The Benihana Book (update 4/27/07) Painter Tutorial

[bdfoster]

Aaaaannnd..... an update, of sorts.

I've been quiet lately. A couple sketchbook pages to scan still, but not much. Most of what I've been working on is tightening up the portfolio, getting some truly "strong" pieces in there. Lots of stuff half finished and abandoned. Here's a sketch that I was working on that's on hold for another project (book cover I hope to be able to show in the not too distant future):



There's a bunch of thumbs for the above idea I'll dig out soon also. Cheers!

[bdfoster]

My buddy Mike (Helzon) has been doing these great scratchboard tool drawings in painter ala Frank Miller's sin city (Check them out in his Sketchbook) Brendan (BWKeough) and I have been pushing him to color them, and when I thought about it, it's not a far cry from the foundation that my man Dave Devries paints on.

For those unfamiliar with Dave's work, check out his Monster Engine site or his old Comics Work. Dave actually taught me to paint through some demos he did while I was at Syracuse, and he has this crazy Bill Sienkiewicz mixed media style that's a combination of ink, acrylic paints laid down with brush, airbrush, and toothbrush, and colored pencils. Great great stuff. Well I thought it would be fun to try and do a "speedy" paint over emulating Dave's traditional mixed media style in Painter's digital mixed media. Apologies for any missing steps or confusion.

*note-- other than opacity and size, nearly every painter brush I use in this demo is "out of the box" as they say. The one exception is my self created "simple oils" brush. I believe this started as a variant from the "smeary round".
Under General: Dab type=> Circular; Stroke type=>Single; Method=>Cover, Subcategory=>Soft Cover, Opacity 30%, expression pressure.
Under Well: Resaturation=>7%, expression pressure, Bleed 100%, expression pressure ("invert" box checked)

For you Intuos or Cintiq users, I also have the same brush saved as a "simple_tapered_oils" brush, size expression set to tilt and min size at approx 15%. Set the brush head really big, and essentially use it like a tapered pencil-- with the pen upright, you can make nice sharp lines, and with the pen on it's side, you get a fatter mark or a nice blender (easier to control pressure with the pen on it's side). Anyway, on to the tut (apologies for the colors. Save for web killed a lot of them):