                                                                                                                            

Honours Dregree Project - 18th September

Welcome

 For the DD3992 module of the 3rd year of our course, we’re required to keep a blog discussing all the research we've collected and describe how we synthesize the information gathered. This is such blog. :)

As this is student lead, I need to find a brief which is suitable to the skills I wish to develop and relative to the place within industry I wish to work in.

In order to find what I needed to concentrate on, I made a list of things I wished to focus on to base my project around:

• 2D Artwork
  This is what I want to focus on most. It is, in my opinion, my strongest skill when it comes to Games and the job I enjoy the most.
• Colour and Light
  Where as I have already practiced new colour schemes and using pallets and observing how light falls for previous artwork, My skills and knowledge in this area, I feel, aren't at the standard I wish them to be at.
• Texture
  Creating and defining textures such as metal, wood and stone can be quite difficult for me. I would very much enjoy learning to add that extra touch of realism and depth to the scenes I create.
•  Perspective
  Perspective has always eluded me. It is something I really want to grasp better in order to make my illustrations more believable and seem correctly scaled.
  
  
• Environments
  Environments are something I find much joy in creating. I would love to end up as an Environment concept artist
  .
  
• Design Work - Mechanics and Levels.Designing mechanics and levels are also things I find really interesting. Balancing the mechanics of play is incredibly important for an enjoyable game.