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Text Menu: Art Portfolio 1Portfolio 2SpotlightArt Artchive 1Art Artchive 2Diablo II GalleryChildren's ArtworkSketchesPrints Downloads Tips Links All images copyright (c) Michael Dashow except where otherwise noted Page last updated on September 11th, 2004 |
The Spotlight page showcases a particular work of mine and goes into some detail about how it was created. The idea is to give you a better look at the process involved with creating one of these digital paintings, or to show off details which might have otherwise passed unnoted. The focus today is on an illustration for The Fresco by Sherri Tepper. This was a contract piece for Easton Press, a publisher releasing fancy, leather-bound, signed, numbered, first editions of books that have recently come out only in hardcover or paperback. These collectors' editions have no dust jacket, but include a frontispiece, which is what I was hired to supply. Michael Baldyga originally offered me the frontispiece to John Crowley's Daemonomania, but as much as I love reading Crowley, I'm really not the right guy to illustrate his work (and also, the timing didn't work out.) So Mike gave me a choice between a number of other books in the pipeline. After asking around at Worldcon in Chicago, I heard that the Tepper story was an adventure a human woman has when two aliens enlist her aid to save the world. I love to draw both women and aliens, so this was the obvious book choice. 
Here's where we start:A rough sketch of what I proposed doing for the cover. I wanted the image to incorporate both of the main characters, Benita and Chiddy, as well as the Fresco in the book's title. In this version the characters are very small, but the directional shadows and rays of light pull the viewer's eyes right down to them. 
This is an alternate version of the cover with the same elements scaled differently. This concept places a much greater importance on the characters, or at least is a lot less subtle about the focus.
At this stage I start doing color tests for the image. In Photoshop, I set the line art to the multiply ink so that I can add layers of color underneath and they will be seen through the line art. I end up with files containing dozens of layers where I can mix and match different color schemes. Some layers are just overlays, to add a certain color accent to a color scheme and still be able to turn off that layer if I'm not happy with it. In the end, the brighter color tests are more eye-catching, but I felt that the piece should be more subdued: As a frontispiece, it didn't have to stick out on a book shelf! 
Th final color rough. I decided to use subdued, light colors for the background and allow the characters to stand out because they are in contrasting bright and dark colors.
This is a quick 3D mock-up of the characters to get a rough idea of where the light should be falling on them. The woman was a figure left over from a game I had worked on. The alien was modeled very quickly just for this test. They were assembled in 3D Studio Max and lit with an approximation of the light I wanted in the painting.
The rest of the spotlight concentrates on the character work. I start by masking out the characters. I don't need to use accurate colors here (obviously!) but just something to mark the paintable areas from the outer, transparent areas. Hitting the checkbox labeled Preserve Layer Transparency allows me to always color within the lines. Each figure here is on a separate layer so that each can be worked on without harming the other.
Now I start separating each figure into the main colors that will be used on them. Usually, this is done by making each color block into a different layer. For example, I worked on Benita's skin on a distinct layer from her shirt (and even that was two layers: One for the main shirt and another for the front sleeve.) I view all of the layers together at the same time, but this process allows me to easily work on one area without messing up another. Additionally, I can make a color shift on just the shirt (suppose I wanted to make it darker.) This can be done more easily than if everything was all in one layer and I had to select each area to alter.
The shadows are painted in on a separate layer and not sandwiched in to the others until I'm sure that I have it right. What you see here is just some black set to multiply, but I'll end up adding a lot more detail to the shadows and using some cool tones to imply daylight offscreen to the left.In case you're wondering why Benita is still bald here, it's because hair is stringy and has fluffy, inexact edges. I just have to paint it in later astrand at a time and see how it ends up. Trying to determine what its exact shape is ahead of time down to the last strand is silly. 
Here is Benita with all of her detail painted in. I finished her shirt but wanted to try adding a plaid pattern to make it look more woodsy. The finished shirt on the right is plaid, but it's subtle enough to still read as red in the overall painting. I created the plaid by making four separate layers of stripes: A vertical and horizontal light stripe with a black stripe in the center and a horizontal and vertical colored stripe. The light strips were applied with the soft light ink at 20% opacity, the red stripes were set to multiply at 30%. But the numbers, the way I drew the stripes, and even the inks are totally arbitrary. If you wanted to make plaid, experiment with different kinds of stripes and thicknesses and colors and inks and opacities.
Just so you can see what I did: The left shot shows the shirt with all of the plaid layers set to 100% opacity and normal ink. The right shot shows what the stripes looked like on a more readable grey background. I've made two of the layers 90% opacity so that you can start to see what's going on where they meet.
On to Chiddy's face. I've started to add color in underneath the line art for his face. The faceted eyes were created in 3D Studio Max: I took large spheres and warped them into a kind of an egg shape. I then used a particle system to cover the sphere with thousands of smaller spheres. I used a shiny red material for the texture and then added some colored lights in the environment: Yellows for the main light coming from the upper rights and a blue coming in from the left side. The completed eyes were brought into Photoshop as you see them here.
Later I added several more eyes - you can never have enough eyes! - and started filling in details on the cloth and the chitin of his appendages.
Here is what his finished face looked like. The more "human" looking eyes are apparent here, created with the help of Kai Power Tools' Spheroid Designer. But don't think that all of my art only consists of cute little tricks and short-cuts like using KPT and 3DSMax. I bring these up because others may find a few of them helpful, but everything else is all painted by hand (if you call using a Wacom pen and tablet "by hand.") The wrinkled forehead was patterned after that of a Sharpei puppy (Tepper makes the comparison herself in the novel.) But I also used a lot of insect photographic reference to help fill in details here. It's important to note that, even when you're working on something never-before-seen such as an alien, terrestrial reference is always extremely helpful!
This is a detail shot of what Chiddy's finished arm and carapace looked like. In studying images from my encyclopedia of insects, I noticed a subtle bumpy texture on the shell of many. After I finished painting all of the colors and shadows on the skin, I decided to add some texture to it to make it appear more "bug-like." The first thing I did was to find a good repeating bump pattern. (Feel free to download this pattern below to use yourself.) I filled a channel with the pattern and loaded it as a selection, so that only the white areas were selected. I then used the dodge tool to brighten the hilights on the carapace. Inverting the selection, I burned some of the shadows. I had to be careful not to overdo it because I wanted the effect to be subtle. But doing this process, especially dodging small areas, made the shell look both very shiny and slightly bumpy.When I was done, I filled another layer with the repeating noise pattern. I set it to 20% opacity and the overlay ink (but as with all things, your mileage may vary.) You can see how it added a subtle mottling of the shell, especially on the lighter forearm. The pattern was created by layering several different effects from KPT Texture Explorer, but was then modified so that it's infinitely repeatable. You can make patterns yourself, but feel free to steal this one if you'll find it useful.
Yes, I've skipped over a lot (i.e. everything about how the background was created.) There was a lot of coloring in my line art while still keeping it somewhat simplistic and flat. It was then brought into Painter to add a more hand-done feel to the background. A texture was overlaid to give the appearance of it being painted on a wall. The shadows from the trees and the rays of sunlight were added in afterwards also. You can also see a larger version of the image, too. |
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