Colour harmony, simplifying lighting and tips to draw from imagination

Heyo!

It's a heavy video focus this week and a bunch of hidden insights I've found useful so strap in for this weeks top resources, thoughts, 'aha moments' and announcements directly from my brain to yours.

---------------

​

- Resources I've found useful this week

​

Video - The art of Moana book review (Adam Duff)

This was a great video by Adam Duff of [Lucid Pixel]( Adam Duff LUCIDPIXUL) for multiple reasons...

1. I love the art of Moana!
2. Adam mentions one of my favourite artists Sam Neilson​
3. He gives a great reminder to explore different, diverse body types in your character designs. Ive got the time-stamp here where he goes a little deeper -> [Explore Diverse Body Types](
   ?t=582)​

​

Video - Colour Harmony and 'Using the greys'​

This is another fantastic video by Marco Bucci as part of his '10 minute to better painting' playlist. It's one that I constantly go back to time and time again. This one talks about colour harmony, and how to 'connect' seemingly opposing colours using greys, highly recommend.

​

Video - Colour notes and 'vibrating colour'​

Another one from Marco Bucci and this time he explores colour notes and how to add that super appealing 'colour vibration' to your art work. The best part about Marco Bucci's content is that he explains the 'why' behind the 'how to'. And that's something I absolutely love!

​

Video - League of Legends Splash Art Process​

This ones from Deiv Calviz and is a great little process video (about an hour long) that shows you the the whole process of the creation of the Splash Art from thumbnails to sketches to rendering and I was especially interested to see how he used 3D tools to get a better understanding of his scenes lighting set up.

No commentary, just fascinating process video that you might be able to get a few ideas process wise from.

​

Video - How to Draw like Kim Jung Gi (from imagination)

This video by Proko was fantastic to throw on in the background while drawing/painting. As it gives real insight into how Kim Jung Gi create objects, characters and places from his imagination, and removes the mystery behind the artwork. Some real nuggets of wisdom in this one.

​

---------------

​

This weeks art thoughts

​

Inventing characters/things from imagination and tackling lighting....

When inventing lighting on a character, I've been starting with the single light source first, I'm finding it's a lot more manageable than tackling multiple lights at once.

And breaking the process further once I get a feel for the intensity/direction of the light starting with...

1. Shadow shapes/terminator (hard lines),
2. The edges of the shadow (soften or harden depending if form shadow or cash shadow etc)
3. Occlusion shadow (shadows in the deep recesses where light finds it hard to get to)
4. Then the center light (brightest part of the object that isn't the highlight) and mid tones
5. Bounce light (one of my favourite parts)

Ive then set the stage for adding extra lights if I want (think rim lights, fill lights etc), fiddling with colours and colour variation and thinking more about materials and potential highlights.

This more structured approach seems to be working for me, instead of thinking about all those variables at once, I'm trying to step back and methodically go through the lighting process, I can always get faster as it becomes second nature.

And like with anything, this can all change as my process evolves or I gain more insights, but this is where I'm at with it currently and loving it so far!

​

Learning while working

I've often times put art courses in the background while I work on painting. But I haven't been doing that as much recently.

This past week I've been doing it a little more (as you can see from this very 'video heavy' resource week) I've started to throw on interviews or random videos of some of my favourite artists on youtube.

I'm finding I'm picking up a bunch of useful tips, tricks and mindset stuff hidden in these videos.

If it's new information, I'll jot it down to explore later, but I often times am hearing very similar things said over and over again from different sources (which is a great sign that It's a really useful piece of information).

I must remember to do this more.

----

​

Hope you're doing great and have kicked some art goals this past week! Until next week...

​

Stay consistent, use reference, have fun with it and remember; it's only pixels baybee!

​

Cheers,

Ben

​

Have any questions or just want to say "hey"?

DM me on:

​Instagram​

​Twitter​

​Youtube​

Email me at b.eblendesign@gmail.com or simply reply to this one.

​