I figure it'll be nice to post some step-by-step for this piece as I've never thought people would be interested in how I work. well, basically I suppost almost every digital artist would start their work in a similar fashion, mine is no different.
I started off doing a thumbnail sketch. The purpose is to see how's the composition and color working and as well as the overall design. This piece is about a battle between two spaceships. I want people to see the blue ship firing missils at the red ship and the smoke trail would serves as a lead. The main challenge of this piece is there are so many things going on, the red ship in the middle ground is competing attention with the blue ship in the foreground. So I have to pay extra attention to their proportion and contrast.
Having all these things layout, I pretty much know what I want. Of course, I left some space for whatever comes to mind later. After finishing the sketch, I asked my co-workers for opinion and the problem here is everything is 50/50, things are too evely spread out. so I have to re-work the design and make sure all subjects have more dynamic placement and well connected.
After examined the problem and made adjustment, it's time to drill into some detail. Painting any man-made objects in perspective aren't easy; so in order to get the right perspective, I used Google SketchUp to built two low-resolution spaceships. What I like about SketchUp is it's basically a "Maya portable", very easy to handle and it has everything I need to get the job done. I placed the city image as a back drop and spaceships in the scene, moving them around, tweaking the camera angle so I could get my composition nailed.
Once I'm happy with the rough layout, it's time to put in some color! Painting environment is always fun to do because instead of painting one object, where you only have to worry about the design, environment demands picture balance, value, color saturation, DOF, contrast and edges. So there is a lot of things to beware of. Many people often got caught up with small details and forgot about the grand design of the picture. After 4 hours of painting, I'm happy with the result; the story is told, two ships are better connected, value looks right, composition is there, foreground, middle ground and background are well defined. I add smokes in the surrounding to give some story and mood.
Having all these things layout, I pretty much know what I want. Of course, I left some space for whatever comes to mind later. After finishing the sketch, I asked my co-workers for opinion and the problem here is everything is 50/50, things are too evely spread out. so I have to re-work the design and make sure all subjects have more dynamic placement and well connected.
After examined the problem and made adjustment, it's time to drill into some detail. Painting any man-made objects in perspective aren't easy; so in order to get the right perspective, I used Google SketchUp to built two low-resolution spaceships. What I like about SketchUp is it's basically a "Maya portable", very easy to handle and it has everything I need to get the job done. I placed the city image as a back drop and spaceships in the scene, moving them around, tweaking the camera angle so I could get my composition nailed.
Once I'm happy with the rough layout, it's time to put in some color! Painting environment is always fun to do because instead of painting one object, where you only have to worry about the design, environment demands picture balance, value, color saturation, DOF, contrast and edges. So there is a lot of things to beware of. Many people often got caught up with small details and forgot about the grand design of the picture. After 4 hours of painting, I'm happy with the result; the story is told, two ships are better connected, value looks right, composition is there, foreground, middle ground and background are well defined. I add smokes in the surrounding to give some story and mood.
