It's All in Your Perspective...

In theory you can make a picture more interesting by capturing a dramatic perspective.  But after I get my perspective I like to exaggerate it.  After all, I draw cartoons.

Using the perspective tool in SketchBook Pro 7 - and then tweaking it - I drew this...

... and was about to paint it when my wife mentioned she preferred a brick chimney to the art deco design here.  I didn't design it; this picture is based on a house located a few blocks from mine.  That's the chimney that came with it.

Anyway, after changing out chimneys I created this:

Nice picture book home but if I wasn't so damn literal I also would have changed out the front door bars for a period door... such as the one to my own 1920's era home.  A solidly built wooden door with loads of glass panels.  Ah well.

In my neighborhood security bars are the rule, not the exception.  And incidentally, the actual house on which this was modeled also has security bars over the windows.

I like the colors and I especially like how physically painting elements on paper rather than coloring them digitally imparts a somewhat cartoon look to the whole enterprise.  Which is what I was shooting for...

The paintings themselves are unimpressive because I do no shading with paint.  If you shade each element independently, I figured, you'll wind up with cross-signals as to where is the light source.  So I wait until I "composite" my elements before applying digital shading.  In spite of that there are still a few glaring cross-signals.  Mwah mwah.

Peace on the home front.  Imagine a retired couple sitting in their living room watching the T.V. or, better yet, reading their books as the sun goes down on yet another gorgeous, unclouded, dry California day. 

Finish a chapter.  Then dinner with a glass of Merlot.  Then to bed, up by 5:00 a.m.

SketchBook Pro 7... a mini review.

Got it a couple weeks ago.  Similar to Adobe, Autodesk (the software house that produces SBP 7) encourages the "subscription" purchase option.  A small amount per year and you get all upgrades and new versions as part of the deal.

The price to subscribe to SBP is more than reasonable... $25.00 per year.  At that price they're essentially giving it away.  If you prefer you can purchase the license outright: $65.00 for SBP 7.  Based on the new functionality being offered... and the promise of yet even more functionality... I highly recommend subscribing.

I won't belabor all the new features.  Their website does a much better job of explaining them than I ever could. 

I haven't even started to experiment with Flipbook.

Probably due to all the new features this version of SBP tends to be buggier than previous versions.  I've had several crashes... and SBP never used to crash before.  And I still can't use the dang canvas rotation feature.  I don't know what it is... I'm running Windows 7 on a fairly new machine.  In truth I have never been able to get that feature to work and I've been using SBP since 2009.

What's infuriating is the ulta-inexpensive ArtRage rotates the canvas effortlessly.  I think you can spin it round and round if you're so inclined.  Corel Painter rotates with no problem as does Photoshop.  So c'mon, Autodesk, what exactly is the problem?

My latest project (next post) was done with no importing to Photoshop.  All the transformation, selection, and gradient tools I needed are now in SBP.  I couldn't be happier. 

Eliminating the unused paper on scans is also pretty easy.   This is part of the work flow if you import paintings and place them into your digital compositions because you'll have to isolate the painted object from the surrounding paper.  Up to now I've used some form of selection tool in Photoshop, refined the selection, and then set a mask to eliminate the paper.

In SBP 7 the process is similar.  Be sure to (1) set your background layer to transparent - another new feature of SBP 7 - and (2) copy the scan layer so you don't inadvertently destroy it and have to scan all over again.

• Start with an overlarge selection using either the lasso or polygonal selection tool.  
• Hit "edit/cut" and the bulk of your unused paper is now gone.
• Now hit the remaining unwanted areas with the "magic wand" selection tool which does a very accurate job.  Again hit "edit/cut."  
• It will probably take a few passes but the painted surface will be completely isolated on a transparent background.

Extremely useful.

The one critical tool you won't find in SBP is Photoshop's Level Control.  With the level control you can optimize each layer relatively easily and quickly.  The adjustment tools that come with SBP are a pretty abbreviated set: adjust Hue/Tone, Brightness/Contrast, Gray Scale, and Invert.  I suppose clever use of the hue adjustment in conjunction with the brightness adjustment can get you close... but it's nowhere near as convenient.

Overall Autodesk has hit another home run with SBP 7.   The new tools are - as we've come to expect - intuitive, easy to learn, and tutorials are available if you need them.  I was using the perspective tool almost immediately, just as if I'd been using it all my life, without any sort of tutorial reference.  It's virtually self-explanatory.

I can't recommend SBP7 highly enough.

Touche Turtle and Dumm Dumm

Much has happened over the past month... all of it "un-art related" ... but I'm back having just completed another piece.

This is based on the Mel Crawford illustration for the Touche Turtle Golden Book:

The large white area to the lower right, of course, is to allow for typeface.  I changed a few things.  The sharp foreground defining Touche and Dumm Dumm's area always looked like a quick cover up of a mistake.  I used a french curve to draw a more sedate forground eye path.

Also, that sickly yellow shading of the cement walkway always looked like the local bums urinate at that bush by the bus and it flows downhill.  Sick, yes.  So no yellow highlighting. 

I think the spaces remaining form a good composition leaving plenty of room for the text of the story.

All elements were painted on paper, then scanned and "composited" to a digital layout.  The pidgeons were the very last thing I painted and I have to say, I really enjoyed painting them.  Quick little paintings but they hold up.

Final shading and touch up was done in SketchBook Pro.  That took about 5 minutes.  Really, Crawford's painted object themselves form a pretty complete composition and there is very little need for finishing.  In fact, it would be easy to overdo it and destroy the quaint quality of the picture.

Now here's an interesting thing about combining physical and digital art in general... and about Photoshop in particular.  Please take a look at that "cloudy" sky.  In fact, the blue sky peeking through the clouds is what was painted; I painted the positive space and let the negative space imply clouds... or maybe it's the other way around, maybe the positive space is clouds.  I dunno.  I can't keep stuff like that straight.

But here's the point.  Rather than commit to a particular shade of blue and then find I have to paint it all over again, I painted that pointillist sky BLACK!  ... not blue, black!  Photoshop then allows you to go back and colorize that black area, and that's how I arrived on that particular shade of blue.  Slick, huh?

Here's another collision between the physical and digital realms.  In some areas such as the leaves of the tree to the left and the foliage adjacent to the building on the right, I superimposed leaves over the sky.  You feel you can see individual leaves.  Now how do you do that when those leaves have been painted... sponged, actually... on a piece of paper?  How do we make the paper "invisible" so we can see the sky through it?

We can do that by setting the blend mode of that leaf layer to multiply.  The multiply blend mode essentially melds to darker colors and absorbs them while the lighter areas are rendered invisible.  This way, the painted area is visible but the white paper on which it is painted disappears. 

But be aware that the multiply mode can create problems, particularly if you set a leafy area over a very colorful background.  For instance, if I set my leaves over a red building the white paper would disappear but the leaves themselves would adopt a red hue.  The "multiplied" layer will absorb the darker colors underneath it.

So in those areas where you want to superimpose leafy or fluffy or wispy textures over a background it can get tricky.  Proceed with caution.  Choose your background colors wisely.

A Lil' Color Theory...

Very little, because it's a subject of which I know next to nothing.  But I think I can recognize tasteful use of color versus garish use of color.

I've never taken an art lesson but in Junior High School I did take an art appreciation class.  I slept through most of it but I remember the instructor telling us, "You can remember every color in the rainbow.  In order, no less!  And it's easy: Roy G. Biv!"

Roy G. Biv of course is an acronym for the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo (?), violet.  I think the indigo is there just to give the last name a vowel.

Anyway it would look like this:

The nice thing is that the primaries, red yellow and blue, nicely sandwich the secondaries, orange green and violet (again, I'm not sure what indigo is doing in there).

Okay, so what.  Well, I know nothing about color design but I do know this: when folks make a cartoon there has to be an effective "read" of the animated cell paintings against the background painting.  That is, the characters or the focus of your action should be relatively easy to see.  And probably the best way to insure that is use opposing colors.

That brings us to this scene from The Man Called Flintstone:

What do you suppose prompted the animators to make the desk blue?  How many blue desks have you ever seen?

Well, my guess is that the blue is the best read again the predominantly orange background.  Consider, a brown desk runs the risk of "blending into" the background:

I used Photoshop to "re-color" the desk.  But notice the brown desk, although IMHO very tasteful, isn't as obvious as the blue.  That is: in theory it doesn't "read" as well as the blue desk (I actually like the desk being brown).

Also consider our color wheel, good ol' Roy.  It might be a little hard to see but blue pretty much is the opposite of the main background color (which I feel is orange).  From a color theory standpoint, I suppose, blue is the color most opposite to orange.

There are other choices, to be sure, but see if you think they work as effectively as blue.

Green works but... ugh!  Garish.

Interesting.  A little busy, maybe.

Red is a little too close to orange, I think.  Not terribly effective.

I'll be honest with you, I'm perfectly fine with the brown desk.  I think it works and I think it contrasts enough to be effective.  But that's just me.

The pros decided a blue desk worked best and who am I to argue?  The lesson is obvious enough: use opposing colors to emphasize "read."

The "Modern" Stone Age

I tried my hand at one of those backgrounds from The Man Called Flintstone.  I chose the one featuring "Bedrock Hospital."  I likes the color scheme... I like all that orange... I liked the contrast, and overall I like the composition.  Very sedate but at the same time it grabs your attention.

Here's my attempt:

I didn't bother with the brontosaurus wearing a whiskey keg a la a St. Bernard that you see in the original.  I think the melodramatic background featuring those bleak mountains is interesting enough.

This was all painted with Cel-Vinyl but, as with most digital artwork, it was built up in layers.  Thus the process was: draw an element, paint, scan, clean up, place in a layer.

I went a little nuts with some things, especially that tree to the right.  I didn't paint it that dark and grey, I painted it with actual colors but then I added shading and I think I overdid it.

I spent all Saturday morning trying to capture the chiseled look of the lettering to the words Bedrock Hospital and Emergency Entrance but I couldn't get it.  Finally I settled for what you see; this lettering was done digitally and a "shadow" put to it.  Meh.  I think if I tried it again I could get it right.

Once all the elements were painted and fitted together I put a tiny bit of lens blur to it in Photoshop and highlighted the orange overall coloring.  The color contrast is nice: orange accented by bright green.  And orange and purple mountains against a light green sky.

As for the Cel-Vinyl, I got it to behave with the addition of a little Blick's Matte Acrylic Extender.  Now it behaves more like a controllable medium rather than drying virtually the instant you put it on paper.  When I called Cartoon Color the other day looking for some of their transparent base, I was told it was out of stock and they wouldn't be getting any more.

I asked if they could recommend something and someone told me polyurethane should work.  Well, the problem with polyurethane is the overpowering smell.  I got a little can but between the smell and the glossing agent (even though I got the "satin" finish) I didn't like it.

I much prefer the extender.  Now it feels like real paint and, similar to what I had read, it behaves similarly to gouache.  Dollar for dollar Cel-Vinyl is actually cheaper than quality gouache so that's something to think about.  I got their "sampler" ... 11 colors and black and white... in the 8 oz squeeze bottles.  Trust me, that's a lot of paint.

Since I have a ton of gouache, though, I think that'll be the medium for the next project.  Stay tuned.

The Man Called Flintstone

Released in 1966, the movie The Man Called Flintstone demonstrates a level of production excellence that we weren't used to seeing in HB TV product.  The animation was very, very good and the backgrounds, well... they were magnificent!

The story was fairly straight forward... Fred Flintstone is a dead ringer for Secret Agent Rock Slag.  When Rock gets injured Fred is persuaded to act as a stand in.

The Pebbles and Bamm Bamm angle really didn't add anything to the story and their silly songs slowed it down.  But the TV audience had grown to love Peb' and Bamm and so it was obligatory the film devote some time to them.

Composite of the aerial view of prehistoric Paris.

I admit I wasn't aware of this movie in 1966... the year I turned 14.  I only saw it recently and I was amazed.  When I watched the opening credits I was pretty sure Maurice Noble had overseen the layouts... but no, this was pure Hanna Barbera.

Hmmm... miles instead of kilometers.  Well, the times were prehistoric, after all.

 

The blue desk (gotta luv it!), the DJ in the fedora, probably even those crazy microphones were on separate cells superimposed over that lovely primary orange and brown background.  There's a real lesson in color here.  Blue and orange wouldn't seem to be compatible colors but this shot isn't garish in the least.

The overall quality of the cell art and especially the backgrounds is superb.  Now this is interesting...

... Bill Perez oversaw the seasoned veterans.  Perez had an extensive biography and as the movie demonstrates he maintained standards of design excellence.  So I guess it makes sense.  Plus, Bickenbach, Takamoto, Eisenberg, Singer, et al must have been extremely busy with all the TV shows they had going every Saturday morning.

Could Bill & Joe possibly have envisioned that within 10 years starting their own studio... within 10 years of pitching Ruff 'n Ready to TV stations... they would be overseeing a project demonstrating this level of quality?

Quintessential HB, this is how they should be remembered.

Gettin' Physical in the Digital World

Well, a month has gone by.  Not a whole lot to report but a few things have happened.

A month ago I got a whole bunch of Cel-Vinyl paint from Cartoon Color... great people, by the way; I spoke to the lady who packed my order and she couldn't have been nicer...

Anyway, I bought all this vinyl paint because I had read on Drake Brodhal's tumblr that it handles like gouache... a paint I am very interested in.

"Working with cel-vinyl acrylic (aka Cartoon Color) is more similar to working with gouache than regular acrylic paint.  It’s what BG painters used on HB, WB, Nick and CN cartoons and is the choice medium for many of my favorite contemporary artists.
 
Cel-vinyl is very opaque, self-leveling and dries to a matte finish. When working in my chosen style, all those traits are preferable over those of regular acrylic paint. Standard acrylic paint has a variety of opacities and sheen even across colors in the same set and is much thicker which can build up (in my case, unwanted) texture. Both dry permanent, but cel-vinyl can paint on various surfaces (plastic, wood, glass, etc) with similar durability to standard acrylic paint. The main disadvantage to cel-vinyl acrylic is that it appears slightly duller and generally can’t achieve the same deepness in its darks or vibrance in its pure hues as regular acrylic. The difference is fairly slight and can be counteracted by mixing in other acrylics.

 To quote a far wiser and more talented artist, “It’s the best stuff on Earth!”

So there you have it, straight from the "horses mouth," so to speak.  An experienced backgrounder endorses Cel-Vinyl as the preferred medium of HB artists.  I just had to have it.  So I bought a box full and tried it.

And hated it.

Basically, due to my inexperience and my complete misunderstanding of the medium, I was disappointed it didn't handle more like watercolor.  Well, it's absolutely nothing like water color.  For starters, it gets sticky and gums up the brush.  It dries damn near instantaneously.  I tried mixing colors on my plastic pallet plate and later I couldn't wash the dried paint off.  And mixing colors, for that matter, is a crap shoot because certain pigments overpower others and what you often wind up with is mud.

On and on.  But those are amateur complaints.  Now I've used it more and I'm learning to love it.  There is, though, a long learning curve.

Anyway, my first few "painted elements composited in Photoshop" projects would up in the trash.  I just couldn't get the Cel Vinyl to work for me.

In desperation I purchased $160 worth of quality gouache paint.  This is starting to get expensive now.   As I say, I was desperate.

My first "painted elements" project using gouache came out pretty well.  I used a scene from the Golden Book "Ben and Me" featuring paintings by Campbell Grant.  I love the simplicity of his designs and I especially enjoy his use of color.

My method is pretty simple.  For these projects I'm simply tracing the elements.  I transfer the tracing to a sheet of good art paper and I paint it.  When all my elements are painted I scan them into Photoshop and arrange them... or as I say, "composite" them.  I'll add a few final digital touches and the result is a series of paintings arranged into one picture.  Pretty ingenious, if you ask me, because that's how you create digital art: you paint different elements on different layers and arrange those elements.

How wonderful, I figure, to use physical pictures instead of digital images.

Here was my layout with all the traced elements combined.  I did this in Sketchbook Pro:

Ben's looking mite ghostly, wouldn't you agree?

Now to trot out the paint and start on Ben.  The time around I really hashed it.  I ruined the coat... I just had no understanding of how to mix color.  And then I tried to re-paint that coat with my Cel-Vinyl... well, you can see where this is going.  Ben was ruined.  Wad up that paper and put it in the trash.

But, wait a minute.  I retraced the coat to a different sheet of paper and tried again.  Here's my gouache rendering of Ben with the new coat superimposed on the original "ruined" painting.  Not half bad... not good, but not half bad.

The reason I actually chose this picture as my project was because of that beautiful wood floor.  I really got a lesson in how to use a liner brush in painting this one:

Then I painted the wall to Ben's right:

This scan demonstrates how gouache is very much akin to watercolor.  Just as temperamental... but we love it, now don't we!

I won't belabor this post with the pictures of the back wall or the lantern.  Both were painted primarily with Cel-Vinyl... see?  I'm starting to get the hang of it.  Here's all the elements "composited":

I even added a parchment-colored vignette style "frame" to the composition.  This picture is pretty similar to the original.

 Now... we take a turn.

I opened the file in Photoshop and thought, hmmmmmmmmmmmm.  I shouldn't do it... but I'm a-gonna do it!

Using the lighting effects filter, I put a spot right behind that lantern and another pin light so we don't lose Ben in the dark... and created something I couldn't possibly do with just paint:

So what do you guys think?  Too much?

Next project should be a Yogi Bear based on a Hawley Pratt/Norm McGary painting.  Stay tuned.