Environment Design Rocks!

[Andy R]

Hi everyone! Dude some real cool works ive seen from my classmates!! Way to go guys! Its super cool to see what you guys have come up with! 

Here i leave my assignment week 02.

[ZombieChinchilla]

Hey Amit, you mentioned you might give a small assignment to tide us over until you post the third one, but I couldn't stay to see, did you?

[MehdiVdC]

Hey Zombie

It's a plein air assignment: go outside and find yourself a pretty/interesting sight, observe it and try to take in what's going on (lighting, composition, etc.). Take some pictures of it as reference and get it down with your favourite medium. We have to use colour btw.

Here you go.

Before I forget, you can do as many as you want + you can take additional pictures of the entire area to get yourself a mood board/reference.
Our third assignment will be focused on lighting, especially towards mood and day cycle (morning, noon, etc.)

[keeny]

Hey guys,

I thought I should at least post a WIP from week 2 considering I'm SO far behind at this stage. I don't know why - but each drawing seems to take me AGES. Hopefully speed comes with more practice. I spent all day Sat & Sun on the top 4, but they're still less than 50% complete of what I intended.

I actually resorted to 3D in an attempt to speed up the process - to establish some perspective guides. I know that's probably ridiculous overkill for such a simple task.

I know I'm so so late with this, but any feedback from you guys is welcome!

Cheers,
Barry.

[Amit Dutta]

Crits for week 02 are all done, if you don't see your crits in the crit folder this week, they were done during the livestream yesterday. These were the ones I did:
Gecko, Punk-a-Cat, Broadway, Xiaogabe, MehdiVDC, Vlada.

Thanks to everyone who showed up, I might consider trying to do these crits live next time instead of recording individual videos. It's fun having people around while I do them, and you get to ask questions if you can catch the stream. Let me know if you have a preference?

And for anyone who doesn't know, the details of the optional study assignment are given at 1h30 into the week02 stream. It's a great exercise to do, I probably learned the most about lighting and colour from doing these myself!

[Cyprinus]

I watched the recording yesterday! It was really insightful to listen to the other crits. I'd really like to do the optional study assignment, but right now it's like...raining and snowing outside and you can't really see a thing. I'm hoping that the weather gets better this afternoon or tomorrow. If not I'll just do it later...maybe I'll try to fill my visual library a bit in the meantime with scribbles from photos etc.

For me it's really difficult to decide what I like better for the crits! Certainly I like the idea of being able to ask questions directly and clear things up even more. About the individual crits I also like that I can download it and save it to EDR! folder. (Maybe that would be possible with a stream too, but I haven't looked into that yet).

[Amit Dutta]

@Cyprinus: Thanks man, I am saving all livestreams to file as well, but perhaps I will stay with the short format on second thoughts. I can start stop them if I need which is convenient.

And Finally. 
This week is COLOUR AND MOOD. Shiz's about to get real....but just have fun with it guys :)

You have a few extra days to do this one, but there is also the optional study assignment, which is very useful to do at some point, for your own learning.
 
@Punky, I know traditional will be nothing like this workflow, but I am after the same thing, 3 different moods, and use reference.

Demo


Assignment





The next week we will be done with one off assignments, and we will get started on a little mini-project / client-brief where we will start creating a finished piece (or as many as you can manage) that hopefully will be portfolio worthy! FUN TIMES AHEAD

[U-3C]

...c...c...colour....

QAQ

[Lordminkx]

Hey guys!
This is what I'm gonna color! I did a new piece following and keeping in mind his crit, it's not perfect but it looks quite better than my last ones lol. I used an old notan sketch from the first week,  I'm starting to see notan power haha. I know it's a cliche image but I wanted to keep it simple. Looking forward to see what you do this week guyyyz! 

[wasgodx]

This is a disaster ;_;

[Amit Dutta]

Hey wasgodx, A couple of points, I think your references could be chosen a little better given your environment. They are maybe a bit too different from each other. You also tried to do a light situation that doesn't exist in your ref which makes it x10 harder. You really have to think about and show the lit side vs the shadow side 'correctly' in order to show form which is why yours appear a bit flat. The light direction has to be consistent, ie come from the same direction otherwise it will look inconsistent, and your light beams are just a single colour over everything which is not the way light behaves in reality. Each object is affected differently by the light.

I am probalby going to talk about how to pick good reference a bit later, but here are some I might have picked depending on the forest you are after. links below image:




http://buzzerg.com/wp-content/uploads/85...per-hd.jpg
http://images.summitpost.org/original/797349.jpg
http://ineluctable.org/ieatfood/blue_rid...arkway.jpg
http://stockarch.com/files/14/04/conifer_forest.jpg

[Bookend]

Hey, I wanna ask about my reference.  I'm not sure if it has enough contrast to be considered worthy of this assignment.  (Plus, the place where I took the picture got cordoned off, so I can't take anymore pictures of nicer contrast).

Thoughts?

My progress sketch is here too...  I'm really struggling.

Should I get a new reference, or is there something I can do to improve my sketch?

[Amit Dutta]

@Book. Why are you after more contrast in particular? That reference image, if anything has too much. It is overexposed, especially in the sky and is actually a perfect example for this exercise why photographs don't do "reality" well.

If I were you I would pay more attention to the notes, and your own observations while at the scene. Did you take good enough notes the first time to be able to recreate what you saw? THIS is actually the whole point of the study, and what you want to capture. The reference is just there to jog memory, not be relied upon as totally accurate for the lighting conditions as they were.

If you keep going back to the same scene, things will drastically change each time since it is outdoors, so I'm not sure if that will help at all.

The value sketch looks fine to me. But again, you might be relying on that reference photo too much by blowing out the sky a bit too much., it's a good start anyway, you can adjust as you get into colour.

[Bookend]

@Book.  Why are you after more contrast in particular? That reference image, if anything has too much. It is overexposed, especially in the sky and is actually a perfect example for this exercise why photographs don't do "reality" well.  

If I were you I would pay more attention to the notes, and your own observations while at the scene. Did you take good enough notes the first time to be able to recreate what you saw? THIS is actually the whole point of the study, and what you want to capture. The reference is just there to jog memory, not be relied upon as totally accurate for the lighting conditions as they were.

If you keep going back to the same scene, things will drastically change each time since it is outdoors, so I'm not sure if that will help at all.

The value sketch looks fine to me. But again, you might be relying on that reference photo too much by blowing out the sky a bit too much., it's a good start anyway, you can adjust as you get into colour.

I meant more stark differences in the values-- More darks, in particular.  As you say, it's really blown out and bleached, and very same-ish..  So I was concerned that it wouldn't be a good reference point.

And, like I said, I can't go back to the spot because construction work is being done in that area and they put up big metal fences.  Really inconvenient.  I am considering going out and sketching up a different place, anyway..  I'm not too satisfied with the photo or the notes I have on it.

[Amit Dutta]

Well maybe you can do another setting if you don't think you have enough to try, but one visit to the scene should be enough. Again the main idea is to wean you away from this reliance on photos alone and to see how different the scene looks when you paint "from life" (this is essentially painting from life)
I am trying to get people to observe and deconstruct things more consciously from life, as well as apply that to paintings from photo reference.
The better thing to do would be to paint plein-air directly, but that brings up other issues. GO for it if you can! You can also just paint things lookinng out a window near your computer, or even a corner of your room in natural light. Easiest thing to do, just as valuable.

[art44]

my wip :



any crits ? .. thanks amit

[Amit Dutta]

Nice Art44! Just keep going. Perhaps pump a bit of atmosphere between the foreground and the tree on the left for that bottom image, to push it further back than your main tree. That big light beam is a bit too exaggerated and sharp, blur it, smudge it, more transparent soft brush, use something like screen/soft light/color dodge to get a more luminous light drop off .

This isn't colour related but the scale read on the tree is still conflicting, if you want it HUGE you will have to adjust the textural scale and the river brush strokes to be a lot smaller to imply that scale. Small areas of light reflection, scaled vegetation etc. The birds aren't enough. Also try varying up those birds in size, depth and value to help show receding depth and scale.

Only other thing is for your third, really change up your palette and totally change up the lighting. These are both moody and cool. Perhaps next one is bright warm sunshine coming from behind the viewer, and showing more of the foreground than just silhouette?

[wasgodx]

Amazing job art44!

And thanks Amit for the tips, I'll try them tomorrow :D

[ZombieChinchilla]

Anyone willing to nudge me in the right direction? I'm struggling because I feel like perhaps my original value sketch isn't good enough for it to look okay with color. I might do a completely new one, but I can't decide if that would be a waste of time.



The bottom one isn't complete with its colors yet.

[KurtJeremy]

@Zombie I would try to give a go again,making sure youre value sketch more defined. solid lighting and all that.
theres still alot of time to do them, so if youre struggling and thought of starting over do it now while theres still time.