school me on enviornment paintings....

[riceface]

i have no formal training, and would like to know how to go about learning environments...

besides learning perspectives. like do i just copy photos? and practice that way.. i know how to learn how to draw figures but enviornments seem like a different animal


like all the light and color,warm, cool, ambient, fades. atmosphere. when learning how to draw people u do life drawing.. what do u do with enviornments?

maybe tell me what school told u guys. cuz at this point im just guessing completely.

[Stephen Mason]

draw environments :) lol. go outside with a pencil and paper and try to draw a scene rather than just a person or a thing in particular. x

[dcorc]

Well, as you said, you need some knowledge of geometric perspective, as that's at the basis of giving you a sense of scale, and setting up general construction for buildings and so on.

If you need buildings, you need to know about their architectural styles and decoration, similarly for gardens, landscapes etc - so, time to go to the library/bookshop/net, and learn about architectural styles, architecture and town planning, bridge design, landscape gardening, physical geography of landscape, weather - cloud types, lighting effects (sunrise, sunset, daylight, nighttime/artificial, sunshine, overcast, misty/foggy, "god rays"), and so on - brainstorm for all the things in your scene - the more you know about them, and the more reference images you have, the better. Fantasy works best on a sound understanding of reality.

Also, what's the story you're trying to tell with your scene? Think like a film director or cinematographer (more reading there :) - and watch some movies, but do so looking at scene design, and how shots are set up).

Look at the work of matte-painters - for example:
www.dusso.com
www.goodbrush.com
www.matteworld.com

Get outside, go places - take a camera with you, or sketch, or paint - into the city, to the suburbs, to the countryside, to the coast, to other parts of the world.

As well as linear (geometric) perspective - you need to know about aerial perspective - basically, objects close by are most distinct, have greatest contrast - distant objects become less distinct, less contrasty, and typically show a hue/chroma shift towards blue-grey due to light-scatter in intervening atmosphere - google "Rayleigh scattering".

In sunlight, you typically have two light-sources - direct sunlight, which has a colour-temperature (google that, if you are not familiar) which is slightly biased towards yellow; and diffuse skylight (from Rayleigh scattering of shorter-wavelength light) which has a colour-temp which is bluer (and acts as blue fill-light in shadows cast by direct-sun illumination).

Check out the EOW (Environment of the Week) projects here:
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=82

Read some sci-fi, fantasy, or historical books (perhaps try to choose ones that haven't been filmed yet - or recently) - and put together environments for described scenes.

I'm sure there's lots more....


Dave

[SoufMeng]

If you really suck at it dont hope for an easy way to get better there isnt any.
Also in your head there is no exclusive folder for enviros and another one for figure drawing so strangely enough the skills needed to paint beautiful chicks are very likely to be needed to paint mountains and clouds...
From my experience with enviros, i think i know its all about light and how nature plays with the sun, atmosphere and clouds to come up with so many different color moods from january to december.
So yeah gather a lot of reference and study/copy it in an smart way, try to understand how stuff work.
Look at this pic (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Rabarber_stelen.jpg) for instance, what is interesting is that the leaves seen from under arent as dark as expected due to their transparency, they let a lot of green colored light pass through and are therefore a more saturated green than those seen from above. This is the kind of effect you can easily remember and reproduce from imagination later on.

This tutorial (http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/light.htm) helped me with lighting too.
Another thing that worked for me was to look at a lot of reference but also paintings from other artists, its good to see how others do it, where they painted the details and what part of the picture was left at the sketchy stage.
Composition too is important. Heres a link (http://www.wetcanvas.com/Articles2/135/120/) with lots of do's and dont's, some rules are worth reading but others are plain silly imo.

Last but not least, theres is no "besides learning perspective"!
You can draw characters without learning perspective and still get away with it but with environnements you wont.
When you draw a tree pretty far away, if you do it accurately enough it should be taller than any car or figure drawn at that same distance, otherwise the scale is off. For more on how to scale an image see Loomis' book called succesful drawing, it contains a very informative chapter on perspective.
Heres a lil attachment to illustrate what i said about scale, this seemingly self-evident principle has to apply to all elements of the finished image so a lot of training is necessary to eyeball it without scaling the image with perspective grids.

Oh and i agree with Stephen Mason, work from life, photographs can be wrong, they're often poor reference for skies for instance.

Hope that helps and good luck.

540913

Oops didnt see Dcorc's post, hope im not repeating.

[dcorc]

Oops didnt see Dorc's post, hope im not repeating.

We've cross-posted - saying similar things is good, anyway - it shows riceface, and others reading along, that there might be some truth to the advice being given, if it comes from several people independently.

(I'm dcorc, by the way - LOL :D )

Dave

[riceface]

wow thats alot to take in, almost too much, thanks

im not looking for an easy way out, just the right way to learn, and seems like all excellent advice.

[Max Challie]

I actually prefer environments over things like character design. Because, while characters and creatures look very cool, that's all. No matter how perfect the anatomy is, how tastefull the colour theory is, the content itself is fed to you. Environments allow more space for the mind; if you have a painting with a lot of depth, you can add something small in the distance, something that is not obvious, but a gesture. It allows me to wonder what that might be, yet someone else would imagine something different. Or, there could be nothing in the distance and you may still wonder what is beyond the horizon. So this is the beauty of environments; subjective mystery.

Another thing that stimulates my niche is taking any known environment and sticking a big-ass manmade structure in the middle of it. Especially a structure that integrates with the environment well.

Thierry Doizon/barontieri
541109

[kikindaface]

Hey dude, here is the environmentoring section, with nice assignments, and some great stuff : http://www.conceptart.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=140
Hope it will help you :)

And thanks SM for your links, they are really helpfull ! And I love the barontieri's stuff :):)

Another matte painter site : http://www.dylancolestudio.com/

[Max Challie]

Sparth also paints some beautiful environments, check out his stuff in the archive section of his site. :)

[Farvus]

i know how to learn how to draw figures but enviornments seem like a different animal

You can always try body-environments :P

541676

[SoufMeng]

Farvus reminded me of this article (http://www.zhaomingwu.com/pub/3ac07.jpg) on Zhaoming Wu (http://www.zhaomingwu.com/). Who is a brilliant landscape painter btw.

[Farvus]

S.M - That's nice article. I like the approach.

But seriously it's a bit what Max Challie mentioned. I don't feel like big authority when it comes to environments but this subject matter always felt more natural for me than characters or anything else. Propably the main drive for painting this stuff to me is limitless possibilities when searching for idea. There is no special framework that you need to stick to like anatomy or some mechanics. Some horizontal mark at first minutes might later become road sign, tree or maybe big tower. I like that it doesn't have to be so clearly defined beacause then every environment you start turns into one big surprise. At the same time I think limitless possibilities are exactly the thing that discourages people from starting this stuff.
Second thing that's really fascinating to me is those moments when during the process of defining light and adding details you almost "walk inside the image". It's like when you paint a tree in front of you and you can almost grab it or when you paint swampy ground and you can feel the humidity under your feet. The more you try to get into that feeling, the easier it is to figure out how to continue with painting.

I would suggest someone who's starting out to stay away from Photoshop for a while and try sketching some stuff with pencil or ink. Especially if you want to do environments with lots of perspective. Many people try to start with environments by doing speedpaintings but going straight into blocks of color requires more advanced skills. You need to think at the same time about composition, design, perspective, values, colors, textures, details and so on.

Going back to question: "when learning how to draw people u do life drawing.. what do u do with enviornments?". Maybe stay away from word "environment" beacause it can be basicly anything. Instead learn how to draw buildings, streets, mountains, trees, furniture, roads, sea and so on. They are everywhere if you look around. Building are always different but have some common set of proportions just like human faces. (It's what I've been told at architecture department :) ).

[Elwell]

Some good, cheap introductory books:
Drawing Scenery by Jack Hamm (http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Scenery-Landscapes-Jack-Hamm/dp/0399508066) (Old fashioned comics/advertising style art, but lots of good info, no color.)
Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting (http://www.amazon.com/Carlsons-Guide-Landscape-Painting-Carlson/dp/0844661023) (Lots of specifics on oil painting, but also extensive info and theory that applies across mediums.)
And of course you've got to know the mechanics of perspective if you're dealing with buildings/vehicles/etc.