Paint The Game

[Johnway]

@Johnway Impressed by the quality and detail of your art work. I felt inspired to try using Paint again last night.

But can you upload a picture on here from your PC? If YES how?

I've been using some gaming sounds as part of sound art project, but would like to get into creating more digital images as well.

i upload to imgur.com and i copy the URL from there.

I would personally go to krita and practice painting and drawing from there. Paint doesn't really offer the tools to make life easier or is effective tbh. I personally use photoshop but krita is a decent free alternative.

if you have a wacom tablet that also helps, but getting use to staring at the screen instead of the tablet to draw can be tricky and frequently i'm just winging it and work around problems.

 

[ipman]

i upload to imgur.com and i copy the URL from there.

I would personally go to krita and practice painting and drawing from there. Paint doesn't really offer the tools to make life easier or is effective tbh. I personally use photoshop but krita is a decent free alternative.

if you have a wacom tablet that also helps, but getting use to staring at the screen instead of the tablet to draw can be tricky and frequently i'm just winging it and work around problems.

So how are your images made...tablet and photoshop?

I'm used to pencil drawing, but trying to get the line with a mouse is going to take a while. Changing my DPI settings helped. This thread can be a good incentive to try new ideas.

I'll go and watch a few YT classes, always a good start.

 

[Brian Boru]

trying to get the line with a mouse is going to take a while

Every digital artist I know uses a tablet for creating original drawings or paintings—most I believe use a Wacom tablet, check those out. Drawing with a stylus is so much more intuitive.

 

[ipman]

Every digital artist I know uses a tablet for creating original drawings or paintings—most I believe use a Wacom tablet, check those out. Drawing with a stylus is so much more intuitive.

Yes I have looked at them, and my son has one. I'm enjoying using Krita at present. I like to find new techniques or software and just play with it.

I mainly work with sound because you can reference anything from reality to films, music, games,etc,etc and also layer those.

Some of the original art work for games is interesting, to see the concept behind say HZD and see how that played out in the actual game.

 

[Zloth]

There's a sticky at the top of the forum that says how to use the forum Media section for posting.

 

[Johnway]

i promised i would get the image finished before march and i've done it! I won't bore you with my thoughts on the process, you're all here for the finished artwork! I'll supply the WIP Gif image later. Image is 2000x

 

[Johnway]

TLDR: Who cares.

Not going to lie, its been a bit of a struggle to get this finished truth.

I think i made a couple cardinal sins when drawing this sort of drawing.

The thing that stands out is the Focal point isn't great so its not particulary punchy and its a bit confusing. is the Focal Point the knight in gold or the man with the axe on front?. when drawing these scenes i think the foreground should be filled and dead/empty space should be kept to a minimum. As you can see, a large (third?) of it is empty. Hindsight i should have used golden ratio and zig zags. Sure, the image follows rules of third and the golden spiral (sort of), but i think it was the wrong measurements. Aspect ratio is probably not the best either.


Secondly, i think the colors aren't quite right (if i have time i'll attach the color studies and experiements). The idea was that the mason order were moving/fighting/defending a burning forest. it was suppose to have a sort of apocalyptic scene yet at the same time a sense of defiance kinda reminds me of the phrase by sun tzu: "An evil enemy, will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes".

Its a nice idea, my only problem was all the photos i foundat this point was all pictures of forest fires were just bright orange and when your color palette is red and black i was going to struggle. Its not to say its impossible, i managed to reference and observe colors from some Age of Sigma artwork and how warriors of khorne were illistrated around inferno like environments. More worryingly i started the figures without a proper palette and for metal work and didn't really get it until 2/3s of the way of the image.

its also a bit on the dark side, with most of the image sort of bluring together tbh.


Thirdly, i think its kinda boring. i had hoped to add some opposition to spice things up but alas, in early thumbnail attempts i couldn't get it working. I was too torn between getting scale and an awesome background and the idea, yet at the same time i just couldn't conceptualize the opposition and what they would be doing. The ideas i did play on was that the knights were advancing forwards over some emplacements/grounds with the dead scattered around the area. The other idea was perhaps the knighrs holding to prepare an ememy surging forwards and just seconds before they clashed.

i had to make a pretty significant sacrifice ditching the forest idea as it just made it too dark and claustaphobic for my tastes. There were points that i wanted to give up and had the sky not kept me inspired i would have crumbled much sooner.

 

[Johnway]

ok enclosed is the gif of the process. its a bit small to save space.

 

[Frindis]

I was looking at the soldier with the sideburns and thought about how some of the renaissance painters would paint themselves in the picture looking at the painter. Was this deliberate or just happened to be one dude that was looking in that general direction?

 

[Johnway]

I was looking at the soldier with the sideburns and thought about how some of the renaissance painters would paint themselves in the picture looking at the painter. Was this deliberate or just happened to be one dude that was looking in that general direction?

nah that's coincidence. honestly i didn't notice it until you mentioned it. But i've been staring at this image for 3 months during weekends and the last few evenings i fail to see stuff like that.

 

[Johnway]

time to necro this thread again.

Well the image is done. Or at least to a point that i can call it quits and move on. i'll probably make some comments once i've had a rest, take some time to gather my thoughts and move on. i do have a lot to ramble on about but honestly, it would bore you all and i need to move on from this one.

 

[Brian Boru]

@Johnway You're kidding me! That's incredible!!

 

[Frindis]

Fantastic work! @Johnway

 

[Johnway]

Much appeciated guys.

here is the WIP of the main parts of the drawing.

Like i said in the chiv2 discord i could have added some sort of artsy/faff description like:

"Even with the dying of the light, the hatred between the Agathians and the Mason order burned eternal. They fought through the night, spilling the blood of their former brothers and sisters. Their hatred had to be sated, even if slipping into the shadows of damnation. Neither side cared that they moved ever further away from the light of peace, redemption, order and reconciliation. ".


This picture took a lot longer to finish. i started the whole exercise back in JULY so nearly 5 months of me working on this. it wasn't supposed to take that long! it started off so well with a thumb nail and then i would slowly build it up, identifying the light sources finalize the poses etc and then just add colour washes as the contrast/lighting was sorted. How wrong i was.

The progress was absolutely glacial as i would do bits, sleep on it for a week before deciding to bin it or deviate or change it altogether. As always my problem once i realize that i have something, i can't help but mess with it to try and improve it. Other times i would second guess myself, decide things had to be redone and in some points i thought it was going to hell as all i could see were problems. numerous tangents, too much symmetry in other areas, things that didn't make sense conceptionally ( a good picture tells a story).

the biggest regret was not doing it in color. Sure the grey scale gives it this harsh grim vibe to things. The problem however is that those not familiar with Chiv2 wouldn't understand who belonged to which side. it was just a massive battle and again, hurts the story. i'm still wondering why i didn't just start with color sooner. i think part of the problem was that i didn't want to be cornered with a particular vibe and thought i could just color it in using the magic of photoshop. Couldn't get it to work this time.

Speaking of the number of people, whilst in my previous posts i lamented "dead space" gaps of wasted space/gaps that ruined things. Well, turns out the opposite is try. yes i have the scale, but it all just blurs together and it might as well be a sea of people. They're just not engaging each other. Sure most of the GW stuff most of the combatants aren't fighting, more like staring at each other. To add insult to injury there's still dead space in the picture (straight down the bloody middle of the picture).

i had hoped for the distant elements i could just use silhouette and shadows to try draw the background, well, due to the complexity of the picture and how close to the action we were, it wasn't going to happen. Cue me needing to draw the individual crowds and trying to detail and make them all fit. painful.

but its done. its going to be a while before i start another picture. Or even do any practice as my other life commitments require my attention.