2D artist in wayyyy over his head. Help please.

#1

So I got this freelance job doing art for a new B Horror movie. I normally do anime or cartoony style stuff and realism isn’t my forte. To make a long story short, I have 3 weeks to complete a piece similar to the reference picture I have included which is the conan the barbarian style fantasy oil painting variety. I have taken an oil painting class mind you so I can use oils to a certain extent but I still feel like I really need to to do a kick ass job as this will be the movie’s cover and promotional material. Are there any down and dirty techniques or methods to create an image like this? I’ve heard of doing detailed and shaded pencil sketches and then laying in blocks of color combined with multiply to let the lineart show through but I’ve never tried it. I should be getting an 6"x8" intuos3 tablet which I believe comes with a basic version of painter so I’ll have those at my disposal.

Any advice, links to tutorials or magic pencils you would like to give me would be highly welcome.

#2

Experimenting on a big job can blow up in your face. Good luck

#3

I accepted the job because the other portion of it is right up my alley but they kind of roped me into doing this cover as well. I’m willing to work hard on this but I have a few days before I begin so I’m trying to plot a course of action hence the need for advice.

BTW, I’m also from Baltimore, MD. I live in Cockeysville.

#4

Oh trouble… I cant really help much… but there is one place you might go ask for help.

2D WIP Anatomy Review with Rebecca Kimmel. Once you have your main characters sketched. Go there and ask for advice on how to make him more anatomically correct. She has tutorials there too…

http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=177

There is a sticky with TONS of tutorials there… here is the link.

For other painting tutorials go to Art Techniques and Theories Forum.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=166

there are many tutorials there too!

sorry I am still a student and dont know much about painting really… so this is all the help I can give.

good luck!!! :thumbsup:

#5

Well, the artist that did that painting is the famous Boris Vallejo. He is of course using traditional oil painting to get this style. You can google his work to see how extensive it is and be able to find out how he works.

Seriously though, his style is nothing like comic book art…its more photographic if anything. If you can start out with a really tight pencil sketch you might be able to get some where

here are some tutorials from the pros

http://www.pensnpixels.com/flatting.htm

http://www.gfxartist.com/features/tutorials

#6

Okay, first off, let me say that I used to have a linear style and I am now doing more painterly stuff. It only took me a year to make the transition.
First, I would buy a wacom and forget about actually painting in oil. If you want to paint in oil, you’ll have to learn all the techniques of the medium on top of all the light and color techniques.
I’ll show you my process, although this is for black and white, not color

Image Process

#7

No risk no fun :slight_smile:
Challenging jobs are always the most fun for me…

I’m not a 2D Artist, so take my advice with a grain of salt. But what about taking exact reference photos. As far as I know, Boris works with reference photos.

#8

Ines,

Thanks for the thread pimpin’. :slight_smile: You’re learning from the master, Roberto! :smiley:

smackbringer,

I’d be happy to help you if I can…but I kind of have limited time due to the fact that I’m teaching a CGWorkshop that starts today.

For Anatomy Reference, you may want to check out this thread:

Reference for Anatomical and Figurative Art

Ben Miller is a great model who has a number of nude poses here:
http://justmeina.deviantart.com/gallery/

Hong Ly has a great website with nude femal reference here:
http://www.characterdesigns.com/

Check both of these out for basic reference. Do a line drawing. Do a shaded drawing in grayscale using the method outlined by Ninjas, or by [b]Stahlberg:

Stahlberg’s tutorial:[/b]
http://www.androidblues.com/JealousyStepbystep/jealousystep.html

Post your work on the Anatomy Forum ~ create a thread called [b]Help needed - figure assignment.

[/b]Good luck! I’ll try to help you as much as I can. :slight_smile:

Cheers,

~Rebeccak

#9

Rebecca, you start today?! Oh sweet! good luck girl!
and yes I have been pimping your and Roberto’s Forums in many a post. :slight_smile:
Well it is an easy sell considering the great product :slight_smile:

#10

Aw, Ines, you’re a sweetie. passes Ines a 20 :scream:

#11

Ok, some tips.

Use Painter with well Intous. You can actually survive with a mouse as well but a brush is of course better. Don’t use too many brushes. Use a Smeary oil brush (no impasto I would think) and use it for almost all the painting. Painter has pretty complex settings for brushes and you can easily get lost. I did this image with only one brush (smeary oil in Painter 6 I think it was) and actually a mouse.

http://www.fusion-wave.com/digital/5/towers_complete.jpg

Pictures, pictures are important to get realistic results. Grab as many pictures as you can and piece them together so you have a big scrollable image with lots images with the sky, details on the ground, leaves, and mainly the characters.

First of create a color scetch. Paint with big brushes so you have all the colors in the right place.

One cheap way to begin with the character may be to use Poser as a starting point. Pose the chars so they look like you want and take a snapshot of it for reference.

One way to create images pretty easily is to have strong contrasts. Have dark areas in the foreground. Sharp rocks, tree branches etc. Then the characters in the middle with action going on and perhaps medium light sky with some light elements. Sun rays or lightning perhaps.

I would use a technique like that myself, but I normally don’t paint that much characters, mostly environments.
Good luck.

/Andreas

#12

Damn i LOVE that film!!

I think the best thing to do, is get a few rough idea’s down first, then try to keep improving on them. To a bit i think it could almost be a case of practice, practice, practice.

Have you got anything you can show at the moment?

#13

Get a hair dryer and some acrylic paint. You can duplicate the same effect with oils by thowing down thinned acrylic glazes and then hitting it with a hairdryer. I’ve done oil-like paintings in fraction of the time. At the end, hit it with a varnish to give it the “lively” vibrance you usually get from oils.

This might actually be faster than pencils.

peace,

Lu

#14

To get a piece anywhere close to Boris’s work you’re going to need models.

If it’s for a B horror movie set up a photoshoot with the actors in the movie and shoot your reference. This is extremely important. To fake this type of draftsmanship is almost impossible (especially if you only have three weeks).

For the finish, I would head to the bookstore or library and get a tutorial from THE SOURCE!

Buy Fantasy Art techniques by Boris Vallejo.

It’s a great book and also includes a step-by step of the National Lampoon’s Vacation movie poster you referenced. Amazon has a used copy available for $3.14

If you’re not familiar with oils I would use Painter to recreate the techniques he describes in the book. Hope that helps.

#15

Honestly, if I were you, I’d get someone to pose and just take a picture. If I were really pressed for time, I’d just do a rough trace over the picture and use the lighting in the picture as a guide for the lighting of the painting. People say tracing is cheating but phooey to that if you have to get the job done. That should give you extra time to spend on the painting process.

#16

Thank you all, i feel overwhelmed with the amount of tutorials you threw at me. Rebeccak, thanks for posting, I think that stahlberg tutorial may have hit the nail on the proverbial head. Also, good luck with your class. I may just end up taking one from you eventually.

Boris Vallejo, I knew I had seen that name somewhere, just couldn’t put the name to the artwork.

Really, thanks to everyone who posted suggestions, I will read through each and every one of those tutorials.

#17

smackbringer,

Thank you very much! :slight_smile: Best of luck with your work. :slight_smile:

Cheers,

~Rebeccak

#18

Will you be posting the WIP as you go?

I only mentioned the risk, because I have always taken them. I have rarely failed, but the risk is there. My first airbrush job was like that. I had no clue, but someone hired me. So I ran out and bought an airbrush and some 1shot enamel. I had one really bad screw up, but I called a pro at 11pm and he walked me through how to fix it.

smackbringer I am in Pasadena, but work in Millersville. Are you a fulltime freelance artist?

#19

Since you are pressed for time the best way I think to do this would be to start with models. Either get your friends to pose, hire models of get he people from the movie to do it. Take a lot of shots not 1 or 2 as you dont really know what you have until you look at them in onscreen. Next use photoshop to composit an image together out of the best parts of the shots. Then edit it in photoshop to get it exactly like you want. Then just use that as a base for a painting in Painter if you really want it to look painterly. And you can always blend the painted version with the originial to get details where you want them. Doing it this way will be by far the fastest and best I believe.

Oh and also the main things about working from photos is to go over ALL of the photo making the lines and detials look good. When you go from a model to a drawing then to the computer you naturaly make all the lines flow and edit the ones that distract etc. You will need to do this in photoshop. If not it will just look like a snapshot.

Oh and good luck.

#20

I’m not a full time freelance artist. I work in columbia, MD at the headquarters for a national sign franchise in IT. Since I’m not a pro artist, things like this tend to freak me out a bit but I take the jobs for the extra money and it also adds to my resume and helps push me out of my saftey box. This piece is definitely outside my comfort zone art wise. A little too much. I will absolutely be posting WIPs of this piece as I highly value the comments on this forum.

Sulla, I absolutely requested all the references I can get. The one girl is a russian bikini model and she’s been well documented. I just have to find a choice photo of her. :wink: The main character also happens to be the producer and a very cool guy. If I can’t get a good reference picture of him, I could always drive over and get a picture with my digital camera. He’s supposed to be calling me tomorrow about the reference pictures and the wacom.