[ARTWORK] Berzerker Update 31/3/10 Coloured!

[S. Bloodhowl]

ME LIKEY.... ME LIKEY A LOT!!!!!

It was weird, when i stood up my laptop screen showed odd streaks of discolouration in the white background that were invisible at first, lol. Any further thought on a tutorial?

[DV8]

http://i1036.photobucket.com/albums/a445/mabbon/BerzerkerColour.jpg

 

Big thanks to all those who commented, it really helped.

 

1st colouring using Shop..

 

Mostly just crazy experimentation for me the image had a layer for practically ever colour haha.

 

I wasn't going for the cartoony colouring.. that just happened.. Need to learn how to get the feel of realistic detail.

 

Anyways feel free to tell me anything wrong with it..

 

Cheers.

 

Well there's a few reasons why your image ends up looking cartoony. One of the big factors is your lineart. Just having lineart can pidgeon-hole you into a very comic style, and even if you have more realistic/muted/pastel colors, you're still going to end up with a rather cartoon feel. Don't try and fight it, use it to your advantage!

 

Play around with shading, in particular with your tablet pen's pressure sensitivity. Couple it with tweaks to a brush's Opacity (how opaque or transparent) and Flow (how much "color" is laid down per pass) levels, and you can become quite versatile with very minimal effort.

 

As an example:

 

http://www.spacewithinspace.net/images/wips/berserkercolorwip.jpg

 

The blends are quite simple. By simply blocking in the major highlights, I can go back and forth using my Brush Tool and the Eyedropper Tool to grab, lay down color, and create seamless transitions in no time at all. Don't be afraid to push yourself and experiment. Especially as you are new to Photoshop. Don't bother playing around with every tool available. My recommendation is to stick with the Brush, Eraser, and Eyedropper tools. Become familiar with how you can use pressure sensitivity, Opacity and Flow to lay down different "levels" of color. Become familiar with quick-commands too.

 

B - Brush (when using the Brush tool, holding Alt temporarily gives you the Eyedropper tool)

E - Eraser

I - Eyedropper

X - Switch between Foreground and Background colors

Spacebar - "Hand"/Grab tool (hold it and you can drag around the image if you're zoomed in)

 

Become familiar with your tablet pen and customize the hotkeys too! I use a Wacom Intuos 4, and the tablet pen has a two-function button on the side. I use the lower function as my Alt function and the upper function as my Hand/Grab tool, so that I don't even need to move my hand across the keyboard to hit "I".

 

I am being pulled away from my computer now, so I will post more later. If you have questions feel free to ask and I'll answer as best I can. And as a final word, I am self-taught with Photoshop (started using Photoshop in Grade 7), so its not like the program's some super-mystery. All it requires is experimentation, experience and familiarity.

 

 

DV8

[Yogi]

@Dan next is probably another Chaos Marine, hopefully with a background of some sort this time.

 

@S. Bloodhowl; See I thought you were addressing DV8.. Thats why I didn't reply.. The white discoloration is there, your not crazy.. I am not sure which layer its on and it wasn't that noticeable so I didn't fix it. I'm not really qualified to make a tutorial.. give me some time man. I could post the step by steps of the berzerker lineart if you want. Dunno how much that would help though. If you want that just post again.

 

@DV8

 

Ok wow, very cool. I have a million questions but I will try an knock it down to a few. I really like the way you have blended the colours in yours. (looks really cool by the way.. Not sure about the hinged feet though :))

 

So I was wondering if I could get a baseline of what settings you are using and experiment from there..

 

So what softness are you using in your brush? I was using a hardbrush pretty much the entire time.. And I realize a softer brush makes it easier to blend colours together but yours looks like some custom percentage I.e not 0%.

 

Do you have your lineart on the background layer? I heard a couple of times that you should have your lineart on a layer above the colours. Do you know what this is about? Also what is your colour layer blend on, multiply?

 

Colour selection. For some reason I found it enormously difficult to get the colour I wanted. And I would amend this by change different layers to multiply or something else. For example the colours you have used in your gold, they are great.. If I had of found them I would of definitely used them in mine.

 

So equipped with this knowledge I think it would only take a little while to get the basics of blending in the manner you have shown. Playing with the opacity and even the flow (didn't muck around with flow much).

 

And thanks for the hotkeys and what to do with the buttons of the pen. I will used them next time I have no doubt.

[DV8]

Ok wow, very cool. I have a million questions but I will try an knock it down to a few. I really like the way you have blended the colours in yours. (looks really cool by the way.. Not sure about the hinged feet though )

 

No need to hold back. The more you ask, the more you will learn. There is no such thing as a stupid question, the only stupid thing is to not ask, for fear that it is.

 

As for the hinged feet, well I am slightly OCD in that I like to make sure the things I draw "make sense". A Space Marine's foot simply would not bend properly if it was not hinged (take a look at stuff like Transformers, Gundams, MechWarrior, Armored Core, or any decent mecha design, and you'll see what I mean). Without making any radical design breakthroughs, I fell back on my familiarity with drawing stuff like Transformers (I interned at Dreamwave for a year and did a lot of concept art there) and just hinged the feet.

 

So I was wondering if I could get a baseline of what settings you are using and experiment from there..

 

So what softness are you using in your brush? I was using a hardbrush pretty much the entire time.. And I realize a softer brush makes it easier to blend colours together but yours looks like some custom percentage I.e not 0%.

 

I use some of the wet-media brushes (although really any brush works, it's all down to how you use it), with quite a few things turned out. The most important ones though are under "Other Dynamics"

 

http://www.spacewithinspace.net/images/wips/brush1.jpg

 

Here you can see I have my Opacity Jitter and Flow Jitter tied to my Pen Pressure. Essentially, the harder I press, the more opaque and the more color will be laid down per stroke. The lighter I press, the more transparent and less color there will be. The "jitter" simply means it isn't 100% even, so the end result looks more like a natural brush stroke. You can adjust the percentage of jitter for both, I have it set to 0% for both so that it's minimal to nil jitter.

 

I tend to hover around 75-80% Opacity and Flow, and coupled with the Pen Pressure settings above, gives me a wide range of control when I lay down my brush strokes.

 

http://www.spacewithinspace.net/images/wips/brush2.jpg

 

Do you have your lineart on the background layer? I heard a couple of times that you should have your lineart on a layer above the colours. Do you know what this is about? Also what is your colour layer blend on, multiply?

 

I work with as few layers as possible. Here's the layer organization for my Berserker illustration:

 

http://www.spacewithinspace.net/images/wips/layers.jpg

 

The Background layer is just a plain white fill.

 

The Color layer is just that, where all the colors are. What I'll do is I'll make a new layer above it, color the section I'm working on (say the helmet trim). Once I finish coloring that section, I'll tweak till I like it, and then once I correct any over-paint, I merge it back down to the Color layer. This way I'm not scrolling through a billion layers. That being said this is quite a simple illustration, so I don't really make any effort to break it down. Something much more complex, I would section off or break down further (Say for example this).

 

The Lineart layer is actually quite special, and takes some explaining. When you scan your lineart, you want to run it through Photoshop Levels to essentially get your art as clean as possible. That means you will have your lines, and then clean white fill/space around it. Now obviously you can't quite color it because you'll cover up your lines! There are three ways around it.

 

The first is to simply color on new layers on top of the lineart, and with this approach the final illustration will have no lineart, and this is actually what a lot of GW artists do. You use a quick sketch to block out your shapes/plan out your illustration, then paint on top to get a more painterly, realistic result. Quite difficult, I'm still trying to practice this.

 

The second is to take your Lineart layer, set it on Multiply, and always keep it at the top. What will happen is that anything white becomes transparent (you won't see the change but Photoshop does all the work), anything black becomes opaque. Anything in between becomes varying degrees of translucency (depending on if it's closer to white or black). You then color on layers underneath, and what will happen is that your lineart will still show through, but you don't have to bother getting rid of all the white space around it since it won't even be visible in the end.

 

The issue with this approach is that your lineart, unless you drew it in a lighter color (or the color you want), will end up highly visible and quite dark, which further pops it out and reinforces that super-defined cartoon look. Some like it, I don't, as it can look quite harsh. And with this method it is very annoying and difficult to tweak/adjust the color(s) of your lineart.

 

The third, and this is what I use, is to run the Lineart layer through a special filter called a "Ghost" filter. It's a custom plugin that you will have to find and install (it doesn't come with default Photoshop, simply google "Photoshop Ghost Filter"), but is incredibly handy. What this filter does is it first desaturates the image, so it's greyscale. It then takes all the white, and knocks it out, leaving just black (grey is simply black + white, so with white gone, you end up with translucent black lines). What this leaves you with is a transparent layer, with just lineart, and nothing else around it. If you leave this layer on Normal, and color on layers underneath, you get the exact same result as in method two I described above, with the exception that now you can make easy modifications to the lineart.

 

If you take a layer, and put a transparency lock on it (in the layers palette, it's a button that looks like a checkerboard), any brush strokes, fills, gradients, whatever that you apply to the layer, will only affect what's on it. So if you have for example, a transparent lineart layer with nothing but black lines, and you applied a fill to the entire layer without a transparency lock (say red), it would fill the entire layer red, and you'd lose your lineart.

 

However, if you put a transparency lock on, and then applied the fill, it would only fill where there is lineart, essentially leaving you with a transparent lineart with nothing now but red lines. And that's why my lineart looks brown. Because it is brown, and no longer black.

 

Colour selection. For some reason I found it enormously difficult to get the colour I wanted. And I would amend this by change different layers to multiply or something else. For example the colours you have used in your gold, they are great.. If I had of found them I would of definitely used them in mine.

 

Find reference, use your Eyedropper tool to pick colors from there. Google pictures of Gold, Chrome, Metallics, etc. Never assume that you have to choose the colors yourself.

 

EDIT:

 

I also forgot to mention two very important hotkeys that will VERY much come in handy for you.

 

Zoom in-out: "Ctrl +", and "Ctrl -". "Ctr +" zooms in, "Ctrl -" zooms out.

Brush size: "[" and "]". "[" decreases brush size, "]" increases it.

 

 

DV8

[S. Bloodhowl]

I kinda like the cartoony look, makes it look serious and funny at the same time.

[Retributis]

Yogi: I like the colouring, but it's very much looking like you were going for a cell shaded technique, there's no gradient of shadow there. Do you watch a lot of anime? ;)

 

and DV8: I will say that although your picture is awesome, something doesn't sit right with me on the orientation of the legs with the body...

[Yogi]

Ok DV8 that reply was Aces.. Everything was really helpful. The way you make the brush work is really enlightening to me. Also all the info you have posted is now in word doc. I'm gonna take all this information and see what I can do. Plus the hotkeys are gold!

 

@Retribus - I did watch a fair bit in the past, Cowboy bebop and so on. But I think its from my vague recollections of spawn comics from way back when.

 

Thanx & Cheers to everyone back soon with something.

[DV8]

and DV8: I will say that although your picture is awesome, something doesn't sit right with me on the orientation of the legs with the body...

 

It's this pose, with the upper torso slightly twisted more to the left (my left, your right)

 

http://www.spacewithinspace.net/images/wips/awesome!.jpg

 

If anything, the legs could be larger, but the orientation is correct. It's just a funny angle to look at that particular pose.

 

 

DV8

[Retributis]

I think it's just because his right thigh (our left) looks a bit more "open" than his knee/lower leg would suggest, but it might just be because the shading/highlights are in the rough stages ;) I look forward to seeing how it carries on.

 

Are you going to do more to your pic yogi?

 

EDIT: I'm also really envious of how clean your linearts are, anything I do in pencil is always really sketchy and so a bummer for me to start painting over digitally.

[Yogi]

Was a lil' bit busy.. but this is a skeleton of what I am doing right now.

 

http://i1036.photobucket.com/albums/a445/mabbon/thanx.jpg

 

Also for the record my linearts are via tablet as I don't have a scanner. As to doing more to the original .. I'd say not right now.. but the option is there.

 

 

EDIT: Also this is done sans reference (mostly cause their aren't any good ones for these poses).. my defense if anyone thinks its crappy.

 

Cheers

[Dan The Deamon]

Alpha Legion and Black Templar?

 

What is sans reference? The marine on the left looks a little awkward but i don't know what sans is so it's hard to really crit.

[Yogi]

It means that I drew them from my mind.. without looking at stuff. Which is considerably harder..

 

But please feel free to crit harshly.. Looking back at them now I think.

 

The Alpha Legionnaire's left arm is too long, knife is wrong etc.

 

Btw the Alpha is supposed to be dodging the BT's downward swing and then shooting BT in the face..

 

EDIT: Im kinda embarrassed I posted this now.. looking at it more thoroughly.. Oh well, just shows drawing can be hard..

[Starks333]

@DV8, the problem is in the lower portion...your crotch always faces the direction you are going, right now his legs say hes going left and right, or walking incredibly bow legged :)

 

@yogi, when drawing marines, the most important thing to do is start with a skeleton of your pose, as in, pre-armour...if you go into armour right away you are going to have non stop amounts of anatomy issues because of the impractical design of the armour.

 

as cool as it may look, having big fanned out lower armour makes it impossible to run, unless you enjoy the thought of a marine running like a penguin. the best way to avoid this is keep the front of the lower armour more straight, the sides a slight angle outwards and have the biggest on the back

 

the thigh plates on the marine armour should be massive, if these guys are genetically modified superhumans, they will have thighs the size of small vehicles. if you want someone to look powerful it starts at the hips. While i respect the talents of many artists for the anatomy or ability to pose things, the thing they lack is a first hand experience of powerful movements.

 

if you are just playing around for fun, by all means, but if you actually enjoy seeing your work become more than it is, i recommend watching olympic sprinters, bobsled, powerlifters, wrestlers, hurdlers, javelin and shots, discus, and so on. Then try and act them out. What you will hopefully gain from this, is the understanding of body dynamics, weight control and placement, and most importantly as my coach says, "where the power lies, arrrrrg"

 

when it comes to colouring, well, lets just say that a whole other ballpark, stick with the drawing part, when you get that rolling and more comfortable then we can move on to colouring ;)

 

PS never be ashamed of your work, because if you want to put it in perspective, you are already ahead of countless thousands of people, regardless of whos ahead of you

 

PPS, DV8, since you read this thread so much, finish your Rune Priest concept already, so i can sculpt! jeeez!!

 

Alex

[Aqatone]

the thigh plates on the marine armour should be massive, if these guys are genetically modified superhumans, they will have thighs the size of small vehicles. if you want someone to look powerful it starts at the hips. While i respect the talents of many artists for the anatomy or ability to pose things, the thing they lack is a first hand experience of powerful movements.

 

 

I'd just like to emphasise this by quoting it. The only games workshop artist I have seen who actually understand this are Paul Dainton, Adrian Smith and Karl Kopinski, but he seems to deviate from time on his marine drawings.

 

Some examples:

 

Paul Dainton:

To me this is a perfect rendition of a space marine, I can't fault it one bit. The thighs are what you'd expect from a genetically engineered post human super warrior in power armour. His chest and waist are perfectly matched to the scale of his lower legs to give you a sense that this guy is FILLING the armour. The only thing I don't like about this image is his tiny gun. But that's not what we're commenting on.

 

http://dreamworlds.ru/uploads/posts/2009-05/1242726782_1232846752_paul_dainton_thorbrand_hunter_squad7e0.jpg

 

Adrian Smith: I love this guys drawings of power armour so much I have this picture of Sarpedon of the Soul Drinkers from Ben Counters book framed on my wall above me. Again, like the above picture I can't fault this one at all, everything is as it should be in terms of scale and bulk when you think about how big and strong these guys are supposed to be. Again look at his leg, it's as big as a truck. Excellent drawing.

 

http://img.myconfinedspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/soul-drinkers.jpg

 

Karl Kopinski: He's done some excellent stuff in power armour and I think this picture of Raven Guard is one of his best.

 

http://www.karlkopinski.com/images/portfolio/178.jpg

[Firenze]

Yogi: The new pic looks similar to one Ive been trying to do for a while, I just couldnt get the pose right.

 

Your colouring style is real cool, I love it. Mines inbetween yours and more realism, almost half cartoony if you get my drift

 

DV8: I think Ive got the same tablet as you. Only Ive got Painter Classic.

[Yogi]

Ok wow.. Yet again the BnC delivers really helpful knowledge..

 

First off I have to say I have been rushing myself for some stupid reason.. basically since I started this thread.. And the reason I was embarrassed is because I realized I made mistakes with poses that DV8 told me how to avoid.. So I'm gonna take my time from now on..

 

@Starks333

 

I have real trouble drawing skeletons for marines.. May have to try more in this area.

 

as cool as it may look, having big fanned out lower armour makes it impossible to run, unless you enjoy the thought of a marine running like a penguin. the best way to avoid this is keep the front of the lower armour more straight, the sides a slight angle outwards and have the biggest on the back

 

I dont really get what you are talking about here. Are you talking about the angle at the top of the thigh armor.. and how it leaves no space for movement? Sorry I don't know.

 

And I am definitely trying to get better.

 

@Aqatone

 

I think it has sunk in.. Thigh plates that are huge! Always.. like Trucks. Always. haha

 

Those are some pretty swish examples.. Kopinski has been my fav GW artist for ages now.. That Soul drinker picture though.. To me his left leg is placed way too far left.. Should be to the right and down IMHO.. But you know different boats float different folks..

 

@firenze.. Thanx for the compliment.

 

 

Anyways.. Thanks everyone for the amazing feedback.. I've learnt so much from this thread, its pretty incredible.

 

Just need to take my time to apply it.. Emperor Willing..

 

Cheers.

[Starks333]

when i say skeleton, i mean muscles, not necessarily bones...its the part under the armour to allow you to make a pose and then clad him in armour...this will show just how bad amrine armour is to work with :rolleyes:

 

 

as for the lower armour...when a person walks, or runs, their feet are usually about 4-6 inches apart, which means if you have giant armour that gets even thicker towards the feet, you are going to struggle moving, this is one big issue i have with marines is that you cant pose them because their armour is non functional

 

the only way to make it functional is to thin it out, not thickening towards the ankle on the front(to enable ankle movement) minimal thickening on the sides(to enable normal walking) and adding thickeness to the rear of the lower leg, since the only motion it will affect is ful out sprinting, which in massive armour like that you wont be doing anyway! it will help bulk the armour a bit

 

if you want some of the best examples of "freaks", look for pictures of NFL athletes. There are guys about 6'6 250-300lbs that are both immensely strong and incredibly fast, possibly a great base for space marines. Guys like Tommie Harris, Julius Peppers etc...To put in perspective, those 300lbs guys run faster than your average canadian athlete

 

 

Alex