tiger / big cat digital painting wip

#19

thanks phi1618, I haven’t had very much time to work on it lately, hopefully I will soon tho…

#20

New update, blocking in some more stripes, starting some hair texture work, per some brushes provided by a colleague…c&c welcome

#21

the neck doesnt really look right. i dont know if its bc its too long or if it looks too flat. maybe try adding the front leg bone/muscles. cheers mate

#22

I agree with the above, I don’t think it’s that the neck is too long, but maybe the tiger doesn’t have enough musculature beneath it’s fur… I’m also not so convinced by the composition, maybe move it in to the right a bit more to take the anchor off the left side of the picture and be careful not to overlap the path in an awkward spot. cheers! :slight_smile:

#23

DeathMetalDan & mrd33ds - thanks for the constructive comments, I’ll work on more muscular definition, whenever I get some spare time to work on this again :surprised

#24

nice painting… you need some casting shadows to separate the foreground and the background and other component of the piece.

#25

trying to work on getting some messy fur in there, will refine that later on, working on carving out muscles with some shadows, not quite sure if its working out yet… we’ll see I guess

c&c is welcome and appreciated as always

#26

so after I posted the last update I saw something I really felt needed to be changed (the silly looking plant, whick led to adding the start of some roots) so, here it is! c&c welcome

#27

I’ve had a little down time lately and have been using it to tweak and experiment with different brushes in my digital paint, please let me know what you guys think…also I’m including a empty bg image to give an idea of what its like without the fg image…c&c appreciated as always

#28

New update mostly playing with the backlighting in the jungle,

have hardly touched the tiger in a while, need to get on that

c&c appreciated as always

#29

been really busy, but finally getting a chance to show this guy a little love,
working on texture with custom brushes and various other techniques, more updates soon (hopefull) C&C welcome and appreciated as always

#30

another new update, working on refining the look of the jungle, going for a smoother look on some of the trees, feedback? also working on the path a bit…c&c welcomed

#31

My eyes keep going to the tree to the right of the cat head. It’s perhaps too white. Also it all looks blurry, are you giong to start sharpening it up with details soon?

#32

@Neil - Interesting thought, I was sort of looking for a silhouette against the jungle, but perhaps that tree does stand out a bit too much, as for the blurryness, yes.but not that soon, I would if I had more free time to work on it. thanks for the crit! cheers

Edit working on the trees a bit per suggestions

#33

this is the most recent draft (with the new tree-ish stuff) let me know what you think with C&C Cheers!

#34

The neck and shoulders are off, you might want to study tiger anatomy to put that pose together. Tigers tend to be lean, with very defined muscles, with ruffs and other tufts of fur breaking it up.

I hate to say it, but the pose isn’t working for me, it’s not very “tiger” like, it feels more like a quizzical pose a house cat would do. Tigers generally look best at quarter profile, looking past the camera, which is why most pictures of them are like that.

The background isn’t working for me, either. You need to work with a full palette of color, for this kind of painting - you have no realistic tones in there, like blues, reds, browns, orange - it’s just GREEN. Jungles are a riot of color - that’s what’s fun about painting them - that, and there’s usually 10,000 different kinds of plant per acre.

One tip for you: while you’re learning, it’s perfectly acceptable to use photos as reference. I’d find a jungle shot to use as a basis, so you can focus on other things. Student work can focus on one or two things you want to explore, in this case, painting fur, so it doesn’t have to be all original. You don’t have to have perfection while learning.

One last tip: I painted several “fur” paintings, and the crucial part is the paint strokes need to follow the direction of the real fur, and you need to layer - paint furthest to closest.

#35

One more thing - don’t be afraid to go brighter/more saturated on the tiger. If you’ve never seen one in person, they have gorgeous colors in their fur, it’s very subtle in some areas, while bright in others, especially the Bengals. If you have a zoo near, go see one in person, if you’ve never seen one up close - go anyway, I never need an excuse to go to the zoo with a sketchpad!

Anyway, go ahead and add more russet and orange and red and rich browns. Go nuts. Tigers are never dull. Use greys for the darkened areas of white fur, and pick out the highlights with white, try to keep the pure blacks to their markings, and make sure the black is DARK, because they are in person, it’s very striking how dark the black is. And don’t forget some pink for his nose, they have pink noses in real life.

I had some time, so I did some quick and dirty edits to your piece. Take a look, and see what you think, or if you have any questions. If I were doing this, I’d be doing fur with 3-5 pixel brushes at 200% magnification (300 dpi for the image), but I’m crazy like that. Fur is tedious, but if you do it right, it’s really cool.

#36

#37

Plan your tonal composition at the earliest stages. What you have now looks disjointed as there are dark and light values scattered everywhere, instead of forming a cohesive, balanced tonal composition.

Good composition is all about the balance of large vs. small shapes, complex vs. simple shapes, the balance of dominant and supporting shapes, the arrangement of values so there’s an actual sense of design to the entire image, not just randomness based on the local values of each element. You can control you tonal composition easily with lighting–casting some elements in shadow, having entire objects be a silhouette, fading distant elements out with low contrast, controlling the ratio between your main light source(s) and your supporting secondary/ambient light sources, and so on.

#38

@Lunatique - I most definitely see your point, it is quite noticeable that I didn’t do any planning, I just sort of started. I can see what you’re talking about it looking disjointed, I hadn’t really been looking at it as a whole just it’s indivual parts. Thanks for pointing that out, do have any advice about how to salvage it? Aside from starting over entirely (which I have considered by the way)