Mermaid

I'm pretty much a huge fanboy of pirate movies and quite enjoyed the newest Pirates of the Caribbean (they could make a hundred of those movies and I'd still want more).  I really liked the mermaids so I did a quick mermaid painting.

It's Alive! Digital Painting Tutorial

I've been getting a lot of requests lately for a tutorial on my digital painting process so hopefully this post answers your questions.  I use Corel Painter for any actual rendering and Adobe Photoshop for adjusting levels, color balance, etc.  Digital brushes work better on large images so I never go below 3000 pixels in any direction with my originals.  I use an Intuos 4 medium sized Wacom tablet.

1 - The first thing I do is a sketch which I scan and then paint in black and white using Painter.  I find painting just the values extremely liberating.  Getting the fundamental composition and lighting right in value before introducing color helps me keep the image more coherent.  Plus it's just easier on my brain to be thinking of less things at once.

   I have a tendency to paint dark, I captured the levels here in Photoshop (Image>Adjustments>Levels) and you can see how on the dark side they were (left) until I adjusted them, bringing a greater range of contrast to the portrait (right).

1 - paint image in value only.

2 - The big downside to painting in black and white is that it's hard to introduce color to the image without it feeling dead and grayish. I solve this with a tool called Gradient Map in Photoshop. With the B&W image open go to Image>Adjustments>Gradient Map. Click on the gradient to bring up another menu letting you edit it. Pick a color for your high, mid, and low tones, keeping in mind that under most normal lighting circumstances the mid tone will be the most saturated. This helps set an overall tone to the image. I wanted Frankenstein's monster's skin to feel dead so I went with a greenish hue for the mid tone with the dark going cooler and the light going warmer.

2 - add Gradient Map for base colors.

3 - Now I introduce color through a Color or Colorize layer. I have no idea what the actual difference is between these layer types. Colorize only exists in Painter and I usually like the results I get from it more but since Colorize isn't supported in Photoshop (it converts it to Color on import) I have to export a flat image format (I do an uncompressed .tiff) from Painter and bring that into Photoshop. I let the colors get fairly bold at this stage since they seem to have a tendency to lose their saturation during the final rendering.
4 - Here I just paint in the details and add the finishing touches. I mainly use the cover pencil in Painter for painting. It's simple and similar to a digital airbrush but ends up feeling more natural for some reason. I use the digital airbrush too for adding a punch of color where I need it. I keep them all at low opacity to keep them versatile and to maintain the more natural feeling of building the paint up.

3 - paint basic colors into Color or Colorize layer.
4 - paint in details/final rendering.

 5 - In the end, I spend time tweaking the image in Photoshop until I come up with something I'm happy with. For this painting I adjusted the levels again and the color balance (making it more blue).  I sometimes edit the Hue/Saturation, Brightness/Contrast, etc...just play with it until you're happy.

5 - do a final adjustment of image settings.

That's it.  Feel free to ask me questions in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.

"Hey! Listen! Hey!"

I'm not sure what happened, Blogger seemed weird for a while and deleted this post so I'm posting it again.

Should I Be Flattered?

Check out this post on my good friend Sam Nielson's blog for an interesting story concerning the vacant-eyed red-headed kid in this painting of mine.  I'm never sure how to feel about stuff like this.  I've seen images of mine replicated before and I usually don't care and am genuinely flattered, but when it's in an actual commercial product...I don't know.  Sam's image was obviously used a lot more than mine (this "artist" who used our pictures has good taste at least :) so he's got more to be annoyed with, but I still find myself a little ambivalent about it all.  If nothing else, it's a little weird.

Bauer Power

"If you don't tell me what I want to know, then it'll just be a question of how much you want it to hurt."

Been watching a lot of 24 lately.

Botanical Burden

Oily Pirate

Around the time I started this blog (more than 5 years ago, wow) I began exclusively painting digitally. When I started I used lots of layers and digital tricks but as time has gone on I've begun basically painting as one would traditionally, using very few, if any, layers or overlays. Originally I liked digital painting for the ways it was different from traditional but slowly found myself unsatisfied with it for those same reasons. So I decided a few months ago it was time to get back into real painting and decided to go with oil paint. I'd only used acrylics before and thought it was as good a time as any to switch to oils as I'd essentially be relearning how. So this is my first attempt, ever, at an oil painting. It took a while since work has me so busy but I really fell in love with the process and can't wait to paint more, hopefully better, oil paintings. Thanks to Dave Malan and Dave McClellan for answering my endless questions.

Play Ball!

I've been crazy busy at work and have thus had less time for art (at least any art not for the Cars 2 video game).  I did manage to finish this 50's style pinup girl I've been working on for a while.  No, I don't think she'll be able to run the bases very well in high heels.

More Sketchbook

Drizzt

A friend of mine is a big Drizzt fan and asked me ages ago to draw a picture of the heroic dark elf.  He's been doing me a lot of favors lately so I figured I owed him.

New Sketchbook

Around Halloween I got a new sketchbook.  I was desperately needing something different after using essentially the same size and kind of sketchbook for years.  I wanted something wirebound with non-white paper so I could work in both the darker and lighter values.  They didn't seem like unreasonable or obscure expectations for a sketchbook but it took a surprising amount of time and research to find what I was looking for.  I eventually found this book which I've been loving (it's even eco-friendly for all you hippies out there).  The white highlights are done with one of those gel pens and the rest of the sketch is my stalwart Zebra ball point pen.  It feels so good to be sketching again on a regular basis.

Maria Wiegenlied

Merry Christmas!

Simple Nativity

Another one done for my sister.

A Right Jolly Old Elf

A quick painting for my sister.

King's Vineyard

This is another, much less digital, game I did some art for.  Designed by a few of my coworkers, Sandeep Karkhar and Dave Haslam, it features some clever mechanics.  Working with Mayday Games was great, this project was a little different from anything I've done before and they were very patient.  Ultimately I'm quite happy with the final product which you can find out more about here.

Epic Mickey

No, I did not paint this

I've spent the majority of this year working on a video game called Epic Mickey which is out today.  I worked on the environment art for a several levels but spent most of my time on a few of the boss fights.  In some ways it was a dream project for a Disney geek like me to recreate stuff from the movies and parks.  It was fun because the art, for some clever story reasons, was meant to be inspired by the Disney stuff but not exactly match it.  So I was able to help create (with the help of other talented artists both here in Salt Lake City and Austin, TX) a dark, twisted version of Hook's Jolly Roger and a Tron version of Space Mountain.

 

The game includes its own version of the Haunted Mansion (called the Lonesome Manor).  There was no way I was going to not work on that (Haunted Mansion is my favorite Disneyland ride), so I muscled my way into it where I could, ultimately helping to render the ballroom level and even do one of the long paintings for the stretching room. I also worked on an area modeled after New Orleans Square. It was a cool project and I'm excited to see it released,  It's exclusive to the Wii, you can see the trailer here.

Angel

Young Rapunzel

My 2010 Pumpkin

Happy Halloween!

Drac

Wolfy

Mum

Frank

She's Watching You

It's not too early to start Halloween posts, right?

Nilbog! It's Goblin Spelled Backwards!

I couldn't pass up the opportunity to do some art from my favorite bad movie for the Avalanche blog topic: Troll.  Troll 2 is a must see!

Watercolor Fairy

No one's EVER painted a fairy with watercolors!

Vigorous Viking

Ever since I saw How to Train your Dragon (awesome!) I've been wanting to paint a viking and I finally found the time this weekend.

Bright Idea

An illustration I did for the May edition of the LDS children's magazine, The Friend.

Redneck Bigfoot

A quick painting for my brother in law.  Sorry for the lack of updates lately, I've got a lot of things coming soon, promise!

Watercolor Weekend

I found some time over the weekend to do another painting using real paint. Revolutionary!

Happy God of War III Day!

I picked up my copy of the Ultimate Edition last night at midnight and played until 3 am. Between this and Final Fantasy XIII coming out last week I'm a very happy gamer. KRATOS!

Love, Love

A goofy cupid I painted for my wife for Valentine's day. Happily, she likes it.

The Girl Who has Everything

What? Actual Paper? Real Paint?

I got an awesome set of Watercolor paints for Christmas (thanks in-laws!) which I finally used to paint something. It's been far too long since I've painted with anything other than digital paint and I had a lot of fun. I think this turned out moderately well and I'm excited to try more.