Cast Drawing Workshop

Join me at The London Atelier of Representational Art for a week long cast drawing course aimed at teaching you the fundamentals of drawing from life.

"This short course aims to introduce students to the methods of sight size cast drawing with pencil or charcoal. Using the sight size set up and methods taught on the full time course, students will create a competent reproduction of a cast of their choice. Students will be guided through the process of drawing the cast from start to finish including set up and lighting advice so they may recreate a similar arrangement at a later date"

Dates 30th June - 4th July 2014

Detailed information and booking form can be found here

Check out the LARA website http://drawpaintsculpt.com

Any questions about the course? contact LARA directly on info@drawpaintsculpt.com

2Dartist Magazine

Catch my image "Last Chance" in this months issue of 2Dartist mag.
This months issue has some great artwork in it and tips on how to improve your digital painting.
Go grab a copy here.

More news to come!

Landscape Spitpaints

I have been trying to get a bit faster with my environments and trying out new brushes and techniques, mixed results really but thought I would post a few of them. spent no more than 2 hours on them. Gonna crack on with some more now!

Industry Workshops

The last batch of tickets for Industry Workshops goes on sale today, get them while you can!

If you don't know about Industry Workshops then enlighten yourself here.
Needless to say, if you want to break into the cg industry this is a must.

More exciting news regarding the workshops to follow so stay tuned.

V and A sculpture study

Last night, me and the students from the London Atelier of Representational Art went to the V and A museum in London for our fortnightly sketch meet. I took the laptop along and did a study of this statue. took about 2 hours on photoshop. More photos of the trip on Instagram.

Artstation

Just received my Invite to Artstation.com! Awesome!

Go there to check out my Portfolio and all the other awesome work that on there

www.artsation.com/artist/alexheath

Works in Progress

Here are some work in progress designs I am currently working for a yet unnamed IP I am creating.
Its a real mix of SciFi/fantasy with some weird influences, More on this project in a later post but here are a few designs, still need finishing but that is a job for tomorrow!

Enjoy

Making Copies

Posting a few studies.
For warm up and practice I will do a copy of a painting, film still, photo etc
I do this before getting into a days work but its also very helpful for training. You can learn a lot copying stroke for stroke a master painting, trying to match the colours and drawing it as accurately as possible with the colour. Obviously these are photoshop studies and not in real paint, I'm not that fast.

Here are a few Anders Zorn studies I worked on the last few mornings to warm up, I don't always finish them but if the the photo I am copying has a frame I cut that out and paste it over the copy to frame my image the way the one in the photo is, it really helps to judge values against as its the same in both images.

Also added a film still from Alien 3. I dont spend to long on these, an hour tops. think of it like stretching before a run, just gets the brain working and hands doing what you want them to do.

Painting Rough Metal

Here is a quick example of how I start painting scratched metal, this process can be enhanced by more detail.

This 15 minute process gives you a good base to work from when doing concepts, as its super quick!

I will show you the process on a sphere, but you can use this for armour, environments, vehicles etc

I start by blocking out my basic form, in this case a sphere. I choose a mid value grey to fill it.

I also click the "lock transparent pixels" option at the top of the layers window. this means that I will only be able to paint over the area filled by the circle. I also add a shadow, but this is just for presentation.

Next I make a new layer, set it to Overlay. I take a textured brush and start laying it in with black and white, giving some idea of light direction and form but really just adding texture.

I now make another layer, set that to Overlay too. I now use a soft airbrush and paint the form of the ball using black and white, getting a clearer idea of the lighting.

I add a coloured reflected light to push the form more, also means I can show you another cool lighting trick later.

 I don't go to light as I intend to keep the highlights on a separate layer, its way easier to edit them like that.

I make a new layer and keep it on Normal setting, using a soft airbrush and having white selected i do a quick atmosphere pass to help turn the form more at the edges, this is not a step you always have to do, just in this case it helps the ball read better.

Ok now for the fun stuff!  this is a trick that works really well for reflective surfaces and I use it a lot.

Make a new layer, set it to Color Dodge. Fill the layer with black. You will notice that nothing has changed on the image, that because the black won't dodge anything, but what it does mean is that if you paint into the layer with white, and have a textured brush, you get really natural looking shiny lights, this is because your actually painting into a colour and not just painting white on a blank layer.

I use a textured brush to pick up the detail from my texture pass, I create annular highlights around the light most facing plane of the ball, something you can observe on textured metal.

Now here is a very similar trick but for coloured light, which will enable us to do the same with the coloured reflected light as we just did with the highlights. 

Make a new layer, set it to Screen. fill it with black. Now go to Layer_New Adjustment Layer_Gradient Map, click ok.

Make a gradient that goes from black to a high chroma hue that matches your reflected light (in this case I go from black to orange). 

By now some awful crazy shit has happened to your image, don't worry!

Hover your mouse cursor over the layer palette between the Screen layer and the Gradient Map layer you just made, hold down "Alt" and you will see the mouse cursor change to a box with an arrow facing down, click.

what you will see is that the awful coloured filter disappears and your layers will have been "Clipped" together :D!!

Now for the actual painting! click the screen layer, whatever value you paint into this layer from ALMOST black to  complete white will be the colour of that particular value on that gradient map. So white will be the saturated orange, black will erase and any grey in between will scale in chroma the closer you get to white.

Sounds mad complicated, but once you see what its doing it makes lots of sense, it enable you to paint coloured light on your subject without messing with the rest of the painting, its a very clean way to add light to a surface, and completely reversible! honestly the applications for this are mental, I play with it all the time and its awesome!!

Finally, I add a scratch to the surface, just to show that up to this point we have been creating a base to work on, from here you can add patterned filigree, dents, scratches, blood, whatever, choices are endless.

This process can be adapted to paint a variety of surfaces not just textured metal, so play with it.

Final shot is of my layers just so it makes a bit more sense, I can also send you the file if you email me.

NOW GO PAINT.

Digital Life Drawing

I teach the full time drawing and painting program at the London Atelier
(www.drawpaintsculpt.com).
A huge part of the curriculum is life drawing, in particular long pose figure drawing, with poses up to 72 hours long!!! spread out over many days but still!!

So anyway, on the odd day I take my laptop in to the studio and do some digital life drawing in photoshop.
The rules are simple, no undo, one layer and only one session (3 hours).
This way its as close to real painting as you can get and requires a lot of concentration.
here are the results of two such 3 hours sessions.

After the sessions however I get a bit carried away and start to draw armour over the models, its pretty fun to do after all the concentration to get the figure drawn out.

blogger seems to really hate the colour profile of these images and loses definition in the darks, will have to look into that.

Concept Design Process

Morning.

Thought I would share a few screen captures from an image I have been working on to show a little bit of my process for concept work. I will do a more detailed explanation of the technical side of the process in a new post as there is a lot to cover! but for now enjoy the screenshots.

Any question feel free to leave a comment or email me!

Ok, so when I sat down for this image all I had in mind was that the subject was going to be a character design and he would be "brute" archetype.
Starting with thumbnail sketches I start to explore silhouette and shape design, I use a heavily textured brush to keep the shapes random and interesting, it also ends up working as the skin texture later on too!
These sketches are rough, its not about details at this stage, just a general "feel" for the design.

I end up picking the thumbnail far left on the middle row, to me it has a look of a great white shark with some sort of weaponry and this appeals to me as a fun design to work up.
I rez up the the thumbnail to about 4000 pixels in a new file.

Using the same heavy textured brush from the thumbnails I start to refine the shapes a little more, I work zoomed out still, but try to make sense of the shapes I see to inform a design for what I see as armour. I start thinking of this guys character as I refine the shapes, I see him being a hulking brute, not too intelligent but still self motivated in his intensions, more like muscle for hire than a mindless beast.

I get to a point where I can start to see the direction the design is going in, I feel pretty confident about it at this point so decided to start adding colour. I make a new layer, set it to "colour" and lay in some very broad strokes of the basic colours I am thinking of. 

"color" layers are great for this as they do not affect the values you already have, they just add colour to them, also with them being on a separate layer you can constantly adjust them without destroying the image!

With the basic colours laid in, I start to paint opaquely on top with a new layer set to "normal" I colour pick from the image itself and start to use the values in the image to refine forms and start to block out the weaponry, this stage is really fun to do, everything you need is in the viewfinder so its really quick. time to get some music on and get into the painting. I keep thinking of the character as I do this, adding details that tell a story about him and his experiences, scratches and cuts, scars and dinks in the armour all adding to the believability.

Right now I am pretty into the image and decide to take it further as a design and incorporate a bit more of a scene/stage for the character, this is not something I would normally do for a character design but I got really into the image and so went with it.

I open new layer, set it to "multiply" and fill it with a dark value grey, close to black. I then mask the layer and begin erasing out my "lights", this gives me a really quick way to try out lots of lighting ideas without to much effort or destruction to the image, multiply basically works like a dimmer switch, it makes the image darker and then you can erase it back to get the image underneath to show through. its a quick trick but super effective.

From here its plain sailing, lots of background elements to work on and general painting all over the image to refine forms and design. I have a few more things I am going to add to the image to finish it, but its almost there. I will do a future post about the technical aspects and finishing touches.

First post!

Started this blog to post my studies/works in progress and some tutorials.

Some life studies done at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Catch me there most Friday evenings drawing on my laptop till the battery runs out! gotta be quick!

Photoshop CS6 and an old Wacom intuos 3.