AuthorTopic: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2  (Read 811513 times)

Offline Atnas

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1470 on: August 13, 2011, 07:30:19 pm
The only problem I have with your work is that you always seem to misplace shiny anime eyes on top of grizzled veterans quite a bit. The colors are very nice in this, however! Very warm and earthy.

Offline 0xDB

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1471 on: August 13, 2011, 09:55:06 pm
inside out forest border, watercolor on printer paper, attempt one: epic fail



observations (some of them seem like no-brainers in hindsight):
* rendering back to front is a lot of unnecessary work (large areas get painted over three or more times)
* rendering back to front does not agree well with the paper (get's very soaked very fast)
* watercolors are only opaque when applied with an almost dry brush
* watercolors appear darker and more saturated directly after application
* sometimes it feels like a "good" combination of color clusters is more important than their individual shape
* painting without planning ahead results in muddy areas which are hard/impossible to fix
* cheap effects like "shinies" can not save poorly rendered flat shapes
* I can not wing perspective properly (should construct it carefully next time)
* crude brushes are crude and should be used for large color patches and not for details
* an even number of anything does not feel natural at all
* to make the forest appear dense there should be a third layer of trees in the front and the existing trees should be horizontally closer together and there should be bushes and fern-like plants below them
* to break up the monotony in the ground, some rocks and shrooms should be added and some twigs and leaves
* the sky should turn gradually brighter towards the horizon
* there should be some details (single trees, rocks) in the background to give a better sense of the endlessness and depth of the plains
* painting non-digitally is harder but feels more satisfying than dragging a plastic pen over a tablet
* brush strokes should be planned and executed one stroke at a time and they should follow the surface volume of the subject being painted
* the image in my head before applying any color at all to the paper is altered by the process of painting it and adapts to limitations in tools and skill
* the longer I stare at an area in the finished painting or even the whole one, the more I like it, even if at first it looked hopelessly poorly done (must force brain to not accept shit)

Offline Geti

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1472 on: August 14, 2011, 10:58:27 am
The only problem I have with your work is that you always seem to misplace shiny anime eyes on top of grizzled veterans quite a bit. The colors are very nice in this, however! Very warm and earthy.
Hahah, perhaps. Eyes are pretty shiny in my experience though, just perhaps a little less than I tend to portray them. Glad you like the colours, I was happy with them too :)

edit; oh yeah also


Lazy but pretty fun to put together.
« Last Edit: August 14, 2011, 11:49:34 am by Geti »

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1473 on: August 14, 2011, 07:04:19 pm
I'm starting to feel a tiny glimpse of a sense of control over the brushes and the colors. I've also noticed that mixing any of the watercolors with the opaque white not only makes it brighter but also opaque (yes, this reads like a no brainer too) which is how I managed to apply the lighter spots on the trees this time (in the previous image I tried to do that without opaque white just by placing layer over layer over layer of the same color which lead to some very uncontrolled color patches) and also for some of the grass.



I've also started to create a 16 color palette based on those watercolors I got (picture of them is here) with the intention of using it for some pixel art. The watercolors I got seem to be the standard 12 industry norm (DIN 5023:1989-02) colors used in basic art education classes in German schools plus opaque white.

« Last Edit: August 14, 2011, 09:17:30 pm by Dennis »

Offline Ai

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1474 on: August 15, 2011, 01:28:00 am
Dennis: Ever done Spectrum pixel-art? Cause your paintings *and* that palette remind me a lot of a less saturated, more painterly spectrum-ish style.
If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.

Offline leroy

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1475 on: August 15, 2011, 04:55:07 pm
I'm starting to feel a tiny glimpse of a sense of control over the brushes and the colors. I've also noticed that mixing any of the watercolors with the opaque white not only makes it brighter but also opaque (yes, this reads like a no brainer too) which is how I managed to apply the lighter spots on the trees this time (in the previous image I tried to do that without opaque white just by placing layer over layer over layer of the same color which lead to some very uncontrolled color patches) and also for some of the grass.

[img]http://www.dennisbusch.de/shared/2011_08_14_scan_resized.png[/img

I've also started to create a 16 color palette based on those watercolors I got (picture of them is here) with the intention of using it for some pixel art. The watercolors I got seem to be the standard 12 industry norm (DIN 5023:1989-02) colors used in basic art education classes in German schools plus opaque white.

[img]http://www.dennisbusch.de/shared/dbPalette.png[/img

Excuse my crudeness but these are fucking awesome! :) Makes me want to try it myself, would you mind taking a picture of the brushes you used? I can't remember the last time I did watercolor, probably art class in the eighth grade. Also what kind of paper would be ideal for watercolors?
« Last Edit: August 15, 2011, 04:59:37 pm by leroy »

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1476 on: August 15, 2011, 06:59:44 pm
Dennis: Ever done Spectrum pixel-art? Cause your paintings *and* that palette remind me a lot of a less saturated, more painterly spectrum-ish style.

No, I've never done any Spectrum art. Maybe the Spectrum engineers took inspiration from some standard paintbox as well.

Excuse my crudeness but these are fucking awesome! :) Makes me want to try it myself, would you mind taking a picture of the brushes you used? I can't remember the last time I did watercolor, probably art class in the eighth grade. Also what kind of paper would be ideal for watercolors?

Thank you for being so crude.  These are the color+brushes I used. In the top magnification are the ones used in the last painting. The ones in the bottom magnification I haven't used yet. They look like pretty standard brushes to me and they all came in a set of 15 brushes. All together I think I paid 7 Euros for the brushes and the colors. Those are my first watercolor paintings since probably 14 years ago. As for an ideal paper, you'd probably want "the heavier the better" because when it gets soaked with water it deforms a bit (gets all wavy and stops being perfectly flat). I'm currently using only standard plain office printer paper (80 g per square meter).

Offline Mathias

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1477 on: August 16, 2011, 04:46:43 am
OH yeah I'm lovin' those alien colors. Could you crank up the fantasy design feel to compliment the color theory?

In PS, try Image > Adjustments > Vibrance to boost the saturation of your scans, with two very intelligent sliders. Don't use Hue/Saturation.

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1478 on: August 17, 2011, 03:10:02 pm
OH yeah I'm lovin' those alien colors. Could you crank up the fantasy design feel to compliment the color theory?

In PS, try Image > Adjustments > Vibrance to boost the saturation of your scans, with two very intelligent sliders. Don't use Hue/Saturation.
It certainly would not hurt to try that in my next painting (making it more fantasy-ish). Unfortunately I can not afford Photoshop, so I can't try that vibrance thing.  The adjustments I made after scanning were done in PaintShopPro8 and XNview and I tried to make the image appear as close as possible to the real painting on a bright TFT screen by holding the painting next to the screen and playing around with contrast and brightness and some auto-correction features.

Meanwhile, I've been testing/adjusting the 16 color palette a bit.

Using the following arbitrary restrictions...



...I wasted way too many hours (progress gif) into this (which turned out quite boring which I think is mainly due to the perfectly vertical tree trunks):
And after that was done I tweaked some of the colors, so they'd look ok on this old CRT monitor here.



Offline Atnas

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Re: Official OT-Creativity Thread 2

Reply #1479 on: August 17, 2011, 07:41:11 pm
I REALLY liked the brown forground a lot more than this blue one. It changes the whole image to have such a warm and earthy color grounding the trees, and I quite liked it!

Why not use the blue for detailing the front trunks like in the painting? I'm enjoying your exploration of this whole subject, keep it up! c: