The Peer Project- OPEN Foundational Exercises for All, A great place to start.

[moki]

I finally registered here just for this project... you can feel honored if you like

Lets start at the beginning:

I used a fairly big, soft, brush with 30% opacity for the shading... the biggest problem, I see at the moment is, that I didn't use the full range of values in the colored one. The darkest parts are not black and the highlights are not as white as in the greyscale-orb.

...more to follow

[edit]

Proceeding with the exercises... I'm not very happy with this one, because the shadow on the cyan object seems wrong. I did this at 1am, so there will probably another try.

[Miracula]

Hey Moki, welcome!
Now, I'm not alone any more - hehe
Have you done exercise 3 and 4? They are funny
If you want to see more great beginner stuff about digital painting you can visit the tread "Digital Painting in PS" - it's really helful!

And noooooooooow: Project 1 beta
I copied Prometheus|ANJ's character for this exercise.... Well, I'm not satisfied, but for the first time drawing metall it's not too bad, I think.

[Idiot Apathy]

Sorry guys, I will try and hammer out some replies this weekend.
I don't have to be the only one to reply you know, feel free to help each other out You can get just about as much out of a discussion as you can painting.

[Idiot Apathy]

funfetus: sorry, took me awhile to get back to ya. 1. yup, red as red gets. Shadows will be pure red just less value. Highlight in this situation probably wouldn't show up, but in a real situation I think it's safe to say it would go towards whatever color your lightsource may be. Here if our object was really shiny there would be a nice concentrated white highlight. You could also play around a bit stylistically and use orange or yellow as your highlight here. 2. yup! 3. Good reasoning! Hurrah! 4. Ooo yeah! Good reasoning again! 5. Hrm, you lost me. Turing red and green all the way up? Oh right, rgb sliders ok. Anyhow, I suppose the object would reflect the whole range between red and yellow ... but by saying it reflects both of these I was hoping you'd get the result of a pure orange. Well done. Shadows are because the temperature is off a bit, you could do red or change the saturation according to the environment. mm orange is a nice color. 6: *high five* I'm bringing the highfive back by the way. 7. WOOooO, well done! *hands you a cookie* See the end of this post for the "answer key"

dischord: the only failure is one you don't learn from homey. Values look real good. Sphere could use better modeling however, have you done exercise one? Define your light side, shadow and core shadow. Reflected light indicates more of a beveled button sort of shape as well as the specular highlight. Specular highlights depend not only on the position of the lightsource but the position of the viewers eye. Grab some shiny stuff and check it out, move around it - and hey any excuse to gather shiny things is a good excuse. *high five*

sun-jae kim: My pleasure! Thanks for joining in. Good work on these dude. Ex1: I would say you are using manual opacity? I think you will be much happier setting your brush up to use opacity and flow set to your tablet's pen pressure. I also think that your shadow is perhaps too big for sunlight. It should for the most part be just about hemispheres - half shadow and half light and a blend in between those. Anyhow, *highfive*. ex2: Nice, values are pretty close! Core shadow is quite a bit darker and you've neglected the reflected light just a tad. Modeling of the sphere is much better than ex1 and so are the colors. I like that highlight! ex3. Where are your notes? D: Modeling is getting better here too. Seems like a ton of brushwork though. You might try varying your brush hardness to help you blend. 1. red, yup. 2. blue, yup. 3. white, yup. 4. black, yup. Highlight is fine, makes it like an 8 ball, shiny coat over top and all. 5. orange, yup. (I'd have more to say if you had notes! ) 6: Yup. 7: The point of this one was to write the instructions in the same format I was doing. See the end of this post for the "answer key" to ex3. Cheers!

lennon: Hrm, was this from the peer project volume one? Been so long... Anyhow, looks good. Colors seem pretty accurate. I do wish your strokes were blended more, smoother. You might try setting your brushes up with flow and opacity to your tablets pen pressure and not using manual opacity. Manual flow can be nice for more blending control though. cheers.

JazzW: Hurroh. Being embarrassed is for loooooosers. So quit it. #1: Dude! *high five* sweet angle and some nice gradations - particularly on the cast shadow. I think if you were a perfectionist the sphere could use a little oomph in the full light by way of more saturation. Specular I think should sit jsut a little further back as well. Real nice job though man! #2: Phew, man I can't see the difference. Sometimes if the brightness seems right on it can be hue, every hue has an inherent value. Yellow is really bright, violet not so much. Anyhow, sweet stuff!

HOLY CRAP! I'd forgotten how long this takes. I'll try and do more catchup tomorrow.




Using Photoshop terms for this so you can visualize it on the color picker better perhaps,
S = Saturation B = Brightness

1: Pure red, since our lightsource has the 'maximum' amount of red and our object reflects the 'maximum' I think 100s and 100b (PS) is appropriate. Shadows, if you chose to include them, would be less B but same S. Highlights if there were any would technically be 100s 100b so perhaps you would leave some room in the full light for them.
2: Same as above, only replace the hue with 'blue'. Trying to get the idea across here.
3: Technically speaking I suppose this should be a mirror :|. But a white sphere is good too! Shadows still be grayscale, highlights even whiter if possible (probably not in this situation).
4: Ok, this I suppose would be akin to a blackhole - technically we wouldn't actually 'see' it - we'd see nothing. Remember, if you can see it it is either emitting light or reflecting light, don't forget that even shadows are visibile.
5: Should be orange right? And the shadows? Less B same sat. Not too different from steps 3 or 4.
6: This one is a bit tricky, it should of course be a shade/tint of gray - I would think 50% percent gray, but I need to think about that.
7/Optional: Oh noes, so? What is the sphere doing with sky blue? Well, that's a little bit of a vague name for a color - open for interpretation however generally I see a mix of blue and a little cyan as the hue - the saturation is fairly low and the tone very high. Very close to white, so if we are close to white that should mean we have a mixture of all colors, however we should also have more of this sky blue (blue with a lil' cyan in my case). How much more? How saturated is the sky blue you envisioned?

Notes: If it isn't at 100 s I think it is safe to say you have other hues mixed into your light. So, more hues less saturation, more of the same hue more saturation.

If it isn't at 100b I think it is safe to say you either have a weak lightsource or your object is absorbing the remainder. More tone more light, b for brightness isn't exactly the same.

[MattGamer]

I don't know if I have done this before or not. It was fun after reading Tom's posts on using it simple three strokes with a soft brush, etc. Though spending a much wasted half hour working on the shades with a small brush, I am static about using this less brush technique.

Chairs...

[MattGamer]

Numba' three gangstas. Here's my notes:

Red: For the red I filled in a dark red so that I could get a better illusion of depth. I used a soft edge brush to create the side the light shone on. 

Blue: I did the same thing with the blue.

White: Uh, I cheated and found out it was a white sphere. I thought I was going to be making a mirrored surface sphere, but was wrong.

Black: I cheated again. Black? Common! Ha ha.

Orange: The orange one threw me. I thought I had to draw the color that didn't have yellow or red. But then realised that yellow and red mixed created the color I needed.

Grey: I cheated and used Texahol to figure out what to do on this step. :/ Grey of coarse!

Sky Blue: I love cyan color and knew right away how to achieve this. Put the slider in the cyan area and start out dark to light.

[Pedro Cardoso]

hello, sorry for the late starting, but just know i could start using my tablet... so here goes... those are still from the volume one( sorry again, i didn't realize that it was dead...) and if it is better for you guys i will start volume 2 right know... i will post these so you guys can take a look at my "work"
it is not the best, and maybe the worst, thats wy i'm here!



thanks for the help!
you are the bests i've ever saw!!
later!

oh... i almost forgot... can someone give me a step by step of how to make a signature in the forum??
thx!

[Dan_Grr]

Oi Pedro, bem vindo ao concept art.

If you'd like to link your sketchbook url in your signature, go to Quick Links>Edit Signature, and then copy&paste (Ctr+C to copy, Ctrl+V to paste) this into the box (including the [] symbols):

[url=http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=102483]Pedro's Sketchbook[/url]

You will get this result:

Pedro's Sketchbook


Instead of "Pedro's Sketchbook", you can name it anything you want, even add colour to it, like I did. Images are not allowed into signatures in this forum.

Hope this helps.

[Earendil]

Really like what you've set up here Idiot_Apathy! Here's the first exercise, and my first colored sphere. I wasn't quite sure about bounce/ambient lighting, so I'm probably going to study those tutorials a little more.

I chose purple because I thought it might make the combination of ambient/bounce lighting more interesting. Same reason I chose a kind of brownish for the "table" the sphere is resting on.

Picked the base color for the sphere, then chose variants with the same saturation, just darker values. In most of my recent studies, I'm avoiding 100% black/dark values because I have a hard time rendering midtones in just about everything. I see the darks and lights, but have a harder time with the in between stuff, so nowadays the values are about 25% light, 85% dark, or some variation thereof.

Another thing I'm trying to practice is using a hard brush for all my painting. I get a fuzzy look if I continuously use a soft brush, so this time, I didn't use a soft brush until the very end to kind of blend the values of the sphere together a little better.

I was aiming for that billiard ball kind of look, however, even with a hard brush I noticed my edges were still kind of loose.

EDIT: Added 2nd Exercise

[m0uS3r]

my first one here

[SPACEMOD]

I am new to Digital Art, and color theory. I Could Really Use Help And Advice On this.
Here Is Exercise 1....

I Tried.

[Idiot Apathy]

Hey guys, I've probably got a good dozen hours or so of replies to catch up on and no clue when I will be able to sit down and do it. In the mean time - I've honestly just about said everything that needs to be said for the first few exercises in all my other posts - I've repeated myself in each on actually. So I really recommend you check those out. Thanks!

[Vyliss]

I did a bunch of exercises from vol1 but since that one is dead, I'm switching over here. This is the first exercise from here. Just tried to kind of eyeball the lighting and shadow so it looked like it was coming from top right of the ball. The exercises from vol1 really helped me do this one actually. I figured the closer the ball is to the table (where they're touching) the more yellow it would be because of the shadow being yellow also, and as it moves further away, more of the blue is reflected to the ball since the shadow colour isn't as strong a yellow. One thing that helped is also putting a soft blue around the outline of the ball so it looks like it's sitting more in the picture.

Ok to the next exercise! These are fun

[Vyliss]

ok ex 2







Ex 3




1. Absorbing all hues except red = reflecting red, so it's a red ball
2. Same as above except it's blue
3. Reflecting everything would mean a white ball
4. Reflecting nothing would mean a black ball
5. Reflecting red and yellow would mean an orange ball
6. 50% hues I guessed would be about 50% grey ball
7. Didn't really get what you meant by sky blue, so I just did a sky blue coloured ball

Ex 4



This one was tough! and I know I probably have most of these wrong but whatever, I'm curious for the answers for these, but most people seem to be guessing it too so, thought I might as well post my interpretation


1. I tried to think real world situations with these instead of theoretically, so I figured a blue light on white ball, the blue would be not quite so blue, a bit faded not quite so intense, maybe I'm wrong ?
2 or 3. I couldn't figure out what colour this would be! lol So i did two, one being red but slightly blue I guess, so it was a more purplish blue and the other yellow, not sure why I thought this. I guess I thought if the ball was yellow, it wouldn't reflect blue, cos blue light would might it green? lol No idea
4. With this one I just tried to imagine what colour the ball would be if it had a red light on it lol I don't know I guess I made it a warmish blue.
5. This one is probably wrong too, I tried to make it a bit red, so it's a bit in between red and blue
6. Red and yellow light and ball only reflect yellow, I figured it'd just be a yellow
7. Red and yellow light on a green ball, this was tough too. I ended up making it a yellow/green ball lol
8. 30% of all hues, I figured would be a 70% grey ball
9. Again, no idea, just guessed, it sounded like a dull red ball with a slight white blue light. So I made the ball kind og red/blue

Project one


The metal one is probably wrong, the highlights look quite off but oh well.

Ex 6a



Ex 6b

[ronin-tiger]

Ok so here is my first attempt to use my wacom tablet and first attempt at painting with photoshop. I havent figured out how to link the picture directly on to the forum so its just a link for now, please take the time to view it and give me some feedback.

excercise 1 - from volume 1

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pi...7&id=503814684

Basically i felt that i did not have a problem with the grayscale sphere, i figured out afterwards my brush size was too small and it left a lot of strange lines and brush stroke instead of a smooth finished sphere. With the colored version i really felt as if i was fighting the shadows and shading on the ball itself. I couldnt figure out if i was pushing the shadow too close to the light reflection or if i was making the entire sphere too light and not enough shadow... overall i spent too much time tweaking and blending but im happy with my first attempt. Im also not sure that the colors progress naturally into the shadow... maybe too much saturation in the dark zones. I will be trying the second excercise later this week and i hope to progress a little further in my abilities.

[UnSharpened]

Huwee~~it's really a treasury!! Thank you Idiot Apathy !!

I have found a lot of problem I've come across constantly in my work, and this thread is absolutely a cure for that.
The most crits I got is about the blurry in my painting (other weakness I had are piles-high), and I just can't figure out where it goes wrong. The brushes I mainly use is your basic round brush. I love it most too!!! Yet I found the setting has led to low saturation of the colour, which makes the edge become vague. I love the stroke it provides, but I guess I need to find the right way of using it.

Here is my Ex1. version1 . As you can see, the problem of the low opacity is fairly clear. And didn't feel happy with the back ground, so, rework.


Ex1 version2. Hadn't come to realize should get more saturation to my colour, rework


Ex1 version3. Finally felt ok with it. I use the basic round with un-checked other dynamics, and tried to use smudge tool to get the gradient. That's another reason why I love your brush. I can, at least, use it for gradient while my laptop keeping crashing every time when I use smudge tool.


Ex2. Matching the same tone? Not sure did I get it right or not.


Ex3. That' really a great fun. I was like a child that being eager to know the answer, but had to finish my exercise first.
#5 I think it's too gray. It just that the 100s white burnt my eye...
#6 Same reason I applied a mild black.
#7 Yellow/Red, which one is stronger in orange? Gotta find it out it Painter..
#9 Uhmm... as exactly you said, is sky blue? Thus I picked it from the colour panel due to my conventional brain.



Thanks a million!!!
#

[UnSharpened]

Managed to do Ex4 before going to bed.
This is really a tricky one....I have to say.
The main approach I used here is take 3 primary colour in as math equation:p, it can probably be read in my note. Got questions of almost all of them, but just one thought after finishing it: WHAT IS THIS FOR?
Something seems just over there to be helpful to my work, but it seems so far as well.

[UnSharpened]

Project beta1. Though lack of progress, I generally still think this is very helpful, as long as one goes through it.
Note: One difficulty I came across was the metal one. The plane of right hand side should be hit by light directly. So I gave it a very light gray, yet the result didn't look as shiny as I expected. I think the problem is that I have no idea of where should I strengthen the contrast, in generall.

[ikuru]

Idiot Apathy, You are indeed the dude! (I will try and get in to this whatever it is) and hopefully learn something.

/Danny

[Apothecaria]

[Apothecaria]

I initially put in the shading and lighting with the color pick tool, then I used the burn tool to punch up the shadows. I couldn't decide whether to add or subtract saturation in the shadowed area, since I preferred the look of more saturation but knew that less saturation would be technically correct. The rim lighting is maybe excessive, especially on the colored sphere. But there it is.

[Apothecaria]

White sphere: I was unsure whether to shade this or not, but ultimately decided to.

Black sphere: Unsure of whether to add highlights or not, then thought of black holes...

Sky blue: The sky is blue because the molecules in the atmosphere scatter short blue wavelengths the most.

Interesting stuff: The sky on mars is red because of the red dust that gets thrown up in storms. If there have been no recent storms the sky is blue, but darker than on earth because of the thinner atmosphere. (I thought it was always red before I googled it~!)

[MiXRuivo]

Hi guys, i'm a begginer who wants to learn more. I'm a real zero with tone, value, colour and shadows, so i will do the exercices from the very beggining and try to make them the best i can...

So with this said, i present you with the first half of the first project. It was a fast thing but i whant to know what you all have to said.

Thanks in advance and keep up the good work!




Ps: SOrry for the post in the other thread.

[4ntimatter]

Firstly apathy I'd like to thank you mate for starting this study and lessons thread, I love it, and it's exactly what I've been trying to find for a long time.

Secondly I'm sorry for joining your lessons so late, I've only learned of this thread a few days ago.

This is my first orb and I've only ever painted once with my wacom tablet, witch was an apple I done using the quick guide from bumskee in the old Photoshop painting thread before it was deleted.

I know I haven't finished this yet cause I wanted some advice before I continue.
I Used a size 3-4 hard brush at 30% op with no size jitter on this orb which took over 3 hours to get somewhat smooth, I used a larger brush to color it in at the start and put in the basic shadow and light, which took minutes. I tried using a larger brush but I found it impossible to get it smooth without a small brush. I'm well aware that if you don't put in the time you won't get the results unless I'm Apathy, I just wanted to know before I color the red orb, should it really take this long and do I have to use a size 3-4 brush.

Also please crit and abuse me on the orb I done cause I know it's not quite right. And with your advice I can fix it.

PS Sorry for posting this and feel free to delete it if I've interrupted you guys.

Thanks!

[4ntimatter]

(had to double post sorry)

Exercise #1



Notes.
Although I'm new to painting I'll just post my notes for the sake of the threads guidelines.

I started this as a quick orb for practice after I'd posted previously.
I started with a light green because I noticed some nice eye catching orbs along the thread.

A) I simply got a large brush "size 200"and with one stroke made the orb.
B) I then made a new layer and began the basic shading for a foundation.
C) Using a hard size 30 brush to start the basic shading of the form shadow.
D) I then used my color picker to quickly blend the form shadow into the full light.
E) Then I simply got a smaller brush but unlike the previous orb I used a larger brush so I wouldn't take over 3 hours again. lol.
F) I then very slightly brightened the full light surrounding the highlight,
G) Then using a small brush with a slightly softened edge, I put on the Highlight.
H) Then simply using a soft brush I added some Radiosity or reflective light coming from the surface to the orb. Then I guessed where the shadow would go and then added a small reflection near the highlight.
I) Finally I gave it a background to add some overall contrast and to make it look more like a surface.

Thanks guys and any crits would be great.

Also I love your balls Apothecaria. I mean spheres!

[Sharkcellar]

I'm doing these exercises now. This is exercise one. I didn't look at your finished version until I was done. I did look at briggsy@ashtons suggestions for modeling a sphere though. I did't do any blending as the instructions for this exercise didn't mention anything about blending the tones (perhaps I'm just dim). I will blend the tones now that I looked at your finished version. But, I'm posting what I created before looking so that I can get some advice. This is an awesome thread!



Here is the blended version with light source arrows. I messed with the cast shadows a bit after I drew my light source guides back in.

[enrigo]

I'm just starting to do the exercises in this great thread, I don't want to be shot on sight so I'll post some of my tries.

I used a circle lasso tool to clean off the edges in the first one, I'll do a few more of them to get to know how to handle the tool in photoshop a bit.(also I haven't read some of the in-depth theory yet)



I have a bit of a problem blending with the hard-edge-color-pick method, well it always leave these frustrating hard edge that I don't know how soften them out without ruining the gradient. (again I haven't read the old advices yet and I'll probably dig in to it later )

[Azalin]

hi, i´m also new to digital painting & colors, and i want to learn more about it, so i thought just post what i´ve done in this thread.

exercise 2
I´ve done it in Painter using the Digital Airbrush tool, with the opacity set to 9%, the only time i changed the brush size to a more little one was to mark the core shadow, the rest i did with the same size, and without using any blender tool. since i don´t much about color theory i just kind of did it intuitively, trying to get the color transition right of course.
i repeated the exercise 2 twice cause the first time i didnt get the core shadow right. i think the second time was better but still i´m not sure if i used the correct range of colors.

so thanx for this thread, i´ll post more of the exercises later...

[Azalin]

ohhh sorry i forgot here´s a quick sketch from exercise 1.
Its done the same way as #2 but a bit sloppier
i´ll do it better next time, promise
btw is this thread still alive? if dead is it ok if i post my work?

[Azalin]

Hi again,
here´s exercise 3.
Spheres 1 & 2: were easy to make. at least it seems to me, i might have made lots of mistakes, but that´s why i´m here for.
Sphere 3: absorbing nothing and reflecting everything = White, shadows must be grey.
Sphere 4: absorbing all colors and reflecting nothing = Black, total darkness, there´s only the cast shadow.
Sphere 5: absorbing every hue except yellow and red = Secondary color, Orange.
Sphere 6: 50/50 = Grey
Sphere 7: beats me, i only know the sky is blue because of x(i forgot wich) molecules... anyway i´m still confused with this one, so if anyone out there could help... thanx