After a crit session it was pointed out that my paintings are flat. The biggest problem I was doing was not using a light enough brush on the lighted areas and also putting light in wrong places, these combined created a less realitic picture than lost its 3D appearance. This causes a flat look. I have greatly improved in my paintings through advice and new techniques. One good thing is to use a light grey as a starting background instead of white, having a light grey means you can create very bright highlights on your paintingsa and they stand out from the background popping your focus onto the main parts. I will post variations of these paintings later with the rest of my paintings so you can see the difference between my original flat paintings and my progression.
Horse Research
27 MayObviously when you feature a war between to armies that are expert horsemen, there is gunna be horses to draw. If I can I want to take the focus away from the horses as much as possible by adding detail to the characters and less to the horses but we shall see when I come to draw them. Horses have lots of material online for drawing tips and while they are noit easy to draw there are simple shapes that I can use to roughly measure them. A problem I am having mainly is the neck length. Eadweard Muybridge is a photogrpaher and his photos with the page of various running and jumping motions for horses have been very useful.
Development and Drafting Techniques
27 MayThis book I really loved, it is called the Skillful Huntsmam. It is a book based on the designing of an old book, by 3 brilliant students and a more experianced artist who judges thier journey of art throughout the book. The artists are Khang Le, Mike Yamada, Felix Yoon and finally Scoot Robertson. The techniques are very nice to see and I wish with this project I had taken thier approach with ym art as I feel I jumped into too much detail too soon. They start with lots of sillouttes and line drawings and establish form, composition and a bit of lighting. Here are some shots, there is some very nice art in here but I thought I would stick with the sillouttes as this is a process I will test further in the future.
Shot Composition and Transitions
27 MayTaken from the book “Dream Worlds” by Hans Bacher, it gives some useful tips on composing a shot and ways to make the scene more exciting. Although it is primarily for film there are many aspects that also translate into illustration and concept art. There has been a few times where I have flipped my canvas only to see it is an unblanced composition. By sticking to the fundamentals in this book you can help avoid that. I also found he laid it out very simply and did not rable on with complicated words or diagrams. I have taken a few shots of what I found to be some of the more important bits for myself.
300 slow motion and still shots
27 MayThis clip from the film 300 is actually a great find, most 2.5D animatics have a sort of slow motion effect to them much as this clip does when people are inpaled etc. Also its a great source for looking at shot compositions.
Mongol Clip
27 MayEarly I had taken screenshots of a film called “mongol”, here is a good clip to watch although I actually watched the whole film this is probably the most influencial bit for me. While it is not in design with my story it is interesting to see how they have shown a Mongol vs Mongol battle. The battle I actually am depicting is Mongols vs Tartars which are a diffrent line of breeding to the actual Mongols(however they are all tribesmen and similar in alot of ways).
Feedback
27 May
The great thing about being surrounded by people who are doing the same thing as you is that you can get good feedback from everyone, and while sometimes the truth can hurt it has improved my drawings numerous times throughout this project.
Here are some screenshots of conversations recorded on Facebook; a lot of my advice is given in class and especially as I work close with Jake Neal who is great at form, composition and lighting I have had tons of advice and I think it shows.
Rough Paintings
27 MayI started with painting out simple forms of the charcters and the poses. I tried to convey the idea of each scene and the animation that it will be including. If I were to do this again I would have done even simpler drawings of about 10-15mins and just blocking out solid blacks and whites to get the compositions right. By spending probably too much time on these early concepts I felt I had to stick with them. However some were changed later on. Some of the intial concepts were not clear to say someone else or a client. My work in the future needs to be much more precise in whats being told as I won’t be working for myself in the future.
Resource Images
27 MayBelow are some screenshots taken from the film “Mongol”. This film has quite an interesting view on the life of Temujin (Ghenghis) however it strays quite far from the source book I am using. Due to my final peice being a cinematic I was looking at shots and composition to help me decide on my own shots. This was also very good to look at references of movement and position of horse riders and of course horses themselves.
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