eow 144: The Coastline of Bohemia:Technique challenge:

[chaosrocks]

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e181/chaosrocks/EOW2.jpg

EOW 144: The Coastline of Bohemia:Technique challenge:

The Title is a quote From shakespeare, Bohemia has no coastline, so any coastline COULD be it.

The challenge here is the resulting image must be monochromatic
one color, you can use a complete value range from black to white, through One color. images using more than one color will be eliminated.


DUE June 15th 2010
Go!!

NO description required, say what you need to say visually. the words are already there.


:right: FOLLOW THE TOPIC.

:right: POST YOUR FINAL HERE THREAD.


:right: SAVE YOUR FILES IN THE FOLLOWING FORMAT. EOW##_Nickname
example: "EOW#100_Chaosrocks.jpg" ;)

:right: PLACE THE IMAGE IN A FRAME WITH YOUR NAME/TOPIC

example from CHOW

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i222/ChowPics/frame.jpg
(you can add CA logo, etc).

Add an icon to you final post
150 pixels either direction
PLEASE OUTSIDE HOST THE ICON
k thxAn outside host means exactly that - an image host that's not Conceptart.org. Instead of adding the thumbnail with the attachment manager you have to host it on another site (your private domain, photobucket, (both recommended) or imageshack for instance).
The full image gets added with the attachment manager, however.

After you uploaded the thumbnail somewhere, you simply add the around it and you're done

[NickTrip]

Helllo, I'm considering participating in this round, but I'm a little confused about the topic (of course). I looked up the idea of Shakespeare's Bohemian Coastline, but all I got was Shakespeare not knowing his geography. Are you looking for a piece that follows a specific idea or any old piece of a coastline?

thanks!

[SunRoamer]

"The Title is a quote From shakespeare, Bohemia has no coastline, so any coastline COULD be it."

As I understand it, any coastline will suffice... doesn't even need to actually exist//could even depict a fantasy/sci-fi/surreal landscape^^

[chaosrocks]

yep.. the point is in the technique... make a coastline that is compelling, with only one color.

[Ragnj]

I usually only use b&w since I do graphite, that is ok if I understand correctly crx?

Maybe Ill eff it up with some colour in ps tho.

[NickTrip]

Ragnj - That's pretty cool. I've been doing digitally colored charcoal drawings for these challenges.

[android411]

cool topic,

so here is my try, I double checked my hues with the color picker, I think it should be monochromatic. Tried to work out a clearer focal point this time...

[android411]

worked on it a bit more

[chaosrocks]

Android411 are you working in PS?
go to adjust and look at your value scale... seems skewed dark to me. It seems like you are lacking in a certiain subtlety in the midranges.... there's a lot more levels you could pull out of this. in a challenge like this value and composition are everything.

if i may be blunt about your composition. it is a circle in a rectangle, centered . because of the visual competition between the light dark contrast of the person on the balcony and the light doorway in the center, the eye doesn't really know where to go. and the rays of light in the upper left lead the eye off the page rather than towards any focal point.
honestly I'm not sure what the focal point is.

[chaosrocks]

Ragnj=- absolutely..you have an edge sinceyou're used to it

[SunRoamer]

This is so _not_ what I'll work on for the competition. Just wanted to test some brushes and think of some kind of scenery I could possibly depict...

@Chaos:
As a friendly reminder, is it intentional that there's no poll for the last EOW yet? :)

[Katanasoul]

Hey everyone! :D

I´m not into environments that much, in fact this is my first try. I don´t really get it the way I want it, if anyone can help me with telling me what exactly sucks, I´d appreciate that.

@android411: Cool! I like that door a lot. Still I think that the composition could be worked out a little more. Did you try to work with the golden rule already?

@SunRoamer: That´s nice, I don´t see why you don´t want to use it. I like it, it´s so soft. :)

[Limewax]

@android411 The part that loses me right now is the "moon" (I assume) in the background. I dont know if it needs further definition or if it needs to be less "up in your face", but something about that moon, and the whole background, irks me at the moment -- it makes me lose the submersion that your piece is capable of.

@katanasoul, it ALMOST seems like you're using more than one color, but I think you are starting to do it the proper way... using white and black as colors as opposed to shaders and highlights... for a first attempt at landscapes, this is excellent practice work. I love the "painterly" open-brushstroke style you have going on. It almost looks like theres a humanoid figure standing on that midground jetty. I think adding a figure or something for scale may help out the viewer a lot... either a figure in the foreground or continuing that one in the midground should nail it.


As for my attempt:
http://i628.photobucket.com/albums/uu10/bryanrshannon/BohemiaasAtlantis.jpg

I am doing "Bohemia as Atlantis"... In this theme I am trying to incorporate a massive technologically advanced civilization that has learned to adapt to the impending world flood (think of Waterworld... old movie, I know). The entire underwater city is self sufficient, such that going to the surface is not necessary, but purely luxury. Scene is painted in midday.

I am going to be adding a few "ships" (futuristic submarines) for scale, maybe a drilling rig (lol@oil spill), horticulture stations...

[JGoodliff]

Started this piece with watercolour, thought it might lend a more romantic feel
developed further in PS

more to do, thinking birds etc.

[mpaquin]

one color coastline.

[merl1n]

Hey guys,
I'm living in Bohemia.
And I'd suggest to do some research because obviously none of you got even close to what the central european environment looks like.

Type this "machovo jezero" into the google picture search engine and see what a typical czech lake looks like.

What a nice topic by the way! :)

[JSpayde]

Here's my initial idea

[TSonline]

Hey guys,
I'm living in Bohemia.
And I'd suggest to do some research because obviously none of you got even close to what the central european environment looks like.

Type this "machovo jezero" into the google picture search engine and see what a typical czech lake looks like.

What a nice topic by the way! :)

i think the point is that bohemia doesn't have a coastline since "the region is landlocked". means you can come up with any kind of coastline, anything will do.

[chaosrocks]

katanasoul goodlif and mpaquin, that looks like more than one color.

merl1n yes ,...did you actually read the brief? the reference is from "a winter's tale" Coast line implies ocean, Although if you do want to do the actual Bohemia that would be cool too.

Apparently there was a moment in history when Bohemia did have a coastline.
t has often been said that no one who had visited Bohemia would ever have written The Winter’s Tale with its well-known reference to the coast of that country. Our received knowledge nowadays is that Bohemia was the old name for the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and that it was and is a land-locked area. However, there was a time when the kingdom of Bohemia stretched as far as the shores of the Adriatic. What’s more, the documented life of the King of Bohemia who reigned during this expansion of his empire ran a course strangely parallel to that of Polixenes, the Bohemian King in Shakespeare’s play.

Ottakar II (the Bohemian King in question) reigned over Bohemia from 1230 – 1278. These were troubled years for the Holy Roman Empire, and Ottakar took advantage of this to forward the expansion of his own kingdom. After conquering the then large country of Hungary, his empire encompassed the Adriatic, so that Bohemia at last had a coast. But the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph Habsburg, decided to fight back. After half a lifetime of struggling between the two, however, Wenceslaus (Ottakar’s son) was betrothed to Rudolph I’s daughter. If Ottakar is reflected in the character of Polixenes (King of Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale), then Rudolph may well be represented by Leontes, the lion-hearted king of Sicily, who spends a half a lifetime misjudging the King of Bohemia but then finally allows his daughter to marry Polixenes’ son.

on the other hand, as fascinating as this all is, it isn't the point of the challenge.

[mpaquin]

I used the color picker in Photoshop to check, click, hold down and scan over the image and there was a slight vibration in the hue, but nothing too dramatic. Just to be sure, I flattened it, and ran hue/saturation, colorize, so that it would definitely limit it to one color. Again, I checked with the color picker and there was still a slight vibration in the hue, albeit the difference was a little less than the original version.

So in the spirit of the challenge, and to avoid any further conflicts, I made a color picker gradient mesh swatch in illustrator, copied and pasted into a Photoshop doc and will only pick colors from there. Next comp to follow.

[Snafu]

So far, gettin' there (:

[dVargas]

fun topic! here is a quickie from me

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_XzC0t-Ivqyo/TBGrazQdehI/AAAAAAAAAV0/roH3FN0ggBw/eow_144_dv_copy.jpg

:d

[mpaquin]

Definitely one color.

[JGoodliff]

Thanks chaosrocks

I checked it out and I had a layer above my colour layer with some effects,
I've merged/moved things around

all work below the colour layer is BW

good?

[JSpayde]

An updated version.

[JanJager]

Great work so far everybody.

[Jon Gibbons]

Interesting Challenge,
I'm leaning towards a futuristic image.
The Industrial Planet of New Bohemia, orbiting a massive and dying star (which will dictate my colour)
some WIPS

[merl1n]

Chaosrocks: Gah, my bad. I somewhat missed the sentence saying "any coastline COULD be it". You are right, there were times when Bohemia had actual coastline.

Anyway, I didn't mean to be rude to guys, I would just be so happy to see some czech environment made by someone from outside. It is always so fascinating how the same scenery can be done absolutely differently by a guy who sees it exotigue and a guy who sees it every day. Hope you get my point :)

[JSpayde]

Can someone tell me what's the proper etiquette for posting WIP updates on here? Which is better, in the original post or in a new post?

[mpaquin]

I've hit the wall on this.

[Ragnj]

So many beutiful pictures so far.

Im doin some sort of clif city/lighthouse, gona try scan a wip tonight.

EDIT: Heres a wip, hopefully far from finished, but Im in a moving process atm so you never know.

[Nhil]

998064

[Incinerated]

hey peeps nice entries :) thought I'd give a try myself :P

998150

[android411]

thanks for the feedback guys, really appreciate the crits, changed my image but tried something different, hope I can work on it a bit more...

great entries so far

[SunRoamer]

More of a cloud- than a landscape...

[chaosrocks]

mpaquin- your cliff is very regular unlike real cliffs which have fault line and variations in a horizinal and oblique direction as well as vertically. you might want to refer to some actuall cliffs, I reccommend Dover or Etretat for possible reference.

dVargas you are getting ome optical lift on the waterportion of your picture.. as the perspective is just enough skewed thatat it makes your ocean look like it's going up hill. and your composition is very heavy on the right side.

jSpayde. moind the composition in the upper corneres... they don't loook intentional
one is empty and on is cut off by the tower

Jon -- lookin good mind the tangents the point of the crane like object is just touching the edge of the sun.... makes the sun look like it's the same distance away as the crane. flattening your space.

sorry if this feels like a drive by shooting, but that's all the time I have... these are looking great , I feel like you are definately rising to the challenge

[mpaquin]

Thanks Chaos. Cliff textures are a pain!

[chaosrocks]

indeed, and you are falling into the trap of regularity horizontally rather thatn vertically ... making them look like intestines

look
http://www.wergerprint.com/
(yes this is my exhusband;s work.... I may not be married to him any more but damn he's a freaking genius

[mpaquin]

This was the reference I was working from originally. I really liked the rhythm of the vertical lines. At the moment I'm really liking the newer texture though. Your exhusband's work is pretty cool. We'll see...

[chaosrocks]

have you noticed that the horzontal ish elements actually fall into diagonal breaks of dark and light?

[JoshDArtist]

just wanted to share what I have so far, will fix alot of it before final :)

[mpaquin]

This feels weird. Definitely out of my comfort zone, which is a good thing I suppose.

[OYO!]

Hey guys,

Here is my entry.

Very interesting exercise. Though I encountered the same problem talked about in an earlier post, even with always the same color set in the sliders, once using the color picker afterward, the color changed slightly, though not too much so I hope its ok. Overall its still the same color used with full range of saturation and values.

http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/3374/shorebohemiaicon.jpg

hope you like it ! Good work everyone !

[JanJager]

OYO
Beautiful picture
mpaquin
I like the picture. I have a hard time painting rocks. What abut doing the basic shapes and after that go into more details. Perhaps you can dampen the tow rocks in the background to get the more in the distans.
JoshDArtist
Good
I like the figures in the corner. That suddenly turns up when you look at the picture.
SunRoamer
Beautiful
android411
Nice
Good picture. Perhaps work a bit more in the light focal point to get little more shapes in the building.
Incinerated
Great.
Nhil
Nice. Perhaps defining the edge between the water and land a bit.
Ragnj
I like the design. Kind of almost organic cliff.By the way thanks for the advise about the Camelus Aquas. Unfortunately I had to go away for some bred and butter work. So I could not thank or finish.
JSpayde
Very dramatic landscape looking forward to see more.
JGoodliff
Good picture. And very interesting technique with the layers.
dVargas
Beautiful. I think chaosrocks had some good points in improving it.
Snafu
Great start
Limewax
Nice picture
Perhaps try to get the water look more like a flat surface. Maybe some relections from the buildings in the water or shadows.
Katanasoul
I like the figure. The dark place in the valley rely catch the eye. Perhaps render it out more maybe dampen it. Its almost as strong as the foreground.

Here is my wip
Dot rely know were to go wit it.

[Gemsie]

Hey guys, here's my first draft.

[SunRoamer]

http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/3548/iconm.jpg

[Limewax]

I had too much fun with this one... should be illegal :D

http://i628.photobucket.com/albums/uu10/bryanrshannon/BohemiaasAtlantis_final_ico.jpg

[Incinerated]

oyo: Brilliantly done, not sure thats monocrome tho, seems to be more than one value range.
JanJager: Perhaps you should expand your value range abit, the coast part doesn't read well
SunRoamer: Love the dreamy feel it has, but the focus seems to be the sky, not the coast.
Gemsie: Looks interesting cant wait to see what you're gonna do with that.
limewax: Very underwatery :)
mpaquin: Attack that picture, make those cliffs work, I command you!
android414: what Jan said :)
JoshDArtist: looks stormy, seems like a good start.
nhil im looking forward to seeing this, I advise doing a sunset, will work with the color range
dVargas: your composition is very heavy on one side. you could add some ships/seastuff/birds to balance it off.
Jib Gibbons: think coast ;), planets and stars are great, but you have to relate to the subject somehow, bohemic architechture maybe?
Snafu: that looks like it has potential.
jspayde: keep working on that!

sorry if I forgot some one :)

reworked the composition abit
998895

http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/273/eowincinerated144thumb.jpg

[Gemsie]

Just a quick update; played with the composition a bit. I'll participate in the commenting later this evening! Have to go and do my sports...

[chaosrocks]

josh and OYO... that's duotone....

[JanJager]

Thanks for the crit. expanded the value range and added some more stuff

[chaosrocks]

Jan ---bold moves with the sliders shows of the wonderful composition better

[Ragnj]

Really nice pic Jan, but its hard for me atm to see where the coastline is really at. Maybe make the bridge go straight into the city and between the pillars make a clearer coastline (altho that would take away some from the nice shape of the bridge, maybe it can sicksack anyways for estethic value?). I like the urban style you chose.

[JSpayde]

Trying to push this as far as I can. Good work by everyone so far.

[Ragnj]

Day and night version. Will have to clean up the night version if I chose it but Im more satified with the day version, any crits on that (and other stuff ofc)?

[mpaquin]

I went to yoga today, closed my eyes, and all I could see was cliff faces.

I'm definitely happier with this. I'll go back and tweak the waves a bit, but I'm running out of gas on this one.

[OYO!]

Chaosrocks : like i said, it's PS failure. Here is the palette i kept using, check it yourself it's only one tone... Though once you use the color picker, PS give you different tones... I don't know why but I don't have more time to rework it sorry. I can give you a b&w one if you want... :)

[tsujni]

entry

[tsujni]

Chaosrocks : like i said, it's PS failure. Here is the palette i kept using, check it yourself it's only one tone... Though once you use the color picker, PS give you different tones... I don't know why but I don't have more time to rework it sorry. I can give you a b&w one if you want... :)

OYO!, you can convert to grayscale, select duotone, select monotone from the drop down and then replace black with whatever color is in those color swatches ( Panatone, etc ). I limited your palette in a matter of seconds.

[pokepetter]

I'd say OYO's entry is definitely monochromatic. Even the edits by tsujni flutters just as much in hue.

As a matter of fact, every entry with color so far have really small changes in hue. I don't think they're possible to get rid of, especially in the darker regions of the picture. It seems like OYO's using contrasts in saturation to make the illusion of more than one color.

For example, this makes three colors look like four:

http://www.colormatters.com/images/ct-3-4.gif


Anyway, I've tried to limit my hues as much as I could and it should stay between 30-32 on the hue slider.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl%C5%A1tejn

[NilTrace]

Great job all..

[Gemsie]

I think what Chaos means is when you were to make for example a silkscreen print of the image, you should only need 1 color in ink, lets say pink. With this one color you can of course make different tones, but you can not make black or grey areas (as in really low saturated pinks) with just the pink ink. You will need to use a second ink that is black or grey. (This is where the term duotone comes from.)

What happens in OYO's image is that both saturated areas and (much) less saturated areas are used and, like Pokepeter said, the less saturated areas will tend to look like the complementary color. So while in photoshop it might look like you only used 1 hue in variations of saturation, in the world of silkscreen prints you actually need 2 colors for this.

I guess the question now is do we use the photoshop "monochome" or the silkscreen monochroom?

[Incinerated]

Pokepetter- try usinger the HSB sliders "S" is saturation "H" is hue, "b"-brightness, seriously if your piece is varying to much in eighter "S" or "H" you simply cannot claim your entry is monocrome. I'd also like to point out that you had the chance just doing it in BW.
it really shouldn't vary way more than 1-3%. sorry if this feels like an attack it certainly wasn't meant that way.

[chaosrocks]

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?p=2775868#post2775868

final burning posted

[chaosrocks]

nicely done, and I'll let OYOs go , it's quite beautiful and he/she totally got the idea of working within the limited pallet to create light and a full range of depth, which was ,in fact, the point.

[OYO!]

Thank Pokepetter for the technical explanation. I was planning to write one but you beat me to it :) Yes the use of saturation and brightness can create illusion of the use of other color. This is the beauty of color, magic greys, etc. Master painter always say most masterpieces have been painted mostly with max 3 colors. One already gives you so much possibility...and trouble. This exercise can get quite tricky but the good thing i find is that the color harmony is immediate, giving a pleasant feel right from the beginning. I will try it more often... Thanks Chaosrocks for your final decision.

[artiphats]

threw a few ideas down, I'm sick these last couple days but I'll try and pick one to speedpaint over by tonight. Should be good fun to see how much I can rework an image in just a couple hours.

Any comments on these unfinished thumbs are welcome !