Hello and welcome to this quick tip on how to apply materials in your concept piece.
In this tip Tim Von Rueden takes you through his process on taking a photo of a material and incorporating that into his concept work.
I am currently working on a concept cookie original piece in which I will update periodically seeking tips, ideas, and critique from the community to help create a great concept art piece. For this one, I am focusing on using a lot of material and fabric on top of a dynamic pose to not only push me out of a few of my comfort zones but to create a mood and flow to the piece.
While I was working on the upper torso and into the arms, I realized I could take this opportunity to show how I could take my own photo reference and integrate it into this concept piece. It can be easy to rely on using custom brushes, textures, and materials in your piece but I urge you to use them sparingly and especially if you normally don’t work with fabric or material, to study it and practice drawing them.
* Do not use others work into your own. This means that you should not take a material image off of google and use it in your piece, to save you from possibly getting into trouble, take your own pictures! You learn more that way as well.
For her arms I imagined a satiny type material that would give off a sheen down the center, so I went and found this gold satin material and wrapped it around my leg to give the same cylindrical shape as her arms. I also placed the lighting directly in front to create a shine that would follow down the center. I included the photo in the source files as well for your using if you so desire.
After placing the photo into Photoshop I changed the layer’s blend mode to Luminosity. If you would like to learn more about the different blend modes, Adobe has a great little description for each on their site HERE.
Included with the source materials are the HD video version, the photo reference, the jpeg of the concept image, and the banner.
Below are some of the still frames from this tip!
What style did you mention in this? all I could hear was “painter something” thanks
He said painterly like he was trying to mimic the look of a painting even thought it is digital.
Nice technique.
Tim!
Great work as usual but in future you might want to work a little more non-destructive by, for instance, using a layer mask instead of the eraser and not merging the two arm layers together but leaving them as separate layers.
I know it sounds as if I’m nagging, but really, if you’re working for a client and they want, say, puffy sleeves, tighter sleeves, maybe they want the fabric on the legs instead, or anything else clients can come up with (the mind boggles), you don’t want to start all over again and not get paid for your time because you should’ve known better to start with.
Experience gained through horrible destructive methods and consecutive loss of money and (occasionally) sanity, has made me allergic to the eraser tool and merging layers before client approval …
However, take no notice of me grousing, you are a great artist!
Caroline.
Thank you for that suggestion! I fully agree with you and especially when I see people work solely on the background layer, I cringe a little. One of my problems is working with too many layers so I tend to merge similar layers together. But yes, having layers that you can easily remove or edit upon is key with client concept work!
My pleasure and thank you for answering.
One more suggestion: if layers get in your way, as they do, group them by selecting similar layers and hitting Cmd/Ctrl-G and name the group something that makes sense, e.g. “arms” in this case. It tidies up the layer palette while still keeping everything live.
Caroline.