lame lemec's drawings!

[lemec]

If anyone else wants to get PPalette (Eventually, I'll have some sort of official order form), just send me a PM with your full name and email, as well as your request for a commercial or noncommercial license. I can then send an invoice.

Anyways, another doodle, this time with no reference at all.

[masterchief]

OMG! Mark, this is super plugin!!!!

need documentation for all the option... great job!


regards,
William

[lemec]

I've been doing $10.00 sketch commissions ($30.00 for full CG colours) for various people. This was probably the best one of the day.

Mana___coloured_by_le_mec.jpg (44.05 KiB) Viewed 25123 times

[lemec]

These were done on commission for Will Caligan of a character from his comic book, "Outlaw Angel"

[D.T. Nethery]

I've been doing $10.00 sketch commissions ($30.00 for full CG colours) for various people.

Good drawings .

But is that the going rate for fan commissions on DA ? Wow . I think you you should be charging at least $30.00 for the drawing and $75.00 for full color.

Or can you knock them out fast enough that the other price is still worth your time ?

[lemec]

But is that the going rate for fan commissions on DA ? Wow . I think you you should be charging at least $30.00 for the drawing and $75.00 for full color.

Or can you knock them out fast enough that the other price is still worth your time ?

It's the going rate for a guy who's work isn't particularly well-known or popular. The price is that way for the purposes of starting a career, so I can show to prospective clients that yes, I can reliably knock out a drawing of reasonable quality in a short amount of time. I figured that at that price, I'd see an increasing demand of commissions but after the first bunch, all has gone silent. Really popular (and proficient) artists on DA (of which I am neither) can charge as much as $300 for a fully-coloured commission.

My price is set based on supply and demand. There is no demand for the work I produce, and I've got surplus time now. If demand were to increase past the point where I could keep up, I'd raise the price. But that's just not happening for some reason or another. I need at least two things to be successful on DA - #1: be prolific. #2: Make pictures that you can't look away from. I'm neither at the moment, and working on it.

[lemec]

Working on another commission, this time it takes place within a forest.

Prior to this commission, I've never really done many paintings with a lot of foliage, and certainly not ones with a lot of mist in them. I'd managed to work out the composition but painting it was a really frustrating experience, I couldn't come up with anything that looked right. So, I went onto Corbis and checked out a few pictures, looking for one that had similar environmental conditions to what I wanted and used that for colour reference. I sure learned a lot from just looking at the photo for a few minutes and I was able to whiz off a quick colour sketch.

It just goes to show, you can't teach someone who thinks he's a genius, but you can teach someone who's feeling like a half-wit.

[Mandalaholic]

It must be difficult to compete with some of these guys.
http://www.conceptart.org/
So much of their work is quite riveting.

[Paul Fierlinger]

Here is a sample of how Sandra dealt with mist. It’s in the :snowing” folder now, onlt 6 MB. www.video.paulfierlinger.com/snowing/
She uses painted brush strokes of semi transparent white, which is all there is to mist, really; visible clouds close to ground.

[lemec]

It must be difficult to compete with some of these guys.
http://www.conceptart.org/
So much of their work is quite riveting.

I've known about them for a long time, there are a lot of great artists on DeviantArt and many other art communities around the internet. I don't put myself in competition with any of them, even though I constantly observe their work. The most formidable opponents any artist should aspire to conquer are A) Reality (which generates the most realistic images you will ever see) and B) one's own perceptions (which are responsible for how an image appears to people as well as the effect that imagery has on them.

Here is a sample of how Sandra dealt with mist. It’s in the :snowing” folder now, onlt 6 MB. http://www.video.paulfierlinger.com/snowing/
She uses painted brush strokes of semi transparent white, which is all there is to mist, really; visible clouds close to ground.

What I've got here is a depth plane effect, painted on four layers. In retrospect, I could really have done it on one, since I found it was unnecessary to go back and deal with the lighter fog layers.

The bottom layer is just the silhouette of the distant brush and canopy cover. I added in a few thin (somewhat)vertical strokes to suggest the trunks of trees. I painted this first using a very pale yellow because of all the light scattering off the fog. The further off into the fog you go, the more detail is lost and the brighter the "darkest dark" becomes. In addition, any specular glints are lost because they get scattered as well, so really the only detail that can be seen is any shape off in the distance contrasting against the bright sky. I used a rather fine brush on the silhouette edges for far away since things that are far away are small (that sounds glaringly obvious, but it's equally important).

The second layer was painted much the same way, but with sparser, thicker strokes. This second depth plane is much closer to the observer, and so details will both spread out and magnify at the same time, so that's why you'll need a slightly thicker brush to handle leaf detail. I also had to paint a lot of ground cover - I used a lot of radial strokes for bushy stuff, and this did the trick. It's important to recognize the structure of different plants - some are vines and need to be painted with thin, wavering strokes that have somewhat fatter strokes protruding axially off the vine. Others are standing plants which require axial branches at helical intervals with radial arrangements of leaves at their ends. This is all just riding on my prior experience sketching plant life with a fountain pen.

The third layer is more of the same, further spaced apart, but even thicker brush strokes. I had to choose an even darker colour because the mist is really thinning out. This is none other than an approximation of volumetric fog. Ideally, there are the same amount of mist droplets per cubic metre of atmosphere up close as there is far away, a light ray has to pass through a few dozen cubic metres of mist droplets for the back layer, while it only has to progress through a few cubic metres of mist droplets for this third layer. There's gonna be a lot less light scatter. I used a slightly lighter colour on the ground floor in a few areas to suggest light from up high reflecting off the forest floor, as well as to show where the mist was denser on the ground.

The fourth and final layer is for any deep shadow and underexposed regions.

[Mandalaholic]

Paul , have you thought about using the wrapping grid to give the mist a slight bit of movement?

[Paul Fierlinger]

Paul , have you thought about using the wrapping grid to give the mist a slight bit of movement?

We try to stay away from that CG stuff. Ours is a 2D world to the extreme. It's like with SFX; once you start putting a SFX to one thing, you need to put one where ever anything moves.

[lemec]

Paul , have you thought about using the wrapping grid to give the mist a slight bit of movement?

We try to stay away from that CG stuff. Ours is a 2D world to the extreme. It's like with SFX; once you start putting a SFX to one thing, you need to put one where ever anything moves.

I used to work in the special effects industry for 5 years. It was the opposite. We'd try to get away with as little work as possible. Putting SFX on everything was a good way to grind your computer to a halt and make the production go over budget. I use SFX whenever it might actually benefit the image. A little bloom for overexposed regions, a bit of motion blur on anything that looks frozen, and I don't see anything wrong with colour correction for things that are a bit off. I try and make sure the source material needs as few FX as possible in the first place, since FX can only do so much to fix a problem.

The biggest problem is that our medium is 2D. It takes effort to convince the audience that what they're looking at is anything but flat stuff on a screen.

Here's another one I did in under half an hour. No SFX.

The recording is here: http://www.moatdd.com/public_downloads/ ... t_anim.avi

[Paul Fierlinger]

Two opposite worlds of thought -- by the way, by SFX I meant Sound effects.

[Klaus Hoefs]

To be honest, I don't evalute landscape images (or animations) by the amount of layers.
For me it's the emotion which is set free by the landscape image that counts (=aura or =intensity of an image). The artist has transformed it through individual imagination (or say interpretation) based on nature reality. It's simple: as an artist more you love (or hate) what you draw the more you're connected.
Otherwise you stick with technical talk (Imo, that's the note in the margin)
I think, so in an intuitive way the viewer feels if there is an individual connection to the base and how intensive the transformation is.

Mark, your landscape painting doesn't give me the feel of what you painted as content. (And probably it's not meant to be that way).
Sandra (as watercolor artists do) paints with light and it gives different scenes very different moods. Because of the early morning skylight it is quiet romantic (like a CD Friedrich, and btw the deserted chair as symbol coming out of the mist is also pointing to CD F.). The feeling for light is the connection - not the mist. If it would be, it must be a continous creep, soaking out of the swaying gras. If this would be animated it would be in rivalry to the light and would be overdone. But having a closer look to A. and his shivering on his chair you feel the mist crawling under his pajamas without actual moving.