Wassup everybody!?
By now I pretty much have my methods down, which isn’t to say I don’t still learn because I do, from watchin’ your posts, from just playin’ with the machine, but as far as the artistic process goes I have a procedure I kind of follow now. I wanted to post a little bit of that for you all with my latest piece.
First I “sketch” the scene. A rough but visualized idea of what the composition will be, I try to get the proportions and layout/posing close to what I imagine the final looking like. Often this stage takes quite some time (20 min – 2 hr, depending on how solid of a vision I have, this one was on the 1 hr+ side…), as I play with posing and perspective, etc.
(Right-click > “View Image”)
Then I work on solidifying the concept and framing, finding out what’s going on in the scene by trying different bits of “action” or other items of interest. I do numerous (dozens) of “Export”s of the image, figuring out exactly where the edges of the piece are going to be for the most dramatic effect, and working on the main colors and finalizing the concept. It may not seem like much changes between this and the previous stage but I usually spend up to an hour doing this as I figure out what works and what the best view is.
You can see from the previous stage I went from having the hero gripping the wing – facing away from the viewer, to what was going to be a pose with a large gun in his hands – facing toward the viewer (it is, after all, pretty hard to do the facing away thing).
(Right-click > “View Image”)
In the final stage I refine the composition to it’s final state, determining exactly what is going on in the scene. And only after I have everything posed and base-colored, do I then do the shading and highlighting, I try hard to keep all shade/highlights on a layer next to the base item as it prevents layering problems later on, but it doesn’t always happen. Usually there isn’t this much change between the framing and final stages, but as you can see he went from the heavy-weapon pose to jetting away with a detonator in his hand. The shading/highlighting and finalizing of the composition takes 2 hrs plus, nowadays, as I have 100s of shadows and highlights and layers by the end.
(Right-click > “View Image”)
Thanks for checking my thread out!
