Originally by: Nova Fox

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Originally by: Irida Mershkov

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Edited by: Irida Mershkov on 12/10/2009 22:59:11
What tools do you use to paint and colour your work Nova? I do digital artwork and graphic design for my degree work but I've never quite got shading tones down, what techniques do you use?

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TBH I thought they would teach these sort of things in school, but i learned this methood from watching others mostly.

You start with a greyscale picture or generate an object thats defined by greyscale alone, if you cannot get a picture to look like the black and white of what your working on then you need to study light values some more I suggest taking photos from the web or video and convert to b&w and observe how things are highlighed and shaded.

Your next layer is textures (which i omitted im not good with those yet) and you overlay that down onto the picture so it bleed the texture though and appropiately applies the shade and lighitng from underneat on the new texture and basically inherits everything you want it to do.

Then you add the source light (the one light thats giving the object all of its shade and highlight) layer color which will be a solid and you illumonsity it or overlay it whatever looks fitting. So if its a fire it be red, sun typically white yellow or white blue or white ect ect.

Then you do a solid color paint over layer of what you want the final colors to look like and overlay once again. This will give you similar results to what I made causing all colors to be perfectly preshaded for you, if you hate the colors go back to normal on that layer and bucket it to a different shade until you get the right one.

You can then go a step further and merging a copy of those layers and do a multiply layer and screen layer and erase the areas on multiply for undesired shade and erase areas on the screen layer for places you dont want highlighted.

Localized lighting on the windows are done on three seperate layers, one source, one source glow which is a copy of the first layer with slight blue and screen or any other brigtening effect and one local illumination which is another copy erased, blured, pushed to conture the nearby shapes and refined to look fitting.

Another thing you can do to make it reflective is to take the background inverse it and reverse it and shrink and transform it down onto the and overlay and control transperancy until it looks just right.

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