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[jwk5]

Thanks!

Going through the steps I was able to put this together in under 4 minutes (a good portion of which was copying/pasting to show the individual steps). It's nothing fancy but you can see that you can stay fast and loose and get your ideas out quickly. Developing quick sketching skills to describe your ideas is really handy when you are doing concept work, I can fill pages with hundreds of different variations of the same idea in half an hour. When I first started gesture sketching it took me much much longer to even just fill one page so don't let yourself get discouraged if it doesn't catch on quickly for you, it is a skill you have to develop.

[gimymblert]

pretty good advice! The D muscle also help giving direction and volume.

[jwk5]

I made these for Melly but maybe some of you will find them useful too.

[jwk5]

I am going to change the topic from "Character Concepts" to "JWK5's Drawing Tips" since I've pretty much just been dumping in random drawing tips that hit my brain now and again. Anyways, below is something I posted in the Great Games with Terrible Boxart topic but I think the information is also pretty useful when designing title screens, etc. Below that was a post I made in the Game Zebo ads  post mortem topic that I think can be equally useful in similar situations or with creating ad images (which was the subject of the post). I figured I'd repost them here so that they are easier to find for people specifically looking for drawing tips.

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Aside from the fact that Wizardry: Heart of the Maelstrom is a fucking awesome game and should be played as a rite of passage into manhood, I always thought it had some of the most interesting box art of any SNES game I ever owned (which was quite a few).

Looking at it know, with a little more technical knowledge about the visual effects of art, I'd say the only thing bad about it is the composition (i.e. the arrangements of the words and images on the box). I browsed around Google to see if I could figure out why they chose that specific composition and from the looks of things it may have been required by Nintendo that the game boxes have that specific logo placement (the gaudy red Super Nintendo Entertainment System at the bottom, the red bar at the top, the Licensed by Nintendo on the right, etc.).

If so, whoever at Nintendo who decided that needs to be slapped cross-eyed. The heavily saturated (intense) red "Super Nintendo Entertainment System" at the bottom and the red bar directly above it pretty much cripple any hope for a decent composition as they will draw attention away from just about anything that isn't also strongly saturated. Their near-center placement is also pretty damaging as well because it pretty much forces the space between them to become a visual hot spot and the red "Licensed by Nintendo" and "Capcom" aren't helping things either.

I think the best the artist doing Wizardry's box art here could have hoped for would be to condense the Wizardry logo text into the main design image so that it becomes one cohesive visual element and then utilize the hot spot space created by the red saturated logo elements. A gold border(because red would be too potent and another color would break the color harmony) could be used to "rein in" the viewer's view and direct it towards the central elements (i.e. the Wizardry logo).

Anyways, this was just a random observation and a bout of curiosity. You can see an example of what I was thinking below.

The Original:










My Edit:


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Your style is nice, real colorful and crisp, it is the arrangement and balance in the image that is bad. There are a lot of things to consider when making an ad image but I can give you a few basic ideas based on the one you posted.


If you blur your add image really well you can see that the most potent color groups in the image aren't the text and the girl's defining features (which should be the focus of the add) but instead it is the green of the ball, the orange of the hat, and the bright lighting on her face. This is largely due to saturation and hue contrasting (highly saturated colors against dull colors and orange over its blue complement). It is really important that you manage your hue (the spectrum color) and saturation (the color intensity) levels so that the most important aspects of your image give off the greatest degree of contrast. It is also best to try for some sort of color harmony (researching color theory will pay off there), a random mishmash of color really creates a lot of visual chaos.


The next issue is the values (black, white, and the grays in between). If you desaturate the image you can see there is no real balance in value, rather than nice defined blocks of lights and darks you've kind of got this swirl of contrasts that really makes it hard to pick out any visual landmarks. This is especially bad for advertising because this means nothing in the ad is jumping out at the viewer and grabbing their attention.


If you up the contrast and brightness you can see that although the words are now a little more readable you have hard lines going every which way, there is no real flow. Rather than a nice contour leading the viewer to the point of the advertisement it is more like a maze, and when you've only got a brief glance's worth of time to snare your viewer's attention that is a very bad thing.


This last image here insn't a fantastic example, but hopefully you get the gist of it. You can see how careful value balance has allowed me to control which elements of the picture stand out the most (in a sort of visual hierarchy). Color saturation and warmth balances in a similar manner. I've used the dark "letter box" bordering to sort of corral the viewer's attention and narrow the focus to the girl and the text and to help the edge flow. There are lots of other things you do, even just a little bit of research will go a long ways, but hopefully this at least gives you an idea of where to start.

[gimymblert]

Never ever desaturate!

Go grayscale! or use luminosity "blending layer" to extract luminosity information!

I had this trouble before. Desaturation actually flatten the luminosity.

Never ever desaturate, that's evil.

[jwk5]

Never ever desaturate!

Go grayscale! or use luminosity "blending layer" to extract luminosity information!

I had this trouble before.

Never ever desaturate, that's evil.

Even if you use "desaturate" you're still going to see the contrasts in the high and low value ranges and the "blocks" of lights and darks, which is what you are looking for in this case. You are right that "desaturate" isn't good if you're intending to actually convert the image to black and white monochrome, though. In that case "gradient map" with white and black selected (one at each end of the gradient) preserves the luminosity and works really well.

[gimymblert]

I need to try this one. Thanks

I use gradiant mostly to color the shadow and the light correctly (adding some color, generally yellow and blue), and to apply saturation map too (through a transformation into saturation ramp then saturation blending). I always work in a "HSL fashion" with multiple layer, I'm no good at color so I better stick to rules whenever I can.

But I'm not sure BW gradient preserve the luminosity component correctly, I need to do some experience, the closer to "real luminosity" is Lab actually, I think grayscale preserve the L by making a conversion into Lab first. Grayscale have the same effect as luminosity blending.

[jwk5]

You can see that "desaturate" has the poorest range but the contrasts are still pretty visible. The advantage to desaturating an image is that because it has such poor ranges you can identify the most heavily contrasted items more easily (you'll notice that the purple and blue-green bottles stand out much more in the desaturated image than the gradient mapped image or the luminosity layer image). This makes it ideal for picking out strong value blocks (such as in an ad image). If you find your image blending together after a desaturation then you know the contrasts are not strong enough.

Gradient mapping it black and white doesn't preserve the luminosity 100% but it preserves it fairly accurately for the most part. The advantage it has over a luminosity layer is the extreme lights and darks tend to be just a touch lighter and darker than they would be in a luminosity layer which gives you a little better edge detection when you are working with very subtle contrasts.

The luminosity layer is of course better for 100% exact luminosity information but it can sometimes cause you to miss very subtle features. A good example of what I mean is the orange bottle (4th from the left) in the luminosity layer has its interior ring (i.e. the bottom of the glass that is visible through it) barely visible while in the gradient map it stands out better. If you actually look at the original image that interior ring on the orange bottle looks closer to the gradient map than the luminosity layer. Just because the luminosity is 100% accurate doesn't mean your eye sees it that way.

[gimymblert]

 

I'm not seeing any difference with gradient however, I need some calibration I guess, but your point is made.

[Inanimate]

I'm not seeing any difference with gradient however, I need some calibration I guess, but your point is made.

Look at the light green bottle (between yellow and green) in the Luminosity vs. the Gradient. See where they overlap? Less detail in Gradient. Likewise with other overlaps.

[gimymblert]

I see!

[jwk5]

misc. musings on poses and body rhythm... MS Paint for the win!

[dasdsad]

All of this is rather excellent.

I haven't read it all yet, but I am compelled to let you know that your work is appreciated.

[jwk5]

Thanks a lot! I am just throwing ideas as they come to mind or as I happen upon them.

[jwk5]

[baconman]

On top of being endlessly enriching, this thread also makes me wonder what an illustration program would be like, if one actually factored and incorporated artistic principles like that into it's design.

[gimymblert]

I always wondered that Bacon
The closest is spore creature creator

[Triplefox]

I was inspired to play with the floursack technique some weeks ago and realized that something else was missing from my techniques, something which I've never seen explained  very explicitly by any art tutorial. Fortunately, I figured it out, and it's been astonishingly good for my figure drawing since then, so I'll share it!





The main new idea here is the first picture. Yes, the boring one with the polygon. It seems silly, but what I'm doing is blocking out the entire bulk of the figure before I draw it. This way I find space and proportion in the roughest terms possible, before we ever get into consideration of "heads height" or mannequin creation. I tend to let at least one side hang loose so that there's "give" as the figure is built - so in this one the left side hangs out, but I stay pretty close along the right side. To motivate the later parts of the figure I will sometimes also add additional lines that cut across the poly - some to indicate position(height of head, torso, etc.), others to indicate pose(e.g. spread of legs, or a line of action if I'm going for dynamic figures). The "M of power"  would fit in great here. But the poly comes first: different poly, different pose. So typical standing figures will look trapezodal, as in my example, but experimenting with weird ones leads me to interesting, dynamic poses, and sometimes to perspective, even when I wasn't looking for it!

So why is this poly such a big deal for me? The edges literally stop me from, e.g. making the torso too long, the shoulders too wide, the feet tilted, etc. I use the edges of the polygon as the anchor points of the mannequin - the top of the head, the bottom of the feet, rough positioning of the hands, etc. It turns out that it doesn't matter what type of mannequin I'm using, all I have to do is find a way to space it properly once I've set up the edges.

After working with this technique for a while, I was able to reasonably conquer the "1 to 9 heads tall" meme that's been around art sites for a while, one which flummoxed me before, as after around 6 heads, I would get far too much distortion to fix it just by hacking away. Being able to do extreme proportions reliably, in turn, gives me more options for conveying the character - e.g. a 9-head+ figure with huge muscles looks larger-than-life strong, but not "musclebound" either. Even the smaller, simpler figures I could do before feel more "solid" now.

It also has the benefit of making it possible to visualize complex scenes with many characters interacting - just block the characters as polygons first. Then build from the points where you plan for them to touch. I tend to do shapes for the feet, lower torso, head, and wrists first and then work my way through the others.

Last of all, it's another tool to make the creative process more fluid. You can start with no ideas at all - just doodle a shape and then start cramming the body parts in it somehow.

[Theophilus]

This needs bump'd.

Thanks, jwk5. You are awesome.

[Fifth]

Yeah, this was a good one.

...but...

The bit about the head line and the horizon in the last tutorial post is wrong.  It's not that all the (same height) figures' heads will meet at the same line, it's that the horizon will bisect all of the (same height) figures at the exact same point in each of them, whether this is something like their necks (looking down at them from above), or the ankles (looking up from below).