Work in progress: the prigoon again

Lately, I have been wondering whether it is really a good idea to keep the paintings hidden until the publication of the eventual book. If I do not show the paintings, then I should probably keep interest going by writing posts more often. But the kind of posts I write, with literature searches and illustrations made to order, take a lot of time.

Perhaps I should write some shorter posts instead, just short ones, without much depth. Let me known what you think of such an approach.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

 To try it out, here is a work in progress: I have worked on the prigoon's head and back shield. I like painting textures, and thought I should try my hand at iridescence.  The legs need to be detailed, but that is fairly boring work. After that I wil work on the shdows some more, because the animal is a bit flat right now. At the very end I will probably use blurring to create the idea of macro photography.

Arrival at Furaha V: done!

Here is the result of all the previous processes. Is the painting ready? Mostly, yes. There is always a possibility that I decide to change something one day. Sometimes, when finishing a painting, I feel certain that the way it is then is the way it will stay. In other cases I am much less certain, and the 'arrival' painting is one such. It will probably undergo some changes in the future.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

But here it is, for better or worse. The original is 6000 by 4200 pixels, so what you see here is much reduced version. A problem of this design is that it was difficult to work out how much detail and colour there should be in the foreground. One extreme would be to paint the foreground as pure silhouettes, and the other would be to add strong lights in the spaceship so every detail in the foreground stands out. I decided on something in between, and the balance turned out to be tricky: with too much light on the walls these start to be disruptive, in particular in view of the array of colours I gave them, in an attempt to give them a brushed metal look. But it is easy to darken or lighten specific layers in a digital painting, so I can tweak the settings later. I will not look at it for a few months and then it should be obvious whether the balance needs to be changed.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here are the protagonists, Giorgios Bruijningh and Souren Nyoroge. It is interesting that in close-up the colours are much more obvious than in the overall view, in which they are more or less swamped by the planet. The lettering on the window is an attempt to add a bit of futurism. The text is in Neolat, an adaptation of Latin that is very easy to learn for speakers of Romance and Germanic languages. That, at least, is the 'in universe' statement: on our world Neolat does not exist. It could do with another font, but I have not found something suitable yet.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

And here is the ship's cat. This fragment also brings out the Art Nouveau decoration on the floor. I took this from the internet, reworked them a bit, deformed them to get the corrected perspective, and positioned them on the floor as a transparent layer.

So far, I had not painted the technology of this universe. I do not really want to, as it would detract from what it is all about, and also because I do not think I would be good at it. But Spugpow's remark regarding art Nouveau was right on the mark. I may write about that subject another time, but my preference for the aesthetic sensitivities of this future civilisation would be much closer to Art Nouveau and steampunk than to cool, sleek and empty designs. The 'bandes dessinées'  by Schuiten and Peeters come close. Their series on the 'cités obscures' are close to what I would like to see. Have a look at a Google image search of their work here, read the Wikipedia article, or go their own website. The books do not seem to be readily available in English for reasons I cannot fathom.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Finally, it struck me that the painting would serve well as a book cover, so here is the novel 'An unexpected friendship', by one Sigmund Nastrazzurro, a hack writer of little fame.

Arrival at Furaha IV: progress

Well, here is the next video. It shows some further development of the characters. These were painted against a white background, and what you see in the video is that their silhouettes were then painted in a flat dark brown tone. The layer of the silhouettes is underneath the one with the shading of the characters. By setting that shading layer to 'multiply' the colours in that layer will interact with the layer underneath in a specific way. Generally, 'multiply' adds portions of the images that are dark in the shading layer as additional darkness to the silhouette layer, but any light portions will not lighten the silhouette layer.
  Afterwards, I flip on the 'walls' layer as well as the planet layer, that here is simply a render from my Furaha model in Vue. To get a more painterly effect I will later paint it completely anew; actually, at the time of writing I have already done so.
  In the meantime I also reworked the walls. I liked Spugpows remark that the walls had an art nouveau feeling, so I took that literally and decorated them and the floor with Art Nouveau patterns. I will probably show the result of that in more detail next weekend.       

Painting Arrival at Furaha III: characters

In this video I am trying to get a feel for the characters. I added a cat for some mystery; if you have a very large roomy spaceship, you can have a ship's cat too, I thought. Besides, by having it look at the viewer the painting becomes more interesting.
  In the next stage the feeling will change completely: here, the canvas is very light, but the painting as a whole will be dark. It is just easier to sketch clothing this way. I decided that the temperature aboard ship is fairly high, so people wear loose clothing. 

Painting a Cthulhuoid carapax (Digitally painting Furahan lifeforms II)

As blog titles go, this one is not likely to win the prize for 'succinct clarity'. Actually it could, provided readers already knew what a Cthulhuoid was, what its carapax was, and why you would want to paint said carapax. To make matters worse, there formally never was a 'Digitally painting Furahan lifeforms I'. But one earlier post would in retrospect deserve that title.

What does the title mean? Well, the word 'Cthulhoid' describes a clade of marine Furahan animals that do not seem to be able to make up their minds whether they should be pelagic of benthic ('pelagic' refers to the 'just water' part of a sea or lake, not close to the bottom nor to a shore, while 'benthic' refers to the bottom of a sea or lake). Some Cthulhuoids use the tentacles close to their face -hence the name- to move around on the bottom or even create their own hiding places, while others use their fins to propel themselves through the sea. A 'carapax' (a term I prefer over 'carapace') is an animal's armour, say its shell. The cthulhuoid carapax covers the head and usually part of the back. Finally, why would you want to paint one? You, the reader, might in fact not want to do this at all, but I wanted to, to create an image for The Book.

I am not going to spoil The Book by showing major paintings here or anywhere else, but I can make an exception for part of a minor illustration. The illustration in question shows a few examples of the riotous array of colours and structures of cthulhuoid carapaces. The problem with 'riotous' colours, in stripes and spots, is that every spot must be painted in the correct shade for where it is on the object, and that includes different shades within each stripe or spot. With oil paints this proved to be a painstaking job, requiring small pointy brushes, a very steady hand and lots of patience. Digital painting has made painting such complicated objects much easier, as I will illustrate here. I will assume some familiarity with 'layers' (in digital painting, a layer is like a sheet of glass: what you paint on it covers things on underlying layers, but parts unpainted on a layer let you see underlying layers. You can paint on a layer under another layer. I use Corel Painter because it can mimic real brushes quite well.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Let's start with a suitable carapax shape. I modelled one in Vue Infinite and made a simple render in which the 3D shape is overlaid with simple lines that define contours of the shape. These help get the perspective right, in a fraction of the time that a conventional perspective construction would require.  On a separate layer I drew lines with a 'brown pencil' to outline some interesting spots, aided by the lines that help keep the 3D shape in mind, and also help ensure symmetry.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

The next stage uses a layer under the brown pencil one. This new layer contains the basic colour of the beast, which in this case means dark blue sides with a lighter colour down the middle. Note that I made absolutely no effort to represent shading here: the colours are supposed to be completely flat.

 

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

I then added another layer, again just under the pencil layer. On that one I painted the spots an even deep yellow colour, to contrast with the blue underpainting. Again, this is completely flat. Note that the result contain three layers: the pencil lines, the yellow spots and the blue basic colour.  We will leave these layers for now and hide them from view.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Using the same Vue render as before I then painted the carapax again, but this time without colour, using just shades of grey to convey a sense of depth as well as a surface texture with same plates on it. I rather like the way the shininess turned out: the surface is shiny, but more like a pearl than like chrome. The shininess should allow the colours to remain well visible.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

The trick now is to combine the flat colours with the grey layer defining the shape. There are at least two ways to do this. In the one shown above, the grey 3D layer changes the aspect of the solid colours below. There are many ways in Corel Painter or in Photoshop of making one layer affect an underlying one. It is often hard to predict what they do as their names often make limited sense. The result shown above was obtained by applying the grey '3D' layer to the underlying flat colours as 'hard light'. Not bad, is it? You may note that part of the 3D structure indicated by the grey layer is obscured by the strong colours. That is very often the case with strongly contrasting patterns.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

This particular image is based on the opposite approach: the grey 3D layer was used as the underlying basis and the colour layers were moved on top of it, where they affected the grey layer through an option labelled 'colorize'. As you can see the result is not the same, which is part of the fun of digital painting: there are new options to discover daily. Of course, it may be better to stop discovering them and get to work at some point, or you will never get any work done.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Finally, I went back to the earlier version and decided to change the colours on the flat colour layers, which only takes an instant. The blue basic colour became solid yellow, and the yellow spots turned black. The grey layer is again used to provide a 3D aspect to the carapax, but this time I turned down the 'hard light' effect so the highlights are less conspicuous. I then added two shiny spots with fairly sharp edges to get a surface effect like porcelain. On yet another layer I painted flat white regions at the edges of the carapax. These were then made almost entirely transparent to represent reflections of lighter objects in the vicinity. I present this version here to show that separating colour and structure allows for some quick experiments. It is not the way I paint most often though: usually I paint shadows directly, using appropriate colours.

To paint other shells I did not use this method, as I thought that using the same outline every time would make the result boring. Instead, I designed and painted a new shell from scratch each time.  

And there you are; a painted cthulhuoid carapax. The illustration should end up as probably about two by two cm, so it will be small. This particular carapax belongs to the species Myrmillo testudiformis, or in common speech the 'turtleback snigel'. Such shells are collector's items, by the way.