March 25th- Week 7 of SRP

Hello everyone,

This week I switched back over primarily to illustrating people/faces, which are my favorite things to illustrate. Over the years that I have done art though, I’ve mostly used traditional media for my art, which are things like pens, pencils, markers, paints, etc. But now that I’ve transitioned almost solely into digital art, I’ve found that the processes I once thought were so easy and natural for me have now become a lot more complicated.

A lot of this has to do with the layers I’ve been mentioning throughout my posts. For even if something might seem easy illustrate by hand, the layers behind it might be extremely complex, (whereas other things that seem impossible to draw by hand suddenly become extremely easy with a computer)

Take for example this close-up of one of the characters in the scene (and try to ignore the terrible quality):

Sorry this REALLY isn't finished yet, but  I thought it served as a good enough example of what I've been primarily working on. If you haven't realized this yet from viewing my previous artwork, it's all very amateurish...

Using a pencil and sketchpad and some markers, creating something like this wouldn’t have taken very long. But due to the way this illustration has to be animated, and how my software allows me to create something like this, a very complex, but highly enjoyable process forms.

Painting on a digital medium requires a completely different mindset I’ve noticed as far as creating artwork. You can’t think of subjects like you normally would as a collection of 2D lines and colors. Instead the entire work has to be visualized completely before you embark on creating the piece. This was something I had to learn the difficult way, but now I’ve been able to completely adjust the way I go about painting.

First, I go to the rough sketch in my storyboard, and I gain a general sense of how I want the picture to look, and what I want to include within it. Then I work from the deepest part of the painting up, meaning I go from the background, to the very surface of the painting working out what every single layer contains, and how I should divide them. From the standpoint of an artist, some objects might require more than one layer to look their best, while others only need one. From the standpoint of an animator, a layer has to be constructed a certain way, or it simply can’t even be animated.

So after I’ve crafted about about twenty blank layers and I’ve labeled each of them, I make rough sketches on each layer of what’s going to be present in the illustration before consulting with my animation mentor. This is probably the most important step, because if a single layer isn’t compatible with, or isn’t as cohesive as it could be for the animations, then I would basically have to start the whole piece over, depending on how severe the error is.

So once the game-plan is set, I begin bringing every layer up to the level of detail I want. It took me a while to get used to this because with traditional art, you simply draw or paint something exactly the way it looks the first time around, and then you go back and tweak around with things and add a couple of details usually. But with digital painting, I favor a different kind of process. Basically, I start out with big blobs of color across the digital canvas, it’s like viewing the final product while wearing  a pair of glasses make your whole world turn blurry. In traditional art, there’d be nothing I could do with this, but in digital art, this is me just getting started. Everything that follows is just me gradually making these blobs of color more refined, giving them shape, giving them highlights and shadows, and then finally drawing details.

Talk to you guys more next week!

~Keanan~