Ginseng
February 18th, 2011, 04:16 PM
Hey Guys:
I have gotten couple PM in regards to environmental mentoring. I will be doing a weekly tutoring session with my students.
I figure I open up a thread to post all the study notes and material covered every session so everyone can learn and strive to become better together!
Yesterday I had the privilege to skype with the talented Sean McClain.
We covered the following materials.
1. Techniques in Photoshop
2. How to Apply Textures using Blend Option
3. Contrast and Depth.
4. Clarity of Shapes.
5. Lighting to Create Mood.
6. Composition and Focus
The class material we used was one of Sean's paintings. I did a paint-over while explaining my process, thoughts, and covered the above mentioned topics.
http://www.danielchou.com/tutoring/Excaliburfinal_edited-Dan3.jpg
Contrast and Depth:
Sean's image was lacking contrast and separation of foreground, midground, and background elements to create atmospheric depth.
By breaking down his painting into layers and by pushing the foreground forward with darker tone and pushing the background backward with grayer tones solved the problem.
I also used curves to adjust the image a bit to punch the light and dark.
Application of Textures:
Sean is pretty inspired by the works of Jaime Jones and Daniel Dociu.
I helped Sean identify area where Jaime and Docui use photographs to simulate textures, and demonstrated how this can be achieved through Blend Option in photoshop.
The bright god ray and clouds were photos and I used blend option to lay it into the scene. Blend option is a relatively unknown tool to most people out there.
I used to use color overlay or multiply for texturing, however those layer options can ruin the saturation of your image and sometimes give artifacts.
Blend option allows you to remove the light area, or dark area of a photo by simply drawing the control node along the dark->light bar.
It is almost impossible to explain without actually seeing someone use this. Which is why I will be creating a series of tutorings on youtube explaining these techniques later on.
Clarity of Shapes:
Sean's shapes tend to blend into one another. Here are a couple things I did to his painting to help separate his shapes.
- added lights behind the pride rock to help sell the silhouette.
- added an ocean surface to separate the sky and ground.
- selected the background spiky mountain with a lasso tool and pushed it back in depth with a light orange gray.
Focus and Storytelling:
Place focus on....
-the intersecting lines of the rule of thirds
-strongest contrast
-brightest area
-most saturated
-most detailed
-where the action / motion is.
Storytelling is kind of intuitive sometimes. I extended the cloak and added green grass and flowers on the pride rock because I felt that there needs to be this "majestic" feeling to it. The longer cloak gives the character a more dominating feeling, especially the red, it really punch out his presence.
-------------------------------------------------------------
I will be continuing to work with Sean on his understanding of shapes because painting is all about shapes against shapes, color against color.
Stay tune for next week's lesson, which I will drill the concept of shapes to Sean's mind.
-Daniel
I have gotten couple PM in regards to environmental mentoring. I will be doing a weekly tutoring session with my students.
I figure I open up a thread to post all the study notes and material covered every session so everyone can learn and strive to become better together!
Yesterday I had the privilege to skype with the talented Sean McClain.
We covered the following materials.
1. Techniques in Photoshop
2. How to Apply Textures using Blend Option
3. Contrast and Depth.
4. Clarity of Shapes.
5. Lighting to Create Mood.
6. Composition and Focus
The class material we used was one of Sean's paintings. I did a paint-over while explaining my process, thoughts, and covered the above mentioned topics.
http://www.danielchou.com/tutoring/Excaliburfinal_edited-Dan3.jpg
Contrast and Depth:
Sean's image was lacking contrast and separation of foreground, midground, and background elements to create atmospheric depth.
By breaking down his painting into layers and by pushing the foreground forward with darker tone and pushing the background backward with grayer tones solved the problem.
I also used curves to adjust the image a bit to punch the light and dark.
Application of Textures:
Sean is pretty inspired by the works of Jaime Jones and Daniel Dociu.
I helped Sean identify area where Jaime and Docui use photographs to simulate textures, and demonstrated how this can be achieved through Blend Option in photoshop.
The bright god ray and clouds were photos and I used blend option to lay it into the scene. Blend option is a relatively unknown tool to most people out there.
I used to use color overlay or multiply for texturing, however those layer options can ruin the saturation of your image and sometimes give artifacts.
Blend option allows you to remove the light area, or dark area of a photo by simply drawing the control node along the dark->light bar.
It is almost impossible to explain without actually seeing someone use this. Which is why I will be creating a series of tutorings on youtube explaining these techniques later on.
Clarity of Shapes:
Sean's shapes tend to blend into one another. Here are a couple things I did to his painting to help separate his shapes.
- added lights behind the pride rock to help sell the silhouette.
- added an ocean surface to separate the sky and ground.
- selected the background spiky mountain with a lasso tool and pushed it back in depth with a light orange gray.
Focus and Storytelling:
Place focus on....
-the intersecting lines of the rule of thirds
-strongest contrast
-brightest area
-most saturated
-most detailed
-where the action / motion is.
Storytelling is kind of intuitive sometimes. I extended the cloak and added green grass and flowers on the pride rock because I felt that there needs to be this "majestic" feeling to it. The longer cloak gives the character a more dominating feeling, especially the red, it really punch out his presence.
-------------------------------------------------------------
I will be continuing to work with Sean on his understanding of shapes because painting is all about shapes against shapes, color against color.
Stay tune for next week's lesson, which I will drill the concept of shapes to Sean's mind.
-Daniel