this is a running dialogue on why i have such a hard time with photo refs.

So, over the last three days i came home and put a couple of hours into a sketch that started as a guniea pig for something i haven't done before. Basically I've seen a lot of artists on Deviantart ( Adam Hughes, Genzoman, Janaschi, Jdillion, et. al) doing this thing where they color in the base picture using grey-scale, then develop color on top of it. As much as I hated charcoal in college, subtractive drawings were something I really enjoyed (and was at least passingly mediocre at), and seeing the sorts of results that these guys are getting this this stance i was like "boo-yah! lets give this a go in the ole' painter/photoshop lab."

The first problem (of a string of problems through all of this) is that most of the stuff the tutorials are based largely in seem to be in photoshop, or at least start in photoshop. Between you and me, photoshop is no longer the first digital app i go to to color. it used to be the primary thing I used (i was admittedly scared to death of painter), but now I use it for text, layout, special effects, color tweeking... basically fine-detail editing that I'm not as comfortable with in painter.

The second problem is that I have 'directions ADHD.' I'll read tutorial directions once and then I'm like "you got served, sucka!"... only that's not the case at all and it usually ends with me in my bathtub listening to REM's everybody hurts on a loop while I cry into (and then eat) chunky monkey out of one of those mini plastic baseball hats.* This is also why its so hard for me to use photoshop because there is a lot of extra blending you have to do with the brushes since thier pressure sensitivity + blending capabilities are not near as fine tuned as painters. The oil paints in painter make it much easier and faster. On top of that, photo refs. It usually takes me a lot longer to try and copy something from a picture than it takes for me to just pull it out of my ass. less believable by a huge margin, but much quicker! The theme for this all is: impatience is a fickle bitch*. on meth.

So lets walk through the disaster.


Unassuming little drawing. nothing major, sort of a mental-stock pose. (I have got to knock that off.) I didn't know really where to have him going about. My thoughts were Durotar since he's still a lowbie, but then I was like the Barrens since its got a little more scenery.

I figured I'd work on the figure subtractively, but I found it to be really hard. One, I don't think my contrast was high enough for the greyscale I was using. Two, when I'm working subtractively Its always been in the final hue its going to appear as: if its greyscale, im working in greyscale from start to finish -- if its in color, it starts and ends in color. This was a tricky critter because I was trying really hard to match the shade levels to what they would be if I was working in color but my image had just been turned to greyscale mode, and for the life of me it was like my brain just could not function like that. What I should have done was just treated it like it was going to be a greyscale digital painting instead of a line drawing with shading in it. I don't feel like even in the final picture it really 'worked' like I would've liked it to.

By the time I got to the end mark it basically came down to this: impatience. for something that I was just trying out for a test run I didn't like how it looked so far. The areas that were supposed to be dulled by the throwing-basket over his head casting shadow below him looked all off. I spent a decent amount of time trying to work the gradations out and it still looked just really amateur. None of the shadows really were believable, the highlights were too high where there was dark and too low where there was light. I figured maybe doing the next step would fix it.

(1.) is what happened when I put color on the image (multiply over the bottom layers) and did a color-wash layer below the color layer but right above the greyscale, just to bleed a little color into some of the shadows. This is where I stopped last night. This is where I threw up my hands last night and went to bed in a very bad mood. It did NOT look like the tutorial ones listed above.

I later found out that it was a combination of things that went to making it look like a disaster. I was only putting color in the interior part of the figures lines, and the color-wash layer (set to color) probably should have been set to either Overlay>50-70% or Hard Light>30-50%. Otherwise, they still came out with a lot of gray and not very impressive.



I came back to it today after work, which starts around (2.). I think for this time all I could think about is "I have got to save this image from myself", like a lemons-into-lemonade sort of thing. So I took it out of photoshop and back into painter (my safe zone!) to futz around with the colors and add in details. Because the change between (1.) and (2.) was changing it from .psd to .riff (and my painter app has ALWAYS been buggy...), it flattened the image, so there are no layers. Its just painting on the picture and hoping for the best from (2.) onward.

By the time I got a sense of the picture again in (3.), I didn't like the background. Too much green, and too much 'swiss-alps-postcard' type feeling which isn't what I wanted. I wanted tired. I wanted hot. Blue + green does not convey exhaustion, it conveys a dip in the pool. So i tweeked the colors.

Mleh, still no good. I think by then I was like "really, the Barrens doesn't have more scenery than Durotar. it has more zebras." ...

...and generally, zebras are not something you can throw into a picture for ambiance unless you are doing a photo shoot in Zaire. Or you are a current resident of Wakanda*.

So (4.) out goes the background. Painted a new one that looks a little more desert-ish, and really the tree can stay just where it is because Durotar does have leafy trees. and it adds as a element to put a little bit more dimension against wherever Uli'jin is walking to. Also added in just a bit more detail around the figure and the basket. (5.) was minor color tweaking in some areas, trying to put in one or two smaller subtle reflected/ambient light sources just to keep the figure from getting too stale.

I still didn't feel like it was hot enough. I went back to photoshop for (6.). The picture needed some pushing on the shadows under the throw-basket and adding in some faux sunlight. there's some birds in the background too, just so that it moves the eye up into that dead region a little bit instead of having this big spot of open, dusty sky. The only thing that really isn't shown in (6.) is that I pushed the yellows of the image in the final one and did a quick dodge-tool blip in the general area of the light so that it looked a little more like a sun poking through the leaves as opposed to some disembodied yellow mist attacking him.

Ugh. I will give working in B&W first a few things. It makes you concentrate a lot harder on contrast, which is another area where I certainly don't excel. (I almost got beaten with a ruler in a figure drawing course for that problem.) Being afraid of contrast is okay if you're doing hallmark cards or light fluffy-bunny-kitty-pony illustrations (or alternatively, shoujo manga). However, its really hard to gauge grávitas and weight, to put a depth and an immediacy to an image that would make more of an emotional statement if it had maybe some quick passes over it to pop the lights and darks. It makes you sort of think more about what colors your going to be using, especially when it comes to their shade and how that's going to effect your coloring if hue/saturation weren't on the plate. However, I'm not really feeling this -- not because it cant produce really pretty, gorgeous, out-of-my-league images (*point to the links in the first paragraph) -- simply because right now its a little out of my comfort level. I have years more of color and form theory to learn and digest before I think I'll be anywhere near that.

hope that helped anyone who stumbled onto this!

* +25 achievement points for those who wasted time on that visual.
* Don't make the biggest mistake that I always do. Art is not quick or easy, and I am a very 'instant results' impatient person. It is quite hindering.
* +25 acheivement points for being a filthy comic-book nerd.