!!Peer Project!! Foundational Activities - Learning, Teaching, and Toast !

[Avetice]

well I've been trying to challenge my understanding of form. I try to draw different primitives merged together. The hard part, for me, is to get the right intersecting line. I can do it with simple merges but once i start turning the forms I couldn't do them so I opened up maya and used it for reference for these two pages. If anyone here has an y knowledge about combining forms like this please please please please share it. This combining can also be called a boolean difference if you want a technical term for it. anywho if mine look off please let me know, even if its an overdrawing. anyways hope this is somethin worthwhile

[Cup of Joe]

Yes! This thread will never die!

Message to EVERYONE- Read everyones response to avoid repeating mistakes!

Once again I'll try to help.

maxetormer- Nice! The grayscale on looks good, but your shadow is mishaped on each, which leads it too looks a little flat. I can't find it now, but I'll find Elwell's sphere post to explain what I mean. Basically, the edges of the shadow on the sphere cover the half of the sphere perindicular to the light source. (I think) I also think you could lighten the shadows a little. Just like you rarely find a 100% saturated color, you'll probably rarely find pure black anywhere. You totally nailed the second one though. Good job remembering that shadows soften at the edges.
Edit- Found it!- Elwell's sphere post.


Mehran- It's never too late! Nice job on the perspective, now try throwing a shadow in there! (See Uridian's shadow post at the top of the page). On the spheres, I think you should check out Briggsy's post and Elwell's post. (see above.) They could use more of a shadow to make it pop, and a little brighter highlight. Remeber reflected light on the bottom! Also, where's that Green light coming from? It looks awesome, but I'ts a little confusing.

Bhud- Looking good, nice textures! No more crits here!

Cyrus- Nice values, did you color pick? If so, try not to. Check out Briggsy's and Elwell's posts that I've linked to above.

Lighter- Not bad! Once again, I think youd rarely find pure black. Also, remember that the floor reflects light back at the sphere! Again, check out Briggsy's and Elwell's posts that I've linked to above. In the second one, the switch from midtone to light area is too harsh, and it makes the sphere look wierd, but nice colors!

Avetice- Looking good, but I'm not quite sure exactly what it is your doing. (?)

I'l try and do some more projects later today.

[Avetice]

Im trying to understand form better by merging primitives together. a basic example could be taking a cylinder and a cuber and merge them together so they intersect at parts. When you do that youll know how well you understand those basic forms even better. I'm just grouping more of them together so that the intersections are more complicated for me. I can merge cones, cubes, cylinders, and pyramids, but torus and spheres are a little harder for me to merge. the trick is to get the lines....that i marked in red on this next example correctly drawn to merge the two forms.
here are some that i just put together in maya really quickly in hopes that they are more understandable.

[Idiot Apathy]

Right, sorry guys - been neglecting you all again. I'm hoping later on this will become a little more self-sustaining, life is getting busier and busier. I'll try to go as in depth on these replies as I can.

@Maxetormer: Great! You've got the values very close - this wasn't really the point however, more so to get people thinking of colors in seperate terms, value hue and saturation, Specifically value here. I like the feel of your sphere, try and think what would look like this and under what sort of lighting situation - why would you have an almost black core and an almost white highlight? #2, the blocks: Again, really good. Shadows seem pretty good, smart of you to start out with a (parallel?) lightsource. I might check the L shaped blocks shadow again however. I like the thoughts you've got on reflected light too. Also it seems that there is only one lightsource, almost like a lightbulb. The only reflected light is coming from this lightsource bouncing off unseen objects - kind of cool. Cheers dude, keep it up.

@glOgg: Good, if you have any questions post them! I'll do my best. Eyeballing is important for speed, calculating is important for accuracy - figure out which you want but you should practice both I think.

@mehran: Good basic perspective, if you do any more feel free to post - maybe it can help someone. Spheres look nice - really smooth and interesting color transitions. Some of them look less round than others, and perhaps not exactly spheres - check out some of the posts around specifically briggsy's and a link to one from elwell I posted back a little, for the proper shape and shading The reflected light on the orange, the shape that is, feels odd to me. The overall shape I think is doable but perhaps its where you have the highlights in it. Can't wait to see what's next!

@Bhud: Thanks, great attitude man - that shows dedication and that my friend is very very important. You'll be improving like lightning if you keep it up. FredFlickStone, Ron Lemen - is a genius, wish he was still posting. On the funnel - if you've recognized that you've gone too light don't be afraid to edit, perhaps use levels or the brightness/contrast adjustments, or even a gray layer set to multiply. Keep going dude!


@Kitsu: Yeah, good link! Value is more important to readability than color - it's probably more important than color in many regards really.

@Cyrus: Yeah, good call on "yellow" being such a high value in our minds. And I think you've nailed the point of the exercise - you realized how important value is to color. I think you might want to check the position of your highlight however, see the posts from briggsy etc. Cheers and keep it up.

@Lighter: Good, I can see you thinking. Check out how vibrant your blue is even though it has a low value, I think this is a quirk of colors like blue. Interesting stuff. Second ones look nicer in the overall shape, good work. Color is interesting too, sort of a bluecyan lightsource. You might enjoy working with a softer edged brush to accent your harder edged brush by the way. Don't get discouraged, it will all come with time and practice. You've got the point of the exercise, if you feel like it later on you might try doing this again for good practice. Go get 'em!

@Avetice: This is some wierd stuff ! But interesting, this could be a pretty good exercise, some good value in it.

@Cup_of_Joe: Hey dude, you've been a big part in this Peer Project, thanks so much! I hope you don't take offense when I make comments about your replies, I just want to make sure everything is clear so it helps people out - two heads are better than one. Don't feel like I'm singleling you out either, it's just that... well you are just about the only other person who replies haha.


@Everyone: "Shadows soften at the edges" Can you think of why this could be? When this isn't true? See if you can dig up a post on Edges that Elwell (I think) did on edges, good stuff.

"Might not see 100% colors, just like you wouldn't see pure black" , yeah, pretty true - but don't be afraid to use them if it will help your vision, probably best used sparingly however!

[Cup of Joe]

I don't mind at all man! It's the only way I'll get better!

I know I've said I'd do some projects for a while now, so I did some! I tried my hand at project 5. Did a little Hue experimentation with this one. First of all, when choosing my hues, I tried to only eyeball the hues and not focus on value and saturation (or making it look pretty, obviously. eek.). So: 1) BAD IDEA!, 2) Looked like crap, 3) Eyeballing hues is a shitload harder than eyeballing values or saturation. So, yeah. It was fun doing some hue experimentation though! I was thinking someday I might try an exercize where value would stay the same, and I would see if I could describe form with saturation and hue. Oh, I also went not as hot/cool as I should have.

No. 1 and 2 were quick things to get the feel for eyeballing hue (once again, hard as shit) and three was a slightly less half-assed attempt.

Final notes- These were all done as fast as possible with as big a brush as possible with probably about 50% conciousness. (Very sleepy) I'm probably gonna see these tomorrow and wonder what the hell I was smoking. I also didn't focus on value and saturation as much as I should have, considering that was the point of the exercize.
Oh, I also went not as hot/cool as I should have. I'll do more tomorrow. So tired..

[Cup of Joe]

I'm probably gonna see these tomorrow and wonder what the hell I was smoking.

Seriously! Ewww. Ugly.

Project3 try. Not much to say. Kept these simple,used big brushes, focused on using shadow to define form, not using form to define shadow.

ref-



Unfinished top lighting-



Various others-

[Stillwell]

Hello everyone, I'm glad to be joining in. I hope I'm not too late, it seems to be a kind of zombie thread.

I think it can be a very useful exercise. I've read the first page of the thread for instructions and such, I'll make sure to read the rest in case I've missed some tips or anything.

There is a lot of useful information, like this one:
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/sho...25&postcount=8

It really did make me slap my forehead. It's so obvious, but I never actually realised it. Anyways, here I go. My first attempt at the first exercise, which I, no need to say, failed miserably.





It seems like I have a lot to learn, about everything. Values seems to be the first thing I have to learn about, I'm also clueless when it comes to colour and light. Anyways, off I am redoing this first exercise. It's good practice.

[Cup of Joe]

Values seems to be the first thing I have to learn about

Good thinking! Value is always the most important, because you can describe a form with or without color, as long as there is value.

I like the blue you chose for the sphere! I don't have much to say, just practice, and definately look over the other pages. Read everyones post. It will take forever (I still think theres a few things I haven't read) but there are so many useful tidbits of knowledge in these pages. After a while, reading value will get easier. Just keep at it!

P.S.- THIS THREAD WILL NEVER DIE!

[Stillwell]

Thanks Joe. After reading this I do believe value is the most important thing to read a form.

Anyways, here's my second attempt.





Much, much better. I'm still a bit off though. I think I did better because I squinted my eyes, which made it easier to read the value. I'm off doing one more, and then I'll go on with exercise 2.

Edit: My third attempt, I think I actually understand this.

[kratos]

Well here are my circles.






Very hard to make out color values from grayscale. At first I tried doing the color ball in blue but when i converted it to grayscale it all went black and after having read all them awesome tutorials i remembered that blue is a cool color so it will always turn out as a really dark value so i changed the ball to a warmer red.

One thing I did was to apply a channel mixer layer onto the red ball which would make it alot easier for me to check how close I was to the original gray scale values.

[Stillwell]

@kratos:
Nice sphere, I like it. It reminds me of a glass bulb! Maybe you could try using a higher range of values? I see a lot of light values in there, which you tackled almost perfectly, but what about those dark values?

Alright, so I started with the second exercise yesterday evening, but I'm a 3d modeler, and hey, I see cubes all day, so I said: hey, let's cut the chase a little. I continued reading the thread, and project #5 seemed interesting, so I decided to do it.

My first attempt was something one could call a disaster.


Here's some things I noted about this picture: In first place, my colors were horrible to begin with. I also misread the guidelines/tips of idiot apathy and didn't use my cool color in my shadows. I also didn't really "understood" how to use my wacom pen pressure to blend.

Second attempt, 24 hours later (tonight).


The first one took me about an hour, this one took me around 40 minutes. For all the time I've been working in the video games industry, I never used the wacom to texture my models. I was wrong, because it seems to work quite nicely. At one point when I was painting it clicked in my head, I don't really know what the hell happened. What definately added a lot was when I started adding the blue complementary color.

I'll probably be doing this exercise again, this time with another landscape.

[Jakian]

This thread makes my pants happy.

I really love it. Thanks guys.

[Cup of Joe]

Stillwell(#1)- Not bad! A little closer. Try working on that highlight shape, and dont be afraid to apply a guassian blur to a selected area if it helps. (I mean, Briggsy did it.)

kratos- Not Bad! Try a darker core shadow and that'll be great! Also, try doing it again, but just with eyeballing it.

Stillwell(#2)- Oh man, I gotta redo that one. You got it perfect the second time! The first is a little too mono-tone. The time you spent on it was well worth it, it looks great! (When I did mine I was so tired I was probably legally drunk.)

Jakian- C'mon! Don't be shy, Post something!

I wont have much free time for a few weeks, but after that expect some redos of my last ones. (They sucked)

[klys]

First I'd like to say, great thread! I have already learned so much from the first page.
Here's my try at the 2nd exercise. The light is coming from the back upper right. I tried my best to get the shadows right by first checking with a lamp and some square objects.
As for the blocks, I colored the brightest surfaces first, then decreased the value and worked on the other ones, and so on. Im clear on which side is least exposed to the light but one thing I'm not sure about is how to determine which of the other two visible planes of the big blue block is supposed to be brighter, the vertical, or the horizontal. So i took a geuss.

[Stillwell]

Thanks Joe. The second one was better, but I realise I could have pushed the contrast a bit further. Maybe stay in values higher in range, and use less mid-range.

Here's a new one, I started this one last evening and finished it tonight.



Not quite satisfied with it, but I got to a point where I couldn't push it any further, so instead of running around in circles I'll start a new one. All in all, this one probably took me an hour and a half.

I kind of struggled, I don't know why. The vegetation gave me a hard time, I redid the bottom right shrubs at least 3 times until it finally kind of worked. When I finally turned the original image to grayscale and compared, I noticed my values were a bit off, especially in the plants shadows. I also realised I'm missing some variations in the brush strokes of the highlights and the shadows.

One last thing: the image is lacking depth. I don't know why, but the foreground and the middle ground looks like they're at the same distance. I need to work on this, although I'm not sure how I'll do that. Enough ranting for now, I'm going back to the drawing board.

Edit: Holy COW. I just noticed how desaturated and washed out that looks. I'll have to watch for that.

[kyi_72]

didnt follow the assignment too well, used different hues in the color picker, but i think the effect is the same.





laid in solid colors first, then used complimentary color at dark value for shadows. used a lighter value of the base color to highlight the areas recieving light. the tricky part was getting the reflected blue and figuring out the shadow of the top green thing on its lower level. spent more time on this than i would have liked and will be going back to it.

[Pixeldragoon]

Pixeldragoon's parable asked his father for his inheritance early, then went out and spent it all on booze and chicks. It came home asking for forgiveness and Pixeldragoon threw him a party.

LOL, i r teh funnay

Sorry bump iwth a uselesspost; But I can't believe I said that. We were studying parables and fables in english class >_<

[le-mec]

Okay. That's Lesson 1... I am moving on to Lesson 2... unless someone says I screwed up Lesson 1.... Gotta catch up!

:EDIT:...
Process Notes:
Grayscale Sphere
Stage 1: Fill the circle with a neutral gray so I'm not stuck roofed at white... It gives me some room to play around with values.

Stage 2: Place the highlight. I'm going to repaint it anyways, but I place it just so its constantly there to remind me of where the light is coming from.

Stage 3: determine where the core shadow was. Basically, where the light is darkest -- the surface has changed direction until it is parallel with the source of light, and is receiving very little direct and indirect bounced light. I didn't go all out and blend it. Instead, I put three fat lines. One in the middle, where the shadow is thinnest, and two longer ones that wrapped around at the sides. I'm working off of the mental image I have of the days I used to work in 3D.

Stage 4: determine the main lit area. I don't make a lot of effort to blend anything. I just want to get a sense of the colour boundaries and see how the values appear next to one another.

Stage 5: add a little bit of bounced light on the bottom.

Stage 6: blend everything together using a circular brush -- fixed radius, pressure-sensitive opacity. I used a special pressure-sensitive colour blending tool on a plug-in palette I programmed for TVPaint to pick colours. The rest is just sort of er... 'glazing', I guess, if that's what the oil painters call it.

Stage 7: redraw the highlight

Coloured Sphere:[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/MARKCD%7E1.000/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot.jpg[/IMG]
Stage 1: Same deal. Fill the area with the semi-dark red.
Stage 2: Place the highlight
Stage 3: Determine the core shadow with a dark shade of red, using only simplified landmarks
Stage 4: Determine the main lit area, but using a red slightly darker than 255
Stage 5: Add a bounce light, but make it a little bit more purplish, to suggest a colder light bouncing effect.
Stage 6: Blend it all together.
Stage 7: Place the highlight using a slightly yellowish/orange tint, then tighten up the centre with white so the highlight doesn't appear chalky.

[le-mec]

Okay... lesson 2......

Step 1: Fill the canvas with something other than white. In this case, I like to use neutral greys with a sliiiight tinge of saturated colour. Why? Pure greys are a little hard to find in nature, and I would rather make a wrong decision than no decision at all.

Step 2: I chose 3 colours of equal value and saturation, but relatively contrasting-play-doh colours. I'm not using a standard palette -- rather a CIE-based Luminance Chroma Hue palette that I coded a few months ago. Yesyesyesyesyes... we're not supposed to use calculators, but what if I made this one myself? I cranked up the Luminance and hit all the tops, making no attempt to stay in the lines, then turned it down, hitting all the shadowed regions, and finally did the mid-regions using the pressure-sensitive eyedropper tool that lets me eyeball things about right. I know I'm not playing fair, here, but I might as well use the tools I use on the job and spent months developing...

Step 3: I realize all of a sudden I made a grave mistake. I should have figured out where the shadows lie before going around and colouring things. I place the shadows where they belong, and redo step 2.

Step 4: Now for the fun stuff. I use my pressure-sensitive eyedropper in Illumination mode and additively pick up colours from neighbouring surfaces to light them and cast reflections all around.

Step 5: I turn off the line layer and try to do some amount of tightening up, but there's not a lot to be learned from this sort of monkeywork, unless someone can please tell me it does magical things. Well, it builds character and patience, I guess...

Step 6: I look around at everyone else's stuff. I should have done this first. There's just no sense in reiterating other people's mistakes and missing out on their valuable tips. When entering a thread like this one so late in the game, it pays to get every bit of help you can get before starting.

I noticed that on IdiotApathy's example, there's a slight dark line on the "bench" shaped block, right on the inside corner. I have no idea WHY such a thing would be caused, but it makes it look better, somehow... I add it to my own and already, it looks better. Just WHAT is that dark line?!

[Kitsu]

Good job le-mec, one of the better versions of this exercise I've seen. Only two things strike me as odd - The light at the bottom of the blue block looks a little too bright/colorful, and the reflection of the floor on the near lit face of the orange block looks odd. Now for my qualifications - Desaturating the light on the blue block will make things muddy and ulgy, and the floor light on the orange should look odd because you are putting compliments together (the surface would be slightly more lit by reflected light, but the colors would be less saturated).

And about the dark line: Imagine light as a bunch of rubber bouncy-balls. If you throw them into a corner how many will hit close to the line where wall and floor meet, and how many will bounce away? It is harder for light to reach a corner, so corners are always darker and large flat regions are lighter (more lit).

[Idiot Apathy]

@Everyone: This project takes up quite a large amount of time, perhaps you've noticed I haven't been as punctual as I would have liked. The only way I can continue is on occasion, I apologize. My replies will also become shorter and less detailed for the projects I have already replied to at least a dozen times. The "answers" are there, you just might have to do some digging. For the most part I always thought that the bulk of the learning is from doing these anyways, cheers!.

At anytime anyone can pick up where I've left off, I really appreciate those who have made an effort to contribute (you know who you are ).

If anyone out there is interested in creating new exercises go for it! I'll be around if you want my advice or anything. I will be and have been unable to create new exercises for awhile.



@Cup_of_Joe: I think you'll find that value is the most important factor in readability, you can still have something read ok with just hue or just saturation but it can't compare with value I don't think. My thoughts on this project (if I can remember back) were to use just two colors, an orange and a blue. This might help you figure it out a little better. Think about what saturation shows in a color and worry about your values as well. Give it another go mate when you are ready mate Post#2: The form could use a little work, when drawing ellipses (i.e. the bottom of the cylinder, top etc) try drawing through, like it was wireframe. This should help you out. #1: Top lighting; if you were thinking straight above I don't think this works very well. if it was straight above the top portion would be lit up only, or at least much more intense than the sides. #2: I see... maybe below forward right? I dunno, these all seem pretty good, good thoughts but they have some problems. If I can make a request; do this same project only do it with either just a sphere or just a cylinder ok? (Alternate if you want) Cheers dude, hope I don't come off as mean here.
@Stillwell: You didn't fail, the purpose of this activity was to show you the connection between color and value. Color is value hue and saturation. They look good, unfortunately I don't have the time anymore to go to far into detail, but look the replies to other's results on this project - the "answers" are all there. Cheers Oh, I see your 2nd and 3rd attempts now, very good! You might try a bigger bolder color if you wanted to challenge yourself, perhaps... yellow? Project#5: I think you did very well with values on both of these, and good with warm cool on the second one for sure. However a large part of this exercise was to try and see what intensity (value+sat) can do to convey depth. If you have the motivation left try doing a quicky experiment and see what you can learn. Post#3: Good lord, you've been busy. Ok, so you've figured out that your foreground and background have nothing to distinquish themselves apart yeah? Hmm hmmm, perhaps... saturation? Haha, I love to see that you're working this out, very fun
@kratos: I don't think blue turns out dark because it's a "cool" color, I think it's something inherent in blue itself - or perhaps just our perception of blue. Good to see you thinking of color in terms of value. You may try eyeballing it now, see how you do.
@kyls: Sorry I can't help you with the shadows, they are still very very confusing to me. On the blue block, the plane that is recieving the most light should be brighter, more intense. Usually I think this has something to do with how paralell the plane is to the lightsource, so I think the top one probably. Overall good job, this reads as a very bright area with lots and lots of white reflected light. Can I give you a challenge? Do these same blocks in a blue room so that you will have lots of blue reflected light .
@kyi_72: Good, using different hues is fine, you'll see that a lot in life. You got the point of the exercise, value with color - cheers. #2: Not entirely sure of your thought process on using complementary colors in the shadows. Yes this is a bit of a traditional technique, but it is for mixing paint, not the actual color you will paint. When you mix complementary colors you shouldn't change hues at all, however you will lose value and saturation rapidly (this doesn't usually work perfectly with paint, paint isn't perfect after all). This is a large part of what happens in shadows yes, but it only works in some situations - mainly where the reflected light is the same as the main lightsource as the sun I think. Keep it up, try it with just one block if you are getting bogged down. Cheers!
@le_mec: Hey dude, do you have any IM clients? I'd like to talk to you about your palette you've programmed; I've watched a fair amount of the videos you have posted and want to discuss a bit of what I've seen. Ok, anyways. I don't see a grayscale comparison to your colored sphere, when I took it into photoshop it came out a fair amount darker, no worries of course I know you understand what color is about. The point of the exercise was to see how value factors into color. Project#2: Good, strange that you are using a CIE palette yet your lighting seems very much to be cool. Perhaps I don't understand CIE properly, like I said we should talk. Really appreciate the notes you've posted for these, should help some people out. Thanks. Kitsu provided a good analogy for the inside corner thing, and I think the same - yet opposite applies for outside corners. Cheers dude.

[le-mec]

Good job le-mec, one of the better versions of this exercise I've seen. Only two things strike me as odd - The light at the bottom of the blue block looks a little too bright/colorful,

Yes! Last night, I spoke with one of my drawing buddies who's heavily into painting and had a fascinating discussion on why in photos (and IRL), the face of a building will appear darker on the bottom than at the top when lit by daylight.

I had the analogy that if we were firing rubber bouncy bullets from our eyeballs, and we stared at the bottom part of the building and shot bouncy bullets, they would ricochet towards the ground and surrounding areas. If we were to stare at the upper regions of the building, they would bounce higher off towards the direction of the sun and sky, our light sources. Now of course, in reality, it works in reverse, since the photons are coming from the light sources, but it's a crude raytracing theory that deals only with the light rays that happen to find their way into our eyes.

With this in mind, I'm gonna try not to shade faces of blocks so evenly.

and the reflection of the floor on the near lit face of the orange block looks odd. Now for my qualifications - Desaturating the light on the blue block will make things muddy and ulgy, and the floor light on the orange should look odd because you are putting compliments together (the surface would be slightly more lit by reflected light, but the colors would be less saturated).

er... so on this count I did OK?

And about the dark line: Imagine light as a bunch of rubber bouncy-balls. If you throw them into a corner how many will hit close to the line where wall and floor meet, and how many will bounce away? It is harder for light to reach a corner, so corners are always darker and large flat regions are lighter (more lit).

That makes total sense. It feels good to know these things!

@le_mec: Hey dude, do you have any IM clients? I'd like to talk to you about your palette you've programmed; I've watched a fair amount of the videos you have posted and want to discuss a bit of what I've seen.

Yes. If you're using a genuine version of MSN Messenger (7.5 at the time of this post), I can even give you a live video demo. I have a digital camcorder jury-rigged to feed the TV-output of my computer's S-Video back into the firewire interface so you can see my screen instead of a webcam view. My MSN address is lungfishv1 AT hotmail DOT com

Ok, anyways. I don't see a grayscale comparison to your colored sphere, when I took it into photoshop it came out a fair amount darker, no worries of course I know you understand what color is about. The point of the exercise was to see how value factors into color.

No excuses! I redid it, and even found out something new, so the exercise was well worth it. There's something to be said for properly reading instructions.

==================================


Step 1 Okay, so we kick this off starting with a greyscale sphere, having to make a fully saturated sphere of equal value. This time, I sampled the gray midtone of the sphere, and then with my CIE-LCH palette, I cranked the saturation up to 100%.

I then chose a hue, noting carefully the angle of the hue(on the 360-degree wheel), which I used in all my colours afterwards.

My palette shows me two swatches side-by-side. The gray midtone sampled from the grayscale, and this saturated red colour. I took off my eyeglasses and adjusted the luminance until I had trouble telling which of the two swatches was brighter than the other. I use my eyes to perform these sorts of comparisons, rather than relying on slider positions.

Finally, after choosing my midtone, saturated colour, I filled the right side sphere. I also threw in the white highlight to help me sense the direction of the light source.

Step 2 The next thing I did was sample the core shadow from the grayscale sphere, and attempted to find its equivalent, fully saturated colour.

Again, I cranked the Saturation to 100%, and then chose the exact same hue that I used earlier. I then adjusted the luminance with my eyeglasses off until I could not distinguish the difference between the grayscale shade, and the colour I wask picking.

With this new, dark, saturated core shadow colour, I placed individual marks going with the surface contours of the at an angle approximately perpendicular to the highlight's position on the sphere (at the equator, using the highlight as a pole). It helped to think of the latitudinal segments of an orange as I placed these marks.

I use these markings instead of trying to shade everything evenly because it gives me a better sense of the dimension of the sphere, and I don't lose sight of the shape of the core shadow, or the patches of colour. I can always sample and fill things in later. I don't blend until I've determined all the colour extremes and what regions they occupy on the sphere.

Step 3 Same deal, Find the equivalent, fully-saturated colour of the well-lit area on the grayscale sphere surrounding the highlight.

I placed latitudinal markings going around the pole again.

Step 4 Repeated step 3, except for the bottom bounce-lit area. My result looked like Fig. 1

Fig. 1


Step 5 This part is dessert. I got to blend everything together.

Step 6 I also went back to the grayscale sphere and applied my method of latitudinal marking and reblended everything afterwards. End result was Fig. 2.

Fig 2.

Project#2: Good, strange that you are using a CIE palette yet your lighting seems very much to be cool. Perhaps I don't understand CIE properly, like I said we should talk. Really appreciate the notes you've posted for these, should help some people out.

I guess I shouldn't call it CIE since CIE is just the acronym(Commission Internationale d'Eclairage) for the people who established the colour spaces that I used.

I've been aware that RGB palettes are terrible in that they don't compensate for human physiological and psychological sensitivities to varying hue/saturation of light.

Colours like red and blue approach the ends of the visible spectrum of light, moving off into infrared and ultraviolet. Purple light is not a pure, spectral light, either -- requiring the addition of red and blue primary colours. Green, on the other hand, is a spectral colour that sits SPANG in the middle of our visible spectrum, and this becomes painfully obvious when you take RGB (0, 0, 255) and (0, 255, 0) and stick em side-by-side. Numerically, the colours are of equal value, but to us, green will stand out as the brighter of the two.

This becomes a huge problem when you have to take a colour and retint it without affecting its perceived value. So, what I did was I created a colour palette that converts RGB values into CIE-XYZ colourspace, and then converts it again into LCH (luminance chrominance hue -- a CIE version of HSV) and presents it in a colour palette. You pick the colours, and it performs the necessary operations to perform the colourspace transformation: LCH->XYZ->RGB.

I bet I lost a few people on that last paragraph so I'll explain just a little... In Adobe Photoshop, you can switch your colour space from RGB to CMYK or LAB. LAB is one implementation of the CIE-defined colourspace XYZ. It stands for Luminance A-B. A and B are 2D coordinates that reside in a square filled with hues blended from the primary colours. Luminance is the last channel. It's a bit of a mindf*ck to understand it. However, here's an experiment you can perform.

Take a colour photograph and perform an Adjust->HSV operation. Try twisting the HUE around and you'll see some nasty awful banding that appears in the image. The hues are shifted around, keeping the NUMERIC VALUES, but some hues are more easily perceived by our eyes than others, so the whole value system gets thrown in the trash.

Okay, undo that HSV operation and this time, switch to LAB colour space. Now, do the HSV operation again. The banding is much less obvious because now it's respecting the PERCEIVED values as it shifts the hues.

Graah... this post is too long already so I'll stop it here.

[Nerahla]

I thought I'd try these out for fun Just really quick --

I painted the first color in grayscale - I just dragged and dropped it onto a new canvas with the color sphere to put them next to each other, I painted them in seperate files.


Then the color sphere grayscaled:



And I skipped to project #4 basically because I like landscapes - and I'd never done anything like that before with just 2 hues. I thought it was fun, but man it got hard not to alt_click and blend!!!



I spent about 15 minutes on each.

The only real thing that I paid attention to on the landscape w/two colors was the fact that warm colors represent closeness and cool colors seem to diminish, so I purposefully used the cool purple in the far away bits. Hue #56 and #266 respectively

I love landscapes

[dischord]

Okies time for me to join as I feel like my understanding of colour and values and all that crap () isn't that great. I've done the first exercise many times but without posting, so shoot me if I really do deserve it. Anyway, I should probably go through all 5 pages for useful information, but I have other stuff to study at the moment.





I'll try to do these ones many times.

[Nerahla]

Oh that's very good on the blocks dischord -- but on the spheres make sure you are doing Image>Mode>Grayscale -- not desaturate... it isn't the same animal at all...

[dischord]

But greyscale makes the grey a different grey?

[Cup of Joe]

But greyscale makes the grey a different grey?

Yes, it does, although I would convert to grey scale instead of desaturating. You get a more acurate greyscale conversion. This is because although desaturate is more mathematically plausible, it doesn't factor in how the mind effects how we see colors. More info here- http://www.digitalartform.com/archiv..._vs_value.html

Thanks for the link Kitsu .

I'm busy right now, but when I get back I'll post some more projects and comment on others. Thsnkd to everyone for reviving this thread!

Edit- Idiot Apathy- Thanks! Thanks for explaining that, I didn't have much of an idea of what I was doing in project four, I'll re-do it. I started the sphere thing, and I've realized on of my problems. I use too many transition values, which makes it impossible to blend without going in to 300% and using some tiny brush which ends up making it look like crap. Don't know how to permanantly solve this, but sometime this summer I'll dedicate a week to this and the digital painting in PS threa to figure it out.

[dischord]

Okay thanks! However, the differences I noticed between desaturation and greyscale were neglectible... at least to my eyes in the case with the spheres.

The blocks look good, but I'm not sure if I got the reflections right. Would the grey glossy surface make the blocks grey, or would it just reflect more white light onto them. Also I'm not sure if I got the colour mixing right when the blocks reflect light onto each other.
I also feel unsure about how to handle corners. In which cases will there be a bright reflection, and in which cases will it be darkened. Please just point me towards a post if I have missed one about it.

(edit: oooh post #100 )

[Cup of Joe]

I'd say it would reflect white light, raising value and saturation, but you should check with Idiot Apathy to be sure. As for corners, inside corners are darker, outside corners are lighter.

Just reminding everyone to read all replies and read old pages! It really helps understand this stuff.

[dischord]

Oh yeah, The blocks must definitely change value and not colour when light reflects from a grey surface. It's not like a black surface would reflect black light
I must have disconnected my left side (logical side) of the brain when painting heh.

I got the reflection stuff answered by looking at Prom's tutorial thingy.