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.

The Walled Flower - a little perspective

This is a cover piece I did for a book called The Walled Flower, just released today!  It's the second in a series of murder mysteries set in Victoria Square, New York (appropriately named "The Victoria Square Mysteries").

The picture had to communicate that the house was under some renovation, without making it look dilapidated. I didn't simply copy an existing Victorian house, but rather designed my own after looking at a few dozen of them (thankfully the area where I live is rich in houses something like this).

Here's a detail of the image

As usual, this picture started with some thumbnails

Followed by some sketches...
You can see how I played around with the different foreground elements: the truck, the cat, the sign.  The cat is a necessary element for all books in the series! The art director went with the third sketch.

I proposed adding the sign with the SOLD sticker for a couple of reasons:

1) to show that the house had recently been purchased (the book follows the adventures of its new owners)

2) to create a nice foreground element, allowing me to bring the cat forward, and therefore make him(her?) larger and more prominent, without standing out too much.

I think this is a great example of where narrative (storytelling) meets design (composition) in illustration. The SOLD sign is a great marker for "something has changed, and now interesting is going to happen." Lots of great stories start with someone moving into a new home.

For perspective, I usually just lay down a series of color-coded lines, each on a different layer, so I can hide and unhide them separately as needed (having them all visible at once creates a lot of clutter).

I don't necessarily make lines that exactly coincide with the main lines of the house - I just makes sure the lines are abundant and closely spaced enough that I can estimate pretty much any line I need to paint with some accuracy.

The house basically uses three point perspective (doesn't everything? - yes); in this image I used red for the upper vanishing point, i.e. the verticals (because we are looking up at the house), blue for the left vp, the green for the right (and black for the peaks - vp's four and five, but who's counting?).

For the lettering on the sign I used a little time-saving technique. First I quickly painted a rough version of the sign flattened out. I designed it to look something like a generic real estate sign:

Then I applied a perspective distortion, using the aforementioned perspective lines as a guide.

Because I want to maintain the painterly quality of the image, I have to be careful not to be too precise with the sign. So I use it just as a quick guide, which I then paint over. It's kind of ironic - with physical paint you may struggle to make the lines of the sign as straight as possible - with digital that's trivial, so you have to make some effort to NOT make them too straight. You have to resist the urge...  Here's what the final painted sign looks like:

Observant viewers will notice the extreme shift in ambient and reflected light on the right or "shaded" side of the post. The upper part of the post reflects a lot of blue-purplish sky light, while the bottom portion reflects a lot of the greenish color from the lawn. This may look exaggerated here - but did you notice it earlier?

Here's the cover for the first in the series, called A Crafty Killing, which I also did:

The Walled Flower is available today, and can be purchased at your local bookstore, or from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Circles in Perspective - Part Three

In Part One and Part Two we saw how in many typical cases ellipses (circles drawn in perspective) do not seem to comply with the rules of perspective, for example, all three of these ellipses are identical, while the perspective squares that bound them are not:

The minor axis of the ellipse does not always remain perfectly vertical, however. Take this simple drawing of a pickup truck - how should the ellipses representing its tires be oriented in perspective?

This looks wrong:

Orienting the ellipses vertically looks better, but still not right:

As suggested before, if you imagine the ellipses (or the circles they represent) as the ends of cylinders, the answer becomes clear - the minor axes of the ellipses point toward the left vanishing point.

No other perspective lines define the orientation of these ellipses - only the center line, which aligns with the ellipse's minor axes matters in terms of orienting the ellipse:

 And if we place more ellipses within these, say, to add wheel covers, they align on these same center lines:

Note how the right vanishing point is not needed at all for orienting the ellipses, even though the circular faces sit on the plane that goes back to the right vanishing point, not the left. The right vanishing point helps determine the relative sizes of the ellipses, but not their orientation:

 That about covers the basics for drawing circles in perspective.

Circles in Perspective - Part Two

In Part One we learned the basics of how a circle in basic one point perspective becomes an ellipse.

 So how would another circle of the same size, say to the left of this one appear? Like this?:

That looks bigger than the center ellipse... maybe it should point to the vanishing point, like this:

Now that looks too small and really off...

In fact, in a perspective drawing like this, all ellipses on the ground plane will be oriented the same way - with their minor axes precisely vertical:

It might help if you think of each ellipse as the end of a cylinder. Since the sides of the cylinders are vertical, the ellipses are oriented vertically as well:

Interestingly, the same thing happens in two point perspective - as long as the sides of the (imaginary) cylinders are parallel, all the ellipses will be oriented the same way, in this case, vertically:

In Part Two we'll see how to apply this to a real drawing.

Circles in Perspective - Part One

A circle

viewed from an oblique angle, or squashed (scaled on one axis), becomes an ellipse:

An ellipse is symmetrical on both center lines - all four quadrants are the same shape (some are mirror versions of the others). The long center line of an ellipse is called the "major axis", the short center line is the "minor axis."

But shapes in perspective are not symmetrical - they get smaller as they recede into space, right? For example, a square in perspective looks like this:

So how does our perfectly symmetrical ellipse fit into all this? Answer: the center of the perspective circle lines up with the center of the perspective square, but the center of the ellipse representing it does not:

So the top "half" of the perspective circle is a very different size and shape from the bottom half:

But the ellipse is still... a perfectly symmetrical ellipse:

Kind of odd, but there it is. In the next installment we'll see how to orient and fit ellipses into a perspective drawing - perhaps there will be some more surprises there...

Go to Part Two