Sketchbook Thread of Heozart

#161

Heozart great portraits :thumbsup: i really like the second portraits, keep them coming:)

#162

Johan and Bart, thanks for noticing a progress. :slight_smile: One thing I have been doing differently is starting with value only. When I am satisfied, I add two or more overlay layers for coloring. Fill/block in with base tones in the first one, and work on the shifts in hue and saturation in the other layer. It seems to be working well, so I will keep experimenting with this method for now.

Karthik, the second one was my favorite of the three too. :slight_smile:

I am serioulsy tempted to look into getting one of those books that hair stylists have. I bet you could learn a lot about painting hair from those. :smiley:

One thing that’s been on mind - color actually has 3 properties: value, hue and saturation. It is easy to separate value, but is there some exercise I can do to isolate saturation from hue and work on it to gain a better understanding?

#163

Well you know what they say… a hairstyle is one of the features that makes a person recognizable. You can be sure that character concept artists browse fashion books at regular times…

#164

Thanks Johan, I guess I need to try to be more interested in fashion.

Underworld poster study:

A teaser I made for a hypothetical movie for the CoH June fan art battle:

After Aeon Flux DVD cover:

Corpse Bride study:

#165

I have cloud envy - your clouds look awesome! And wow at the portraits! I don’t know if this helps, but there are a ridiculous amount of online hair style guides out there (never know what to do with my curly hair, so one day I asked google ;)).

#166

Aviva, thanks for the info on online hair style guides. :slight_smile: As for the clouds, I couldn’t do clouds at all before last month. I painted nothing but clouds for two weeks, and it really made the difference.

I love Corpse Bride! Here’s two more from the movie:

There’s an eye in me soup.

Hopscotch!

#167

Great stuff, man! Haven’t seen Corpse Bride yet (all the singing might not work for me), but I enjoyed Coraline a lot, a feast for the eyes!
You show the form very well, nice work on the values. Kind of shows how color is less important, values must be correct. Keep them coming and make sure you learn something with each one :slight_smile:

#168

… great progress, Wes!
I wanted to say something more intelligent than “wow - wow - wow”,
but - oh yes, wow! :slight_smile:
a.

#169

really great progress. Bravo!

#170

Hi Razz, I usually don’t care for musicals, but I actually love the music in Corpse Bride. Thanks for telling me about Coraline! I didn’t know anything about it, so I had to look it up. I will have to watch it when the DVD comes out. What you said about value vs color really got me thinking last few days. I will elaborate in a sec.

Alena, oh wow, you said “wow” looking at my stuff…wow! :smiley:

Sycen, thanks!

Ok, so on to value vs color, I know Razz didn’t mean it like this, but I had already been feeling like I was getting away with poor color because of solid values, and what Razz said stirred up something in me in a good way. I pretty much work on value first now, and I don’t feel like I am learning much about color by glazing on top of finished values. Maybe I am doing it wrong, but there is a lot of guesswork involved for me in the coloring stage, and I kinda feel clueless.

So after much thinking and messing around, a solution I came up with is a way to work with values while incorporating color at the same time. Value-conscious color painting for dummies, if you will. I made a custom color set for Painter that looks like this:

I made a guide explaining how it is organized, and made it available for download in case anyone else wants to try it and tell me how useful/useless it is. I have Painter X, and i have no idea if it works on other versions.

The main feature of this color set is that you will be working with 5 values (including white and black) regardless of the color you pick (other than the RGB and CMYK space-fillers). The three gray values are the same Lightness values you get in Photoshop when you posterize a grayscale image.

Keep in mind that the V in Painter is not an absolute measure of value. This is apparent from the fact that for each and every hue, V is set to 50% at its most saturated and brightest point (the right point of the color triangle). Painter got saturation wrong as well, for that matter. Along the upper right edge of the triangle, the saturation stays at 100% almost all the way. Only when you get to pure white it suddenly drops from 100% to 0%. In reality, the saturation gradually decreases from 100% at the right point to 0% at white. What stays constant at 100% along this edge(and any other lines parallel to it) is brightness, not saturation.

I am mentioning these things, because when you color pick them in Painter the numbers you see for S and V will be off. This is because Painter uses a strange method of measuring S and V, not because I picked the wrong colors. I determined the colors in photoshop, recorded the RGB values for each and picked them again in Painter using the same RGB values in Painter.

Also note that you will not get a grayscale image by desaturating. If you paint at full opacity with these colors and desaturate, the values will be all over the places. However, if you switch to grayscale mode in Photoshop (no such mode in Painter that I know of) the values will be uniform across the colors picked from the same L zone.

Ok, enough talk. Everything of the little I know about different aspects of color, I learned from this site:
http://www.huevaluechroma.com/index.php

Here is my first experiment using the color value swatch:

#171

Hey Wes,

Interesting findings concerning the Painter color triangle and it’s HSV behaviour.
Do you know you can get the correct color swatch by doubleclicking the foreground color indicator (the small square)? Then you get the square color selection dialog, similar to the one in Photoshop. I just wish it had sliders next to each parameter, now there is only a slider for the value.

If you don’t like how Painter handles it’s colors because the numbers are off, I would suggest to try to become less dependant of these numbers, and determine the value, hue and saturation you need for your next stroke visually. It’s trial and error either way but I think it will be harder to predict how a certain hue will look when giving it a saturation of 156 and a value of 98 for example, than when you just look at your painting and move your stylus in the triangle until you find something that looks right.

#172

Hey Johan,

I don’t depend on the numbers to pick my colors in painter, since they are not dependable to begin with. :smiley: It is just that if you want to find a color with specific attributes, you can’t precisely. Say you want to find a fully saturated yellow at 50% value. Painter says V = 50% at the triangular tip, regardless of hue. This point is where the max chroma occurs, and as you can see here, the actual shape of triangle varies by hue. For yellow, this point has lightness value of 98. That is pretty darn close to white, yet painter says V = 50%! Fully saturated yellow with 50% value actually looks olive green. The big problem is that the degree to which the attribute of value gets skewed varies greatly by hue and saturation. Only when working working with some hues close to red need you not guess the actual value of your colors so much, because max chroma for red is at L=54, which is close to 50.

There is a fundamental flaw in how Painter calculates V (and S to a lesser degree). The color selection dialog merely presents the same information in a different way, and does not solve the problem. The value slider is skewed the same way the color triangle is. It is actually even more confusing, since V is now “Lum” and uses a scale of 0-240 instead of 0-100%.

You are right, the best way of finding the color you want in painter is moving around inside the triangle until it looks right, or picking a color from your painting. My color set is an attempt to eliminate, or at least minimize, the guesswork involved until I get a better understanding of the relationship between color and value.

#173

I have to say it again - Your style is really awesome… I especially like the painting of the character with the eye soup! Great work!
:applause:

#174

Lex, thanks so much! :smiley:

I am sorry to post again without a picture, but I remembered why I seem a little obsessed with these numbers that seemingly no other Painter users seem to care about. There is an exercise I used to do in Photoshop for fun.

Open a photograph with good values and colors. Bring up the color dialog, and start slowly sliding around areas of interest with the eye dropper and pay attention to the way how different aspects of color such has hue, saturation, brightness, and lightness change as you move. The color square shows different things depending on which attribute you have selected, too.

Once you have done enough of this to get a general understanding of the pattern, try to analyze and guess the colors before you go in with the eyedropper. “It looks more red than orange, so the hue is probably somewhere around 10-15. (Photoshop uses 0-360, Painter 0-240) It looks fairly saturated, I think 60-65%. It looks mostly in the light, so 90% brightness.” Ironically, I think lightness was the attribute I had the most trouble guessing. You will probably be way off at first, but this becomes fun as your ability to to estimate improves, and very exciting when you actually nail it down almost perfectly! When you check a color with the eyedropper, do not just pick a single pixel, but rather slide around the surrounding area.

Now once you can guess pretty reliably, start analyzing colors from life. It will be hard to verify your numbers, but at this stage, you should feel confident that you won’t be too far off, and it will be a useful way of killing time when you are away from your computer.

Unfortunately, I stopped doing it before I reached that level, because I started spending most of my time in Painter. As I keep saying, the numbers are either distorted or nonexistent (like brightness) in Painter, so this exercise can’t be done with Painter.

I think this exercise is one good reason to have precise and accurate measurements available to you. I still remember one of the discoveries I made from doing it: Conventional belief is that the most saturated area is in the light side just before the core shadow. While I found this to be true in many cases, I kept finding areas in which saturation pushes up even higher in the dark side. One explanation I can think of is that a lot of people do not make the distinction between saturation and brightness. Brightness always goes down as you get closer to black, while saturation can still go up.

I think I really should start doing this exercise again. Who knows, maybe I will get good enough to be able to pick a color from the color triangle in Painter and know the correct numbers in my head.

Edit: Funny that I said “precise and accurate measurements”. Precision and accuracy are synonyms, but there is a clear distinction. Precision is reliability where as accuracy is correctness. You can be precise without being accurate, but you can’t be accurate without being precise. Painter is precisely inaccurate, since it reliably gives you the wrong numbers, because it fails to take into consideration aspects of color like brightness and correct values. Perhaps it is because of Painter’s precision that people overlook its inaccuracy.

There is a subtle but clear distinction between grayscale and desaturation, as well as between chroma, brightness and saturation. Painter basically ignores these differences, which is why it can be precise, yet never accurate. I think I just made Painter crash by saying that, because it does not know to make the distinction between precision and accuracy. Sorry, I just had to get this off my chest. :smiley:

#175

You are right, Painter’s color management is all wrong. It’s been said by others who did the same digging like you. But…

Perhaps it is because of Painter’s precision that people overlook its inaccuracy.

Nope, not in my case anyway… I don’t have PS only because it’s so bloody expensive (835€ OMG!) :argh:

If I could, I would… you can be sure of that.
Besides, all the reasons brought up by Painter fanatics (a more traditional feel, etc) don’t weigh up against the speed, the reliability, the brush engine with all it’s amazing aspects, the completeness of the package (it’s a lot more than just a painting program), better transformation tools, better color management, better multicore support in the latest versions (I’ll get my multicore system this summer), etc etc. The list is endless!
But 835€? Ouch man, that hurts. That’s more than my new workstation will cost (without monitors). I bought Painter IX.5 for the price of the upgrade (I think it was around 150€) a few years ago. And for that money, I’ve had loads of fun with it. The fact that it has a lot of issues is something I accept, because my wallet says so :slight_smile:

How about you, Wes?
Do you have PS? Why bother with Painter if you have PS?
Just curious :wink:

#176

Hey Johan,

I have CS2, but I just seem to have more fun with Painter. I love it, even with all the problems with it. It is kinda strange I guess, since I don’t have a background in traditional painting. My favorite features are papers, brushes, costum palettes, and the ease with which you can change the brush size. I tried to paint in Photoshop last month for the first time in a while, and I just couldn’t. I will have to learn how to make brush presets first. Changing the brush size was so annoying, too. I do use photoshop all the time when saving JPGs, though.

I thought all this time you used Painter because it was your prefered painting software over Photoshop, lol. Photoshop is way overpriced, indeed. Maybe you can find an earlier version at a more reasonable price? Congrats in advance on your new workstation! :smiley:

I made a second guide for using my color set here. Here’s the result of my second experiment with it. Reference from the Gladiator DVD booklet.

#177

Heh yeah I do love Painter, because it allows me to Paint digitally :smiley:
Just not sure if I would be as fanatic as I currently am if I had PS…

I should start creating these color swatches as well.
It’s nice to be able to use a color palette when you know you’ve created a painting you liked before. That way, if you have a few, I think it becomes easier to quickly choose a palette when thinking of a certain mood to achieve.

If you could work out the face of that warrior a bit more, it could easily stand as a speedpainting. Especially the mood and the composition, I like!

#178

Hi Johan,

I agree with you on his face. It seems a bit washed out compared to his armor.

Since I started using a color set, I have noticed two positive behaviors. First is using optical mixing by using different colors on canvas instead of just picking the color you want. Playing with paper properties seems to work nicely for this, such as inverting the paper grain. Second is controlling saturation, using less saturation in the background for aerial perspective. I knew about it before, but was inconsistent in applying when I paint. With 4 different saturation levels in my color set, it is much more intuitive now, because if I pick a color that is too saturated, it really pops out.

I remade my color set, btw. It seems that the reason Photoshop was using grays at unequal intervals with posterize was because my gray profile was set incorrectly. So the lightness for my colors are now set at 25, 50, and 75 again. Color management is such a complicated subject, and I just don’t get it. :argh:

I did a portrait for my Mom for her birthday. She likes hats, and she likes flowers, so she gets a hat of roses. I used a 20+ year old photo as reference, so she looks a bit younger. But I don’t think she has a problem with that. :slight_smile:

#179

Hey wow beautiful job on that portrait Wes!
Your mum will be thrilled I’m sure!
Really nice!

#180

Thanks Johan. My mom liked it. :slight_smile:

Two studies from today. My original plan was to work on them on small sizes without zooming in so I don’t get caught up with details. It just made me do the details with tiny brushes and now my eyes hurt, lol. I will try to set a time limit and stick to it next time. Both from photo references: