Earlier, we saw how to paint glowing objects by taking lightning as an example. That technique can be used for other things like sparkles, energy beams and flames – not just for lightning.

In this article, we will discuss how to further integrate these glowing objects with the rest of the painting. We might put in a lot of detail into painting them, but if we do not consider the effect they have on their surroundings, the glowing object will seem to stand out. It would seem like it was just pasted over after doing the rest of the painting.

Here is a quick concept sketch I made of a Fire Sorceress. Notice how I painted the fireball in her hand – I used the same principle as I did with the lightning in the earlier exercise. But it still seems a bit odd, in spite of having the fireball show through her fingers – it is sort of detached.

To fix this, we have to consider how the fireball would effect the rest of the scene. In this case, we need to consider the light hitting the form of her body.

I gave the rim lighting to her body, keeping in mind of the light source as the fireball in her hand. This light source is not the primary – which is on her left and above. I apply the effect of the fireball as if it were secondary lighting. The secondary lighting effect does give depth to this artwork, but along with that, it makes it seem like the fireball is in her hand.

Here I have not given any other secondary lighting, and took the glowing effect of the fireball to be the secondary lighting to keep it simple. We can as well apply another faint light source opposing the primary light source to make the artwork more dramatic.

Things you need to keep in mind while rendering the effect of a glowing object are:

• Color – The color of the glow obviouly will cast the secondary light of same hue
• Shape of the glowing object – This effects how the direction in which the light effects nearby objects. If it is roughly a spherical object, then it goes out radially from its center. If the object is an elongated cylinder, when rendering, it will linearly go out.
• Intensity – This decides how far you would go applying the secondary light.
• Shape of the object the secondary light hits – This will give depth, and the way you render it, will depict its form.

If we were to go back to the example of the lighting as the glowing object, and we want to depict it striking throuh thick clouds, depicting the effect is a bit different. Instead of painting crisp rim highlights, we would have to paint a diffusing light since clouds are not solid objects.

So next time you paint any glowing object, remember to render the effect it has on its environment.

The digital painting is done using GIMP and Wacom Intuos3.

See a larger view, and print,  see Phoenix – Painting at devaintART.

For those interested, I had take a couple of intermediate screenshots. Head over to CGPainting.com thread to read through it – Phoenix – Painting thread.

For a wide screen wallpaper version, download it from ClipArtLog.com.

This tutorial is a short one, but would be explaining an intermediate level of digital painting technique. It is a walkthrough of painting a lightning against a moderately dark plain sky. Once you understand the technique, you should be able to apply the same technique for painting variations in the subject – sparkles, energy beams, or light sabers.

When painting a glowing energy streak – remember to choose a color palette that is contrasting in terms of value. You may want to choose contrasting color too to help in composition of the piece but may not be always possible (it would be weird to draw a blue colored flame).

For this example, I used a moderately dark blue for the sky. It is just not possible to get the right effect of a lightning against a white background.

This step might seem a bit counter-intutive. Use a soft edged round brush, take a color even darker than the background and paint over the area roughly where you would be painting the lightning. Even it the lighting seems to glow, to achieve a bright effect, putting an even darker background helps achieve the contrast.

The next few steps are just about taking smaller brushes each time and taking a step towards the bright lighting color through the palette. (You can even create another small image and mix up the sky and the lightning color to get the different shades).

You can see here I have started painting with a yet smaller brush. The screenshot is when I finished doing it only partially so you can see the difference.

Since it is lightning you are painting, you do not need to draw steady lines. You do not even need to keep the subsequent lines exactly in the middle of the earlier lines you have drawn. A different subject, say a engergy beam might require more steady hand.

Here, I have painted, what one would call the ‘white hot’ areas. Do not choose white, but some thing really pale should do the trick.

As I mentioned before, you can use this technique to paint any variations of this subject. You can even translate the technique to different styles of digital painting. For example, I did the same subject, but using ‘cut-edge style shading‘.

Do post the results of your works that you did using this technique in the comments below.

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Dedicated to the lives lost, those of the civilians and the public service personnel like policemen, firemen and armed forces of India, in the Mumbai attacks of 26 November.

An A4 size painting at 300 dpi in portrait layout, done using GIMP and Wacom Intuos3. Check out the deviantART entry – Mumbai Firemen – for a larger view.

It can be quite daunting and for those of us who are modest, it may see feel narcissistic. But trust me – I just tried it out. It is a challenging task yet a good creative exercise. As an artist, when you are trying to portray realism to the faintest extent, you would want to be able to capture what is called familiarity. Even when the ‘portraits’ of people (or even things) are distorted like in caricatures (see Tom Richmond’s works for example), the key is to capture the familiarity.

We have been observing ourselves from the day we became self aware. There will be very few who have not noticed some of the features of themselves in the mirror. A Self Portrait is just an attempt to capture the familiarity of oneself.

Here is my first attempt at a self portrait. I believe I have caught some of my features – I can see a lot of changes required, but I am going to let this one slide. I would do more attempts in future.

This was done in GIMP, using Wacom Intuos3, over a span of roughly 15 mintues. Before attempting this, I just peeked at myself on mirror, and tried to take a mental note of the features. After that, I opened up an new canvas in portrait layout and started with a new dull brown layer. This seems to be a better approach than face a blank white canvas. Then, I started out with rough form and kept refining it on new layers – going through with a smaller brush each time.

I grossly under-estimated the amount of effort this would take.

With the amount of detail, and my choice of color palette – added to that the two sources of light, takes up quite a bit of effort to paint.

As you can see, I have approached this from back to front. And on each of those level/layer, I detail them with a fat/large brush to a fine/small brush.  Stay tuned – I will finsih up painting by detailing the two main characters, and perhaps adjusting some color levels.

It was released quite some time back, and had installed it on my Windows boot. But I had been lazy to install it on my Ubuntu boot where I usually work. The Ubuntu 8.04 did not have a backport of the latest GIMP 2.6 – and since it was not available through Synaptic Package Manager, I just waited a bit for Ubuntu 8.10 to be released on October 30.

Layout

With the upgrade complete, the first thing I did was to check out the new layout. The menu strip from the tool box has been moved to a ‘placeholder’ window. When you select the ‘Keep windows on top’ for utility and dockable windows in the Preferences (Edit > Preferences > Window Management), the setup is quite uncluttered.

Frankly, I was used to the older layout and it does not make much of a difference. But some of you might find it handy if you keep shifting between different tools, to have the tool box always stay on top, and not be cluttered with menu items.

Brush Dynamics

The plesant surprise was when I selected the brush tool. Brush tool is the standard tool that you will use for doing digital paintings.

As you can see in the Brush Dynamics section, there are three sets of check boxes. The Pressure relates to what should vary based on the pressure of your graphics tablet. A usual setting I keep is to have the Opacity and Size of the brush be affected by the pressure. The improvement is the slider, situated at the end of the check boxes. This allows you to specify how much the pressure should effect the ones you have selected.

The next set of check-boxes is for the velocity – or how fast you move the tablet. I guess it would effect even the mouse movements. I see this go into simulating real world mediums like oil and water color.

The Random row, should help a lot while applying texture using custom brushes. The problem I have seen on using custom brushes is that the end result somehow seems unnatural due to repeated patterns. The randomness factor should remedy that issue.

Improved Select Tool

The freehand select tool has undergone major improvement. Do not let the name ‘freehand’ fool you. It allows you to do freehand as well as polygon select in the same selection action.

Allowing the polygon selection alone is a major improvement. Regular readers might remember the post on Path Tool in GIMP. This new feature almost makes the slightly round about method obsolete. You can even save a selection as Path by doing Select > To Path.

Path and selection construction became much easier, and that should allow you to construct those flats layer quite easily now.

Inking

Though, not actually digital ‘painting’, illustration and drawing is a prerequisite to better paintings.

Inking is a technique that you may often need to use to give that illustrative feel, or perhaps be required for inking a comic book.

For this purpose, I earlier used to set the Brush with pressure sensitivity on only size of the brush. Such inking would have lack of flow that you had to fix by going in with a hard-edge eraser. This process too is no more required.

There is this nifty inking tool that lets you create smooth strokes that responds realistically to the tablet pen’s movements. It even has tilt sensor (which I have not yet seemed to master it in Inkscape), that would make calligraphic illustration much more controlled.

There are a lot more ‘under the hood’ changes (like GEGL), that may not seem to make much difference to the end user (us) as of now. But I think, this is that first step GIMP needs to take to deliver more features. There are a lot more minor changes too – check out the GIMP 2.6 release notes.

I left of at the cleaned up lineart in the last part. This installment would contain a little details on the color palette.

Color Palette

I take a bit of extra care while choosing the color palette for his skin – since he is having a darker skin tone. Numerous photographs and character painting done by other professional artists serve as an excellent guide.

Flats and Painting

Once the colors are chosen, it is almost a mechanical task to create the flats layer. You can use any tools to create this layer, but make sure that you have the anti-aliasing switched off.

Then, I start using the midtones to render the form of the character. The lineart did not contain enough detail, and to make it interesting, I fleshed out his muscles as details.

The next task would be to hit the forms with lighter tones, and make the character pop from a generic background using the darker shadow areas.

Stay tuned to see how it turns out.

This would be another character for The Assassin Order – a personal project of mine. Check out the other two characters – Anwun and Kitar.

Concept

There are times when The Assassin Order is faced with necessity of brute force for some quest it has taken. Those are the times when the skills of Gogor – the Giant Assassin – is called upon. His opponents repent when they think he is a simpleton – his war-hammer technique leaves no room for other thought than escape.

After a couple of thumbnail sketches, I study the different anatomical features until I am comfortable with it. Note that since he is a giant, I try to keep his anatomy around 9 to 10 heads tall.

Lineart

Once I am comfortable and decide on the pose, I work on the basics and get the pose anatomically correct.

I try to sketch the ideal human in the required pose – trying to keep things in flow.

Once fixing the proportions for a Giant, I then push the sketch layer opacity down, and start sketching on a new layer with more refined line.

Before proceeding to create a clean lineart at A4 size 300 dpi, I try out different accessories that go along twith the character.

Cleaning Up

Once I am satisfied with the sketch along with the accessories, I flatten all the sketches together, and then scale it up to fit a canvas of A4 size at 300 dpi. Reducing the opacity of the flattened sketch layers, and using it as a guide, I draw the lineart with pressure sensitivity for the opacity of the brush turned off and keeping it on only for the size. This way, I get a clean lineart.

The lineart is now ready for the next stage.

Stay tuned using KalaaLog.com feeds (or use the email form above) to get updates on this project and other tutorials.

• Software: GIMP (or Adobe Photoshop)
• Level: Advanced
• Subject: Kitar – Potion Assassin

Starting off from where I left, I start to detail the different parts of the character.

Details

Using the palette from the last part, the mid tones are painted in the bottle. Note that I plan to make this bottle quite a bit more opaque than the earlier study – Painting A Potion Bottle.

The face and the rest of the parts are detailed.

Highligths

The bottle and the face are given strong and near white highlights.

Finishing Up

A backgroudn is quickly painted and using the darkest tones from the palette, some deep shadows are painted on the character.

Check out the deviantART entry for a larger view.