Smuli's Book #2 (nudity)

[smuli]

The monastery pic more or less finished:




I started painting some background for this one... I should get a decorating frenzy some day to get the armor to look interesting.

[smuli]

This one's from yesterday:




I made a bunch of new brushes out of some marks I did with watercolors. The file doesn't want to get attached but if anyone wants the .tpl file (works from cs3 upwards), just ask.




I realized that using good-looking brushes helps with speed and vibrancy of colors because the big brushstrokes you lay at the start don't have to be blended afterwards. On the waterfall picture, probably most of the area of the rock wall is covered with strokes I did on the first half an hour. I made sure not to tinker with them to keep the vibrant colors of the initial sketch, just added shadows and details.

All of the environments took me about 4 hours. I think the main thing that sped things up was focusing more on painting things from background to foreground as opposed to painting them in whatever order I feel like and trying to keep the layers organized. With the time limit I set for myself, I also had to get details painted at once rather than leaving them on hold while I work on something else.

[fenixx]

You are getting better and batter with colors man. Loving the paintings.

About the monastery painting... I like the overall style, especially how you rendered the rocks... But the monastery itself doesn't seem to fit in there. Don't know... Something about the color or that it looks flat compared to the rest of the environment.

[smuli]

Fenixx - Thanks, glad you like them! I agree there's something weird about the colors of the monastery... I think the shadows of the yellow parts need to be bluer at least. I'll put some more work to it.





Only thing I'm happy with on this one is the perspective. That pretty much took up all my energy I guess.

[warburton]

Hey man, just wanted to pop by and thank you for your crits the other day in my sketchbook, they've been very helpful

You've got some awesome stuff going on here too, i'm especially loving your recent environments. Keep up the great work man.

[smuli]

Logistic Puppet - Thanks a lot! And glad if I could help!


I've been lazy at updating so here's a bit of a dump:










Drawn with graphite powder/raw umber pigment (rubbed with a piece of toilet paper), charcoal/brown pastel and an eraser shaped like a pencil that you can sharpen. I added highlights with white gouache for the last one.




Fathers' day present:




With this sketch, I started using HSB settings in the color palette after a year and a half of adjusting RGB sliders.





WIP of an entry for a Blade Runner themed contest at Imagine FX forums

[ismo]

Hey, dude. Thought I'd take a bit more closer look into your recent stuff. With a critical eye, so beware.

Ok, so first up the monastery piece in #661. I think the athmosperic perspective is quite believable and you've managed to create a nice sence of depth and scale. The design of the building looks pretty good too. I think I've mentioned this to you earlier already, but sometimes your work just lacks variety that is needed to make things look really interesting. You need variety in shapes, textures and colors. This piece has plenty of shape variety, but not enough color or texture variety. Take a look at just about any great painters work and you'll see how much variety they get into the shapes, colors, values, textures and edges. For example their shadows are not just flat violet or cool green. There's all kinds of hues and also temperature shifts to be seen. Why do people like Craig Mullins' work so much? Because he's awesome, duh, but also because he knows the importance of shape, texture, value, edge and color variety in creating interest.

The dwarf warrior: You actually have some very nice color and texture variety going in this piece. There's a nice shift between the warm foreground and cool background. The shield has nice desing. The pose is slightly stiff and some of the edges and forms seem bit rushed (the helmet and the halbeard handle). You could have also pushed the highlights some more. But all in all it's a pretty solid concept.

I think the waterfall piece in #662 is one of your best concepts so far. You've got nice vibrant color going here thanks to the variety of hues and temperatures and also the brush marks and textures are varied which really lifts this piece above the rest.

The ruined city piece has the same issues as the monastery, but I think I've already made my point here. The last one is a lot better and has a nice athmosperic haze effect going on.

In the last post I like the ship stuff the most. Particularly that first one has interesting color scheme and could make one nice finished painting.

Ok, gotta go now. Keep up the good work and till next time, smuli.

[NyeAlexandaFrayne]

good to see you still chugging away thrashing out the work! still looking as smooth as ever. good work man!

[weashell]

smuli i want to buy your power of hard working!

this is pro:

[Cyberman]

Great stuff I really like those colorful mood pieces you do man and I am glad I helped you with the epiphany about photos. About mediums I think your right, different things help in different ways. I love all mediums, except charcoal it gives me goosebumps lol. Happy Holidays!

[fenixx]

I agree with weashell... that painting from post 662 really looks good !!

[smuli]

ismo - Thanks so much man! Your comments really are a huge privilege. About color variety, you and Xbert critiqued about it for the battle scene painting already but i didn't grasp how far I should take it. Now that I look at my old paintings, most of them have this plastic look that some natural variety could probably fix. I tried to do this for the the new version of the monastery piece and I think the change in how natural it looks is very noticeable.

The dwarf picture's still a WIP and I've gotten bored with it. Glad you like it though and I agree the pose is stiff, to make up for it I should add a lot of interesting details on his gear to give the picture some point. The waterfall's probably my favorite out of everything I've done in such a short time, I'll try to carry its good sides to my future work. Thanks for all the feedback and the immensely thoughtful help to improve my work!

Nye - Thanks man!

Weashell - Thanks! I haven't been in a day job since the start of September so that's the explanation to all the paintings. I've been just looking for freelance work and from yesterday onward I'll be delivering morning papers at the side of it.

Sean - Haha, yeah it really helped for the studies to think about a point of interest! Hard to say how it's carried over to my final work but I think I realized something there so I guess it does.

Fenixx - thanks, glad you like it!


I took a big textured grunge brush and added some splatches of different hues on surfaces, then erased out the shadows or highlights. Very simple thing with 2-3 hours of work but I think it made the picture look more realistic and interesting. I also tightened up the cottages a bit and made it look a bit more like a village instead of a row of houses.



A WIP of an entry for a Blade Runner -themed contest on the ImagineFX forums. I've used Sketchup for the perspective. If you haven't tried it and like to paint pictures with structures, I really recommend it. With the video tutorials at http://sketchup.google.com/training/videos.html, you'll get grasp of it very quickly.

[ismo]

I think the monastery went to right direction with those additions. Colors feel more alive now. I didn't notice this the last time, but now I think I realised why I had some read issues with the picture. I attached a grayscale of your image. Notice how the cliff 'bleeds' into the background. Although the hue of the cliff is very different, the value is about the same,and that causes it to read poorly.

I've been reading Stapleton Kearns' blog a lot lately, and I think he has made me look at landscape painting and painting in general in a very different way than I used to. I don't think I've managed to apply all that new understanding yet, but I've definately started giving desing a lot more thought. Here's the blog if you're not yet familiar with it. http://stapletonkearns.blogspot.com/

Btw, good tip about sketchup. I always forget it and then struggle with the perspective of my buildings.

[smuli]

ismo - Thanks again, good spotting about the values! The blog looks really useful, I spent a couple of hours reading that blog one evening and looks like there's loads to learn from it.


A still life I painted as a present a few weeks ago. Rest of it is watercolors but the blue and brown on the background are colored inks. I really like how they blended together, the effect is so random because the color is as dyes, not pigments like in watercolors. I thought it would be just a pain but apparently it has its good sides if you don't want to keep the brushstrokes below the layer you're painting.




The Blade Runner themed contest pic finished:




More work on the monastery:




Tileable backgrounds painted on commission for an iPhone game:

[Ville_S]

Wow have you been busy! And so much cool stuff! I agree with others, That painting with waterfall is just pro and should go to your portfolio! Same goes for your Blad runner themed contest pic.

Regarding the two backrounds for Iphone game. Liking the simple style but the colors seem a bit jarring to me. Maybe you should tone the saturation down a bit and check the color schemes. In the forest backround the purple to me doesn't seem to play well with the greens.


The monestary just keeps on improving.
Few thoughts:

-Looks like some of the towers are above horizon so I think we should se some underside of those domes.

-You might look into composition a bit. Right now the foreground is a bit useless. It's not telling the viewer anything important nor does it look all that appealing. perhaps you should turn a view up a bit. Eliminate the foreground and add some sky with cool clouds.

Keep on rocking man!

[iven]

Thanks for showing all you colormagic, would love to see a link when they have done the
game, would love to have jobs for iphone games, great stuff love the pencil sketches !!

[kimozabbi]

damn man. great sketchbook. great photo refs too. im loving how you study them and slow applying to your work. Also your pencil sketches have been improved! i went from page one to 15 to see how far youve come, its amazing!Though i should be doing my own studies instead of looking at your great SB! I blame ya. hahahha.

[smuli]

Ville - Thanks a lot for the good critique! I see what you mean about the iPhone backgrounds. The client preferred saturated colors to make the style suit the character art but the green and purple do kind of clash too.

I think I'm going to take a pause with the monastery pic but if I continue, maybe I'll define the perspective on the domes more, I got kind of lazy with them. The foreground thing is a very good point, in the original thumbnail, the foreground had two figures but I removed them because I thought they were competing with the monastery of importance. I probably should have left them in and stuck more closely to the thumbnail for other reasons too, the foreground looks better and the whole picture seems to be more in harmony than the latest version. So lesson learned: do important decisions in the thumbnail stage and stick to them.

Iven - Thanks for the comment! Good luck with that goal, looks like you're working hard to reach it but I suggest you to focus on colors too. Even though the colors on game graphics are stylized, a lot of what you can learn from painting realistically applies too.

Kimozabbi - Thanks for the kind words!


Four Henry Raeburn studies and the last one is after Winslow Homer. After the first one, I got some decent brushes made by messing around with the dual brush option.

[smuli]

I was in a job interview for a starting up TV production company recently and if all goes well, I'll get work as a junior environment concept artist/matte painter from April onward. It would be an awesome opportunity but in any case, I'll have to work on my photo-manipulation skills, I've never really included photos in paintings except for as textures.

Here's a WIP of a scene where I'm using photos from cgtextures.com. The topic is from the book Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920). Great read if you're looking for something original. It's a SciFi-book that takes place on a screwed up alien planet with two suns, purple trees, green snow and inhabitants who have nothing else to do but hang around and share their philosophies. It's weird but really well written and retains interest.




Screenshot studies from Apocalypse Now. I started the two first ones by just painting the highlights in BW from big to small with a soft round brush with pressure set to opacity. Especially the end part of the movie has great playing with light.

[Velocity Kendall]

wow love these two!

[dlincoln83]

holy crap you have some awesome skills i love all the brushwork, wish i could learn how to paint like that..thanks for the inspiration!!


oh and yer colors are friggen amazing

[sombertwin]

I remember magazines that I found called Galaxy...really old even in my day...lol I remember reading as a kid about little disk that could hold a library of information and computers that could fit in ones palm. all of which sci fi imaginations inspired imho. Now...well its a pity sci fi has gone wonky...a lot of sci fi I think inspired the impossible. I started a sci fi sketch book based on a monochromatic theme recently, because i do have a passion for sci fi.

Thanks for the heads up on cgtextures.com as a painter I am always looking for models to reference, and thanks for the heads up on the Lindsay book. I will be getting it...I am intrigued by the weird.

hmmm photo manipulation???? I just started looking at 3d programs to use as models for what I have wanted to do. Building the models by hand is way time intensive. I am playing with Sculptris..now. wow

I wish you all kinds of luck with job. Judging by your work, I think you might have a shot.

[YihyoungLi]

Really love your colors and brushwork. Sooo much WIN!

[kimozabbi]

thanks for stopping by!i love your concept dude!hows that commission on your iphone game coming?

[smuli]

Velocity Kendall, DLincoln83, Yi- Thanks a lot!

Sombertwin -

Kimozabbi - Thanks! The commission was just those two backgrounds.

Sombertwin - Thanks! I like the freshness and lack of laser guns and space battles in the old scifi books I've read and it's always funny to see how the authors have imagined the future, even when it isn't that spot on.


Studying forests and exploring with brushes... The winter ones are referenced from window.

[Junpei]

Wow, looking at your stuff I feel that you can draw very fluidly and quickly.. everything is very expressive and vibrant and pleasing to look at, not just interesting as studies, but satisfactory art.

[iven]

Iven - Thanks for the comment! I suggest you to focus on colors too. Even though,.....

I never really used paint in my live, but I use colors a lot in my website did you ever see it ?!
If you have any feedback about the colors choice@ iveno I would appreciate it, it looks very colorful.

Thanks for your time I learn a lot from your information on what you use for the paintings.
I started to color boxes and other form in PS, thanks for advice !

[Justyna]

I like the colors in those 4 images with boats. Nice job!

[smuli]

It's been a long time since my last update. I've been learning matte painting and photo manipulation in addition to some small freelance gigs and painting quicker environments. Here's some useful links I've bumped into:


Really good explanation of the basics of photography, it talks about SLRs but I'm getting much more out of the manual settings in my pocket camera after reading this:
http://berniesumption.com/photograph...ide-for-geeks/


40 instructional videos of Photoshop's most useful features from the photo manipulation standpoint. Some of the topics seem basic but Deke McClelland explains loads of handy shortcuts so I bet most of the videos have something new to everybody:
http://blog.lynda.com/tag/photoshop-top-40/

Some highlights that I thought were especially useful:
Sharpen filters
Luminance blending (very useful for situations where you want a layer to reveal either highlights or shadows of the image underneath it.)
Fill functions
Refine edge
Healing brush
Liquify
RGB, CMYK and LAB


A 26 hour concept, inspired by a chase scene in the sewers of Vienna at the end of the 1949 film The Third Man.




My first matte painting with photos used as opaque parts of the painting rather than just overlaid textures. It took me ages but I learned some useful things, like that when working on some element like the rock wall on the foreground, it's much better for an uniform look to combine different details from the same photo than to use separate photos for different details. The photos I used are from cgtextures.com and imageafter.com

Progress gif (since I can't seem to upload it in CAorg)

Final:




A 13-hour concept, progress:



Final:




A sketchup model for a throne room painting I'm working on:

[NyeAlexandaFrayne]

awwww man, that matte painting of the rocky mining area is boss! sooo sick

your throne room is looking good too, max or maya?

x