KalaaLog

• Software: GIMP (or Photoshop)
• Level: Advanced
• Subject: Golden Amulet

For the past couple of days, I have been attempting at trying to paint gold and other glossy/reflective materials more realistically. I realized, when working on Raged Ravan, that the approach I am currently taking does not seem to be apt.

Lineart

This is a pretty random design, and is not very pleasing. It can actually be shaped any way. The focus of this study was actually on painting gold texture.

Gold - Study

Before working on the above line art, I wanted to study the way a golden glossy surface behaved. Hence I started with a spherical gold surface.

My first impulse was to shade it with usual gradation of shadows, midtones and highlights - but that is what I have been doing and the result is less than satisfactory. After a bit of pondering, I realized that the gold (or any other metal) has a highly reflective surface. It would almost be like a mirror with a faint yellow tint. Basically, we need to render the area behind the viewer in the weird fish eye kind of distortion on the circle.

That means, I need to first assume there is something behind the viewer and for sake of simplicity, I assumed a normal horizon line and a source of light.

Hence I tried a couple of different darker shades. Initially I tried a warmer dark yellow, and later settled for a cool dark yellow tone. The convex surface of the spherical surface would create a curved line. It would dip down at the center if the eye level is above the horizon. It would bulge upwards in the center, if the eye level is below the horizon and the viewer is looking up at the sphere. It may take a while to figure out and visualize it. But after a bit of practice, and study of actual reflective objects, it can be intuitive. ( Note that a sphere has convex surface. If the surface is concave, the horizon lines drawn on it will be flipped. )

Applying highlights is the fun part. Assume the light source and put a contrasting hightlight tone. You will notice that it is still a bit ambiguous in terms of whether it is convex (sphere) or concave. To fix this, render the slight gradations of the shadow areas.

Gold Texture Applied To Amulet

Now let us look at the the same principle applied to the amulet.
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This will be a short study of the ’secondary lighting’ concept we saw previously.

Check this digital painting concept I did few days back.

Notice the usual rendering of the demons structure done through rendering how the light from the left reflects over it.

To give some more drama to the painting, I introduced the ’secondary light’. Instead of just taking the ambient light on the opposite side, I introduced another element to the scene - a secondary light source.

The purple was chosen as it was a light source, and would be complementary to the yellowish hue of the primary light color. If you are not introducing a secondary light, the the ambient light can be rendered by just reducing the saturation and increasing the brightness of the color you have used on the opposite side.

A much larger version is uploaded at deviantART. See the Demon entry at deviantART to study the closeup details.

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This short write up would be about some interesting technique I stumbled across gradually, about make artworks more interesting and less flat.

You can apply this to almost all forms of artwork (painting or illustration), where you create the sense of depth and give volume to your subject by putting different shades of same color/hue. It can be applied where you are varying the value and hue too, once you get the underlying principle.

Let us take as simple example.

This is a simple line art of a vase or pot like object. Once you get the shape right, depending on the style or medium, you would start rendering its volume. First a light source is assumed, and color (or gray) is applied with varying value (intensity/shade). In this example let us assume the light source is on the left-top and behind the viewer.

It is pretty decent depiction of the shape of the vase, due to the varying intensity of light falling on different parts and surfaces. But it still seems to not have that character, and even with proper shading, looks a bit with out depth. The reason for this is, the above shading is not proper. It would have been proper if the vase was floating in empty space with the light source where we have assumed. Even with the shadow draw, it may not look convincing enough as we see in real life. So what are we missing?

The missing render is of, what may be called secondary light. It is the ambient light of the room, or some of the reflected light from the surface the vase is kept on. The moment you depict this secondary light, the artwork gains more character.

Here, I did exaggerate the light from the secondary source a bit more than I usually would so that it become clear. Observe the rim of reflected light drawn on the right hand surfaces of the vase, which are facing the ground/table.

When doing actual artwork, render the reflected light much lighter than the primary light source. Some times, the scene may have an actual secondary light source. The secondary light source may be almost as intense as the primary, but to get a dramatic artwork, always try to compose a scene having one strong primary light source.

In this example, to make it simple, I showed it in gray scale image. But when color/hue comes into play, the technique becomes even more interesting. Studying other established artists’ works, you can notice that most of them have a secondary light source color to be complementary of the primary light source. This, I think, is done to make an interesting composition by having color contrast in the artwork.

Feels like there is more to this that explained here, but this should be a start. Do you have any experiences/observations to share?

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• Software: Inkscape
• Level: Beginner to Intermediate
• Subject: Tomatoes

The other tutorial on painting a tomato has become quite popular and I have got quite a handful of request on how the approach would be for illustrating tomatoes. In this post, we will be looking at how to illustrate a tomatoes (or more than one) using a sketching program and Inkscape (or any other vector editors like Adobe Illustrator or Corel DRAW).

Sketch

Draw a sketch of the tomatoes and get it as a image file. You can either sketch it on paper and scan it in, or sketch it using a software. I used GIMP.

Basic Shape

Import the sketch into Inkscape.

Use the pen tool to mark out the rough shape of the different parts. Take care to correctly order the different shapes one above the other. This depends on how and from which angle have you sketched the different parts. Some of the parts may need to be split into more than one shapes when the interleave between other shapes.

After you have gotten them in proper order, you can then shape all the paths and then give them the basic flat color.

Details

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