Schoolism Assignment 9: Finishing: Step by Step fleshed out- Day 4

Here's where I was at the end of day 3 of coloring (do go back to the previous two posts to see days 1 and 2-3). Pretty much the cow was colored, the background finished, and I was ready to put in brambles as I had tried out sketchily on a layer the previous day.

Here you can see my bramble references, and I have drawn in the brambles mostly with a fairly small dark airbrush.

Here I have zoomed out and am trying brambles in the upper left hand foreground as well.

I tried drawing in more brambles in the lower left, but found it was getting too confused. What I then did was copy and paste the bramble layer, shift it off to the left and down a bit, so I had duplicate brambles, and lowered the opacity on one of the two bramble layers to give depth, and also erased a few stray brambles. I suppose it "shows" that I have copied and pasted, but I didn't really mind the repetition, since it gave depth and more brambles without actually adding more shapes and thus more confusion of forms. I liked the relaxing repetition of the lines vs having it just look like a big tangled ball of wool. Not sure if this was the right decision, but it still doesn't bother me, weirdly, since I often look for cut and paste in illustrations and it annoys me. :)

I decided the brambles in the upper left, over the sky didn't so much "frame" my character as trap her, so I erased them completely:

Here I am drawing in the wee flies around the cow as their lines had gotten so smooshed doing the background:

Taking a look at where I'm at.

Using the FX Glow to put in more glow on the cow's armour:

Looking at my prof's robot eyes close up, and trying to do some of what he did with shading in the eyeball and iris. Rather unsuccessfully.

Working last bits of texture on armour, including rivets around eyes. I put too many!

Ready to put the canvas texture overlay:

"painting" finished:

Capturing a canvas texture:

Opening it as a Painter file so I can copy it:

Copying the canvas texture over my painting, tiling it. Since it had a slight gradation, darker to the right, I flipped the right hand "tiles" so that I didn't get a hard value-change line where they meet.

Finished tiling the texture:

I've erased a bit where the "tiles" of canvas overlap to make the lines a bit less straight and obvious:

Making all the canvas tile layers into one Group and collapsing the group:

Here is what my image looks like with the canvas texture layer closed:
I liked that the colors were quite saturated and moody:

And here is what the image looks like with the canvas texture layer turned on, and set to overlay, at a low percentage opacity. I find it really lightens/brightens up the image and loses a lot of the moodiness and feeling of dread, as the canvas is quite light and cream colored.

So I tried adjusting the color of the canvas layer, bringing down the saturation of it, so it would be greytone rather than cream colored, to see if that helped.

I didn't think that worked enough so I junked it and started over again.

I tried desaturating the canvas layer right from the start before changing it to overlay.

I liked that better. Though I still wasn't crazy about the canvas texture. I did a lot of erasing it out in places, esp on the background, where I felt it overwhelmed the atmospheric sky and on the cow herself where I felt it interfered with the shiny look of her armour. Here I am comparing against my prof's final painting for this assignment. Oh, I also airbrushed some more blue into the cow's eyeball which had really gone totally white from the glow brush at the center of the orb.

Here's my final work with canvas overlay. Hopefully if you click on it, you'll get a large enough image to be able to see the texture which I dislike and feel is kind of "cheap" (like a fine master painting printed out in a print shop on a cheap canvas stretcher). [hmmm, it appears that my screenshots of my work in Painter are much more saturated for color than the Photoshop equivalents in psd or jpg that I post here... grrr]

Here's my final work without the canvas over it, which I prefer.

I still prefer the painting with no brambles in front. I feel that it works better for the cow to not be hemmed in. Perhaps for a portrait of a static character, it is nice to frame it in, and darken around the edges of the canvas on all sides, but I feel that the brambles cage her in and stop her forward hurdle into escape. I also feel that it weights the image too equally. Without the brambles on the left, our eyes follow her eyes behind her, where there are the dark, rather sharp focused tree shapes on the horizon, and we fear what we don't see out of the frame. With the brambles in front, they balance out the dark, as well as the sharp detail, behind her. Also without the brambles, there is a nice contrast between the defined cow character, and the soft background which pushes back away from her, bringing her more into focus. And there is also the nice transition from the sharp dark tree shapes in the back right horizon, to the softer less defined and lighter horizon to the left. Ahhh well.

I also feel that I overdid the blue glow brush on the armour and probably also her eyes. I lost the shape of her eyes too between the black and white (where there is darker overhang of the eyelids only on the left side of the eyeball) and the final color image (where the dark blue shadow is more equal over the whole top of the eyeball), so her eye has less character and emotion. The fly behind her butt in the trees should come out as it is just confusing. etc etc etc.

But all in all I am pretty happy with the final illustration, and feel I have learned so much about Painter: brushes, "cover" types, adjusting colors (saturation, value, hue), different layer types, combining layers, using lasso tools as masks, bringing back parts of "lost" drawing into a painting, using references, adjusting using the transparency slider on the layers, varying areas of detail and focus, etc etc.

And I still feel I have barely started to scrape the surface. But if you look in this blog at what I was doing with the cintiq and Painter when I started it, and now, the differences of ease and skill are astounding.

The Schoolism Painting in Painterclass was definitely worth my time and money. A great investment. Thanks to the Schoolism team who troubleshot all sorts of technical issues, and my prof, Ryan Wood, for his clear video tutorials, his calm encouraging voice, his help with questions, his detailed individual aid through the video critiques of our work, and all the other students who shared their work and their critiques online. Best of luck to everyone.