Of Mice and Monks

Folks have been asking about my process lately, which in some ways I gather is different from many other painters.

This is a pretty simple image I did for Maurice's Valises: The Muuha of Bang Bua:

DRAWING
I start with a really simple rough, but only do the bare minimum needed to give me a guide for painting.

As usual my rough sketch is pathetically simple

Lately I have been developing preliminary drawings a bit more

VALUE
The critical parts of an image like this are the value and color plans.  I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH. If this work looks really solid and polished it's not because I spend a lot of time polishing - it's because I set up the basic value relationships via careful observation and adjustment.

Lately I've been setting up my images in value first, then adding color, then painting.

I do all this preliminary value work on a single layer with a big soft brush, because it needs to be very direct and spontaneous.

The basic value layout shown under the sketch

And without the sketch - if your image falls apart without the

drawing, you are likely not hitting a home run with your value relationships.

The second image (without the drawing) is the one I am really looking at.  It already has an almost photographic quality, a certain kind of poetry of authenticity and tangibility, despite having no detail whatsoever and certainly not based in any way on a photo or real scene.

Observe how it appears more finished the smaller it gets (this is a combination of the two, with the drawing being preserved for accents in a few spots such as the eyes):

The smaller it gets, the better it looks

CONTRAST
Contrast is typically fundamental for creating focus in a 2d picture, but NOT for creating the illusion of light.  I cannot stress that enough either - the illusion of light comes from value relationships in perfect harmony - which is often undermined by extreme contrast.

You don't need high contrast or even a very wide value range to create the illusion of light (if that were the case it'd be impossible to do this in a picture, since pictures have a very narrow range of value compared to the real world).

COLOR
If I could only say one thing about color it'd be this: color is relative.  We simply cannot judge colors in isolation.  The same is true of value.  

Color organization systems and other devices (such as color wheels) are necessary for industrial purposes, but for painters these only provide illusory comfort, typically serving merely to mislead and undermine your ability to see - to see what is actually happening right in front of your eyes in that unique one of a kind painting you are working on - which is all that matters.

Initial color plan

Working digitally it's a lot easier to adjust values and colors in context.  When oil painting I am constantly painting little swatches of paper and holding them up to the canvas. With digital work I can lay down any color and adjust it, then use that to paint.


PAINTING
With such a solid foundation nothing can go wrong now!  It's just a matter of continuing to subdivide the image into smaller and smaller value/color shapes.

Beginning to paint

 Developing the forms

I flip back and forth between painting detail, working out forms like the drapery, then doing bigger adjustments to realign what I've painted with the larger value and color shapes as necessary.  This is unique to digital painting (for me at least) because with digital work I can't paint everything when zoomed out. I need to do some detail work zoomed in, which unfortunately means I can't see the whole image at the same time (Photoshop's navigator panel helps, but its interpolation is somewhat coarse).

The finished painting!

Cooking Up an Organized Mess

With a lot of pictures you don't need (or want) to have detail all over the place.  This can kill the focus, the epicness of the design... but for some pictures you need to have a lot of stuff at a pretty developed level of rendering.

There was a time not so long ago that putting together a picture like this would have been really daunting for me. If that's true for you now, take heart!  Onward!!!  A lot of it is learning to go back and forth between the small stuff and the big stuff.  The details and the design, so to speak.

PREPARATION
As usual I didn't start this painting with a very detailed drawing.  For ideas I looked at lots of different kitchens, historical and modern.

Here's the initial rough:

I scan that and clean it up in Photoshop:

I don't like having to draw something all nice and clean and detailed, and then also paint it afterward. I like to just have an idea of what I am going to paint, then paint it directly.  Also once I start dealing with value and color I find that compositional issues change, and new opportunities emerge.  With digital media I don't need to do separate composition and value studies.  I decide the basics of what I want to do, then set up my image specifically in a way that allows me to work these issues directly in the final picture, and create the final forms directly in the "paint" vs. with line.  But I have to set up my image such that I can control and manipulate the different pieces as I go, which basically means putting them on different layers.

LAYERS

As far as organizing your layers, you really need to find what works for you.  Don't assume what works for me or your favorite artist will work for you.  Having every single element on its own layer theoretically would make a lot of the painting process easier BUT for me it totally kills the spontaneity, which is absolutely critical for achieving creative flow, getting in the groove... you notice something, you go there and paint it. Fumbling through a huge layer stack is a drag!!!

So I group things into a few color coded layers. Using the lasso select tool I quickly trace each object, then fill with solid gray on a separate layer for each set of objects.  I color the layer itself in the Layers panel, and I make a little color key, like this, that I keep open at all times. Each color corresponds to a single painting layer:

This allows me to navigate the layers panel really quickly. If I want to paint one of those baskets, I go to the blue layer in the panel.  Rolling pin, that's the yellow layer.

VALUE, VALUE, VALUE!
If I've told you kids once I've told you a thousand times - it's all about value!!  Please believe me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Value organization is critical to a painting, both in terms of the abstract design and the believability of the space.

Even though my picture is already divided into layers, I do my value rough on a single layer, because it needs to be super-spontaneous and "big picture." I need to be able to paint a big dark swath over there that subsumes all the stuff in it, without having to go back to a bunch of individual layers and try to mimic that global blob of darkness, for example. Once I have something going that looks solid, I duplicate that value layer, clip one clone (Create Clipping Mask) to each of the separate layers, and merge down. So it still looks the same as the single layer value painting, but it's actually divided up into separate layers according to the color key.

COLOR
Next I add color, using color layers and Hue/Saturation layers set to colorize. This ensures that the value structure is preserved.  I don't always divide the value rough and color rough into such clearly different steps, but for this picture it was an easy way to handle the large amount of content. I use a combination of individual color layers clipped to each separate painting layer, and "global" color layers at the top of the stack to affect the entire image.

Look at how even at this very early stage, parts of the picture (like the jars at the left) are starting to look real and convincing, almost like a blurred photo (click for a detailed version).  At this point I merge the color layers down to each individual painting  layer so I'm back to having just a few painting layers.  For the "global" color layers I first clone them (one for each painting layer), then merge them down.

COMPLETE LIGHTING

It's not arbitrary that I lay in the full range of values from specular highlight to deep reflected darkness on, say the teapot, right at the start. You will not create the illusion of a real environment if you don't represent all aspects of the light in that environment. To put it literally, you need to have a white, a black, a red, a blue, etc. but also you might want to think about having a shiny thing, a not shiny thing, and so on.  The only way we see light is by the things that reflect it... so if you want to have light, have different things reflecting it... that is, have things that reflect it differently. In this way the only common denominator is the light itself, and that's what the viewer will see. That is how you paint light.

If I turn the drawing layer back on, which re-introduces some of the little occluded areas and dark accents, viewed small this almost looks like it could be a finished painting. The back wall, with its well placed shadows and organized value structure looks almost complete.

RENDERING THE DETAILS

Ok, that was the fun part... but seriously, I know if I had labored over a detailed drawing, that last thing I'd feel like doing is going back and redrawing those things in paint! But, with this process I've only spent a few hours on the picture at this point, and am psyched to buckle down and just render, knowing I have a really solid foundation in which to paint the individual elements.

LOOK AT STUFF!

There is no greater thrill for me, nothing that is more pure fun than being able to paint a picture like this entirely from my head. That comes from spending a lot of time just looking at stuff. Studying everything I see to understand what makes it look the way it does. What makes something look shiny, wet, transparent, shiny and transparent, soft, hard, etc.

GETTING THE BIG PICTURE

Even though my design was solidly established, it's impossible for it to be complete when the various elements are only roughed in. As I add detail I continually reassess how the picture is holding together, and look for new opportunities to improve the design.   I do most of the painting at 25% or 33% zoom, so the whole picture fits on my monitor (usually).  But I also keep Photoshop's Navigator panel open at all times, so I can get some distance on the picture, like a thumbnail, without being distracted by details.  This makes it really obvious when elements are not fitting into the overall design.

SWITCHING GEARS

When I work a picture like this it really feels like there are two entirely different processes going on, and I am switching back and forth between them every hour or so. 

When I'm working on finishing a specific element, say, a cup or dish, I'm thinking more like a scientist, more objectively - how is the cup reflecting the different lights? Where does that highlight go?  What color needs to be right here to pick up some of that light reflected back off the thing that's next to it? What is the shape of that ellipse? and so on.  

Alternately I am viewing the whole picture using just gut feel. Is my eye stuck over here for some reason? Why is that?  Am I getting a red/green vibe in this area?  Is this or that element separating from the picture, or pulling my eye? Are all the pieces working together to create the whole I want?  Does the picture have the impact I want?  I say this is "gut feel" because often the problem is not what it seems. To give a simple example, you may want the eye to be drawn to a certain spot, and in trying to make this happen you may only do things to that spot, when the real problem is that some other spot is pulling the viewer away. If you just keep staring at your desired focal point trying to figure out what's wrong, you will never find it. You have to listen to those little voices in your head that hint something is going on over there...

So I work back and forth between tightening the painting in specific areas, and making comprehensive adjustments to the composition as those painted pieces start to emerge in detail.

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
3d reality principles are not the same as 2d pictures principles. With realistic painting we need to balance the two as best we can.  These two ways of viewing the picture can come into conflict, and generally the latter one wins. So for example if that perfectly placed highlight is stealing too much of the show, off it comes.  It's paradoxical, but a picture looks more "real" when you can get all the parts to fit together as a 2d composition, even if that means overruling some laws of 3d reality.  I think it was John Singer Sargent who said, "paint the hand the way it looks when you are looking at the face."  Though in this picture I need to have everything pretty crisply rendered, the principle of getting the right simple gist of each element still applies.

DIGITAL POWER... AND PITFALLS

Being able to move and adjust things at any stage of the process and to make global or semi-global adjustments to a picture are obviously two of the key strengths of digital painting vs. traditional media - but this can be dangerous if you allow yourself to defer working out issues until too late in the process, or avoid committing to pictorial decisions due to endless experimentation.  YOU NEED TO HAVE AN IDEA even as you remain completely open to new ideas and refinements as they present themselves.

FINAL TWEAKS

At last I add details that sit over the main forms, such as the various splatterings and mess of the kitchen.  And I do some big adjustments to the lighting, adding atmosphere to the lamps, and pulling the focus into the face a bit more.

THE FINISHED PAINTING

A few more details, and there you go!

Time to go back to your own kitchens and see what you can cook up!

Painting a Snow Scene - working the whole

This is a picture I did for the second book in the Maurice's Valises series.

This picture needed to capture the excitement and promise of Maurice the mouse setting out on one of his most important adventures, in this case traveling by barge to the city of Moscow in deep winter.

Here's the rough sketch - as usual I don't develop the drawing very much before getting going with the paint. I really like to find my way through the picture with values and color, big shapes, vs. line.

Here I've laid in the basic values and colors for the picture. The compositional approach is fairly simple.

Here's the same picture with the drawing removed. You can see that even at this very, very early stage the value and color relationships are standing on their own. If you squint and look at this picture you might think it's finished.  When everything is in good balance your eyes will fill in the details (or not care that they're not there).

For a picture like this I won't do any precise perspective work. I just lay in some lines using Photoshop's line tool, color coded for left, right and top vanishing points. These are all I need as a guide to paint the buildings, wall and bridge in consistent perspective.

As I've said before, when it's time to start rendering, it really doesn't matter where you start, so long as you don't bring any area too far ahead of the image as a whole. I know some artists that don't work this way - they finish one small area and then move on to another. For the vast majority of them this has a generally negative effect on the whole, though I will say that for some it works really well. If that approach works for you - great!  For most artists, though, the way to ensure a consistent whole is to consistently work the whole. I started working the figure here.

I should also add that for some artists it does matter where they start. Where you start can have an effect on the final image, depending on how you work and how you see. For example, some artists start on the focal area, so the focal elements tend to achieve and remain at a more advanced level of finish and detail than the rest of the image. If you do this you may even find that the non-focal areas can remain really unfinished. I used to do the opposite - start on the non-focal areas and do the focal areas last, because at that point there was a really solid context for the critical focal areas, making them much more straightforward to render.

So I'll leave it this way: if you have a reason to start in a particular place, great! If not, don't let that cripple you - just start somewhere and dive in.

Here I'm moving to tighten up the bridge, and add some waves to the water.

And now moving onto the buildings in the background.

More refinement all over, and some snow on the buildings. I'm not loving the palette at this point, but it's actually easier for me to adjust it after rendering some of the elements a bit more. That way I have more information to inform the larger color and value adjustments.

I tried several different approaches with the snow. The scale of the snowflakes vs. the mouse was definitely a challenge. The relatively large flakes run the risk of becoming way too prominent in the picture. To address this I made them blurry, and a bit smaller than what would be perfectly realistic. The snow is built up in three layers.

Here I've lightened up the image a bit, modified the large cleat, and added more detail and texture to the mouse's coat and hat.

A tiny bit of tweaking on the snowflakes here and there to make the figure's silhouette a bit stronger.

Here I made a dramatic adjustment to the palette, bringing more reds and purples into the background. My typical process is: bring all elements up to the next level of detail in Painter > switch to Photoshop for big adjustments to color, value, and position of elements > back to Painter > repeat.

Lastly I lowered the entire background for what I felt was a stronger compositional relationship with the foreground elements, I lightened up the background behind the figure to make him stand out a bit more, and lightened the coat to allow the background to breathe into it a bit more, vs. having the whole foreground reading as sort of a big black blob.

With traditional media you really do need to do a lot of planning up front, because certain changes are really, really costly down the road. But with digital tools you can really work the whole, meaning you can make all manner of adjustments and changes at any stage of the process. For me it's not just that I can make these changes at a stage that might be considered late in traditional media processes, but it's actually more appropriate to do them once much of the image has been rendered, so I have some good tools to work with when it comes to making the big decisions.

Maurice's Valises on iTunes

I'm thrilled to announce that the picture book I recently illustrated, Maurice's Valises (Moral Tails in an Immoral World), part one: The Beginning is now available on iTunes!

I had an amazing time collaborating with the author, J.S. Friedman on this wonderful project.
The iBook features sound effects, narration and animation!

You can purchase the iBook or download a free sample by clicking on the link above, or here.