School Bored

Last week I had to go to a school board meeting for a story I was working on. Being a business publication, we never cover education, but there was something at this particular meeting I needed for my story. Unfortunately, the part I needed to hear was the last item on the agenda. The first item on the agenda was a rezoning issue, and apparently it was quite a hot button issue. The room was packed and more than 35 people signed up to speak in front of the board, and each got three minutes a piece. During that lifetime of speeches I sketched out most of the board members, some random bald guy with an interesting look, and a chubby guy uninterested in the zombie apocalypse (there wasn’t a reference for that last one…).

It’s funny, many of my reporter notebooks have as many doodles in them as notes. I love writing, but sometimes, it’s just more fun to draw.

Digital Painting Lesson 7: Vector Art

The Lesson
This lesson was a fun one because I’ve always had an interest in vector art. What’s kept me from acting on that interest has been the pen tool. I hate the pen tool. Correction, I hated the pen tool. Now I love it, and it’s all thanks to Bobby.

See the pen tool is crucial when creating vectors, it allows for crisp, clean edges, scalable shapes, and multiple paths. I’ve tried many times to master the pen tool, I even followed Adobe’s own tutorials in one of their Classroom In a Book lessons and I still couldn’t grasp it. In just minutes, Bobby had me using the tool like a pro. The way he explained it while providing examples totally demystified it for me.

So for this lesson we had to take the sketch below and using just the pen tool (we did bring in some brushes and textures at the end to finish it off), we had to make this cactus come to life. The colored dots on Bobby’s sketch acted as the palette for coloring the scene.

The Critique
I really enjoyed this lesson; it was fun to see it go from a flat shape to something that pops. The balloon  wasn’t part of the lesson, but after finishing it, and looking at the cactus’ expression, I felt like that would be funny to have in there. Every time I look at it I can just here him screaming, “Ahhhh!” and then blowing as hard as he can to keep it away. I gave myself four stars on this one because I wasn’t sure what to do after adding the balloon. I thought it clashed with the sun and I wasn’t sure if I should keep it in the picture, make it smaller, or just get rid of it.
Bobby gave me five stars (!), a perfect score. His only critique was that it probably would have been a good idea to remove the sun. He quickly took it out with some local colors and the picture as a whole worked much better without it.

This was a relatively easy lesson and it came together quickly, but the things I learned were extremely valuable going forward. I’m working on a children’s book right now for very young children and the simple vector art style is perfect for that age group.

Digital Painting Lesson 6: Custom Brushes

The Lesson
This was one of the most useful lessons, and I learned a lot of things that I’ll continue to use and that will enable me to do all kinds of cool things.

The bulk of this assignment was instruction and it centered around the brush palette. Bobby showed us what every slider, button and menu item did and how they can be used to make different brushes. We made three brushes in this lesson: a paint brush, a marker brush, and a hair brush. You can make a brush out of just about any shape by going to Edit–>Define Brush Preset and playing with the settings in the brush palette.

For the paint brush, we used a seamless texture (which he also showed us how to make) to make a brush that appears to be a brush on canvas. To do it, we took the texture below, desaturated it, and made it seamless.

We attached the texture to two brushes, a round brush and the other to this splatter image (by selecting define brush preset):

The other brushes we made didn’t have textures attached, but could be used to add texture to images.

The marker brush we didn’t use, it was just a quick exercise to show us how we could use the brush settings to create something that looks like a marker.

Finally there was the hair brush, one that Bobby said he gets asked about a lot. This one was really cool, and it was simple to make. All it takes is 10 to 12 dots, and a few adjustments to the brush settings in the brush palette.

The hair brush lets you make clumps of hair that really add some depth and realism to a picture. After creating it, Bobby provided us a picture of a bald woman and had us paint hair on her. He painted the bald woman using the paint texture brush, so we used the same texture brush as a base for the hair and then brought in the hair brush for, you know, hair.

Below is the bald woman we were supplied, and next to it is what I turned in. We all had to turn in this hair style and color, though just for kicks and giggles he showed us how we could do darker blond and curly with the same brushes.

The Critique
I gave myself three stars because I struggled with the highlights a bit. Overall, I felt like I did a good job though, and it was a really fun and informative lesson.

Bobby gave me four stars (hooray!) and he did a bit of touching up on the hair. He fixed the highlight problems and he brought in some swoopy bangs, which I started to do but I scrapped because I couldn’t get it to work right–you can see some of the remnants of that if you look hard. He also went in with a one pixel brush and added a few stray hairs. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this class it’s that those tiny subtle touches are what really sell the picture.

Digital Painting Lesson 1: Visualizing Through Darkness

I’m taking a course at Schoolism.com called “Digital Painting with Bobby Chiu.”   The courses are usually nine weeks long and they work like this: each week I watch a video of the lesson—usually around 90 minutes in length—and I have until the following week to turn in my assignment. As I am working on the assignment for the next week, Bobby is grading my previous assignment, which involves creating a video of him correcting and drawing over my work, as well as some tips on what I could do better. He posts correction videos a week later, and I’m free to view it as well as those of my 14 other classmates. The lessons are incredible, and I’m learning tricks and techniques I never knew, and I’ve been using Photoshop for years. Also, you just can’t beat the one-on-one attention from such a well-established artist. I highly recommend signing up for a class if you can. It’s worth every penny.

The Lesson
Lesson 1: Visualizing Through Darkness. In this lesson we were supplied with a sketch of an over-the-top muscle man and we were instructed to paint him using a palette of five grayscale tones. Using low opacity and flow settings on the brush tool, we had to make multiple light and dark passes until the original sketch was gone and only our painting remained.

Why so dark? Bobby said we visualize better in darkness. Think about it, when you get up for a glass of water in the middle of the night and are startled by a funky shape in the living room, your mind races.

“Is that a coat rack? No it’s not a coat rack, it looks like it has arms…and are those claws? I think it is looking at me…what is it smiling at?”

 Our mind fills in the details in darkness. We visualize fantasy from the mundane. That’s what this assignment was all about, and it was an interesting way to approach a picture.

This was a tough assignment for me, but a great introduction to the world of digital painting. Before, I was just simply coloring my work with solid, flat tones, and adding simple highlights and shadows. That was okay for my cartoony style, but it wouldn’t work here. With the opacity and flow down, I had to think about every stroke I made, just like real painting. I often found myself slipping into coloring mode, which would make my image appear flat. I ended up restarting the picture four times before finally turning it in.

Here is my finished product:

 

The Critique
When you turn in your work you have the chance to grade yourself, one to five stars (five being the best, natch). I gave myself a 3. It was definitely beyond anything I had done before, but I wasn’t happy with the highlights, and he didn’t seem to pop as much Bobby’s picture. I told him I knew something was wrong, I just didn’t know how to fix it.

Bobby did not disappoint in his correction. He knew exactly what it was I did wrong and how to fix it. Apparently, I was paying too much attention to the details and not enough attention to the overall structure, which makes sense because I usually just color in detailed line work. Bobby said my details looked great but the structure was lacking, resulting in a flat character. He drew two cubes in the corner, one with sharp edges, and the other with more round and organic edges. He pointed out how the structure is the first thing people see, and how every structure is made up of basic shapes. For example, you can really see the individual muscles that make up his thighs, but you can’t really tell that the thighs are large cylinders. He fixed this by lightening things up a bit, which took some emphasis off the small details. He then encouraged me to think about the overall structure in every object the rest of the course. I have been, and you’ll see that in my assignment for lesson 3 I think.

Bobby agreed with my assessment and gave me three stars on the assignment.

In the next lesson, we learned how to color a grayscale image like this one. Stay tuned for that critique.

Digital Painting

I’ve been trying to get into Bobby Chiu’s digital painting class at Schoolism.com for more than a year. Every time a class would come open, it would fill up before I could register. I finally snagged a spot in his next class starting May 15. Chiu is an amazing artist (some have called him the next Walt Disney), and I’m so excited to learn from him. I’ve been waiting to send out my recently finished children’s book until after I take this class. I feel like the things I’ll learn from him will take me one step closer to my dream of being a full-time children’s book writer-illustrator.

The class comes at a great time too. I should be finished with Fuddle Learns To Cuddle by May 10, so I’ll be free to concentrate on my class assignments. Speaking of Fuddle, the organization I’m illustrating the book for just got a new website. It’s got my fuddle design all over the place, which is pretty cool. I’m going to cook up a few more poses for them to use on the site and other marketing material as soon as I get a chance. Right now, I’m pretty busy trying to get the book finished though.

Now, on to the reason of this post. I’m going to be posting my assignments and some of my feedback from Bobby’s class. It’s a nine week course, so I should have nine to ten images to share with you. I have a blog at Gamespot.com that actually has readers, but WordPress is much easier to use as far as image manipulation goes. I’ll probably link to this blog from my GS one. So if you’re an artist, interested in Bobby Chiu, or you found your way here by mistake, I hope you like what you see!