I was recently invited down to the Ringling College of Art and Design for an environment painting demo and to visit a few classes. It was a great experience, and I saw some very impressive work from the students there. I feel like I learned a lot too... a big lesson was that it's harder than it looks to answer questions from a live audience and paint competently at the same time. For the person who asked about my favorite food, it's actually kale... not eggs.
Anyway! My process always changes a little from piece to piece, but here's the basic breakdown that I went over:
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| B&W thumbnail sketches... I tend to do a lot of these. Trying to establish major value relationships; foreground/ mid/ background. |
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| Quick 3D blockout of geometric shapes to speed perspective and establish lighting direction. Particularly useful for interiors or angular subjects. Rendered out of Maya / mental ray on "Preview Final Gather". |
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| Grid texture to serve as a guide for impending texture placement. The 3D isn't critical for this particular image, but I feel it's important to show the step. |
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| Building off the B&W base, I throw in photo textures, noise brushes, etc... adding visual density while describing surface textures. Working over whole image, I try to integrate the 3D, photos, & painted portions. I start painting details where needed. |
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| In a top-most layer set, I add atmospheric effects layers (screen layer light flare, curve adjustment, color adjustment, etc). Through the whole process, I try to keep my background, mid ground, and foreground separated into layer sets too. I'll flatten the individual sets as I go through, but I try to maintain these 3 basic divisions. It gives me a bit of wiggle room in case the art director has me change something. |
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Add/adjust details (can take a while), keep pushing depth, add post effects (adjustment layers, a few gradients)... & done!
If anything needs further explanation, please comment below. Also, if anyone has suggestions on how to improve the workflow, I'd love to hear them. Thanks for reading, and a big thanks to Ringling for having me visit! |
5 comments:
Really awesome, thanks for posting your process on this!
very cool temple :)
Thanks for the process, it's always interesting to see how everyone approaches their painting
BTW - best of luck in the future too, sorry hear about 4MM :/
Very cool Jason! Did you show up prepared or was this all done on site? How long was the demo?
Hey, thanks for the comments guys!
Jay, I had the sketches done & the model built when I went down there. I demoed for just over 2 hours, and got to around image #5 (more or less). The final steps tend to take the longest; I've worked on environments like this for 16 hours or more... it just depends on the level of custom detailing required.
Hey! I really enjoyed this demo...Thanks!
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