~ wish I was there ^^

Maybe next year!

:D maybe!

Dammit! It's in my city and I'm not there! Grr!

You missed out of Frolic tonight too then which was a block from the con, no badge to buy. :D

There's always next time!

totally stop by there it was amazing will look out again tmmrw! :3

Cheers if you dropped by, and if not, see you next year!

Kamui,

Thanks a lot for the color theory talk!!!

You did reference me to James Gurney's blog for that (dynotopia, right?) Might as well verify and share it with all your followers that attended:
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com

The guy selling books on the same isle as Rukis towards the end has J. Gurney's books, including "Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter" and it looks f*g amazing!!! It seems to cover a topic every 2 pages.
http://www.amazon.com/Color-Light-G...../dp/0740797719

When the video of the talk is available, plz make a post so I can see it again ^_^

TECHNICAL QUESTION:

I will still try to figure out the math behind color mixing with colored lights. :) In that realm I have one more question, if you have insights on that:

- You said PS uses a HSV model to represent the drawings
- I use Gimp, and I suspect it uses a RGB model underneath

The question is the following:

If you paint a layer, then adjust it, and you decide to make it very, very dark. Later you decide to brighten that layer again. So you pull the value up again (Brightness). Do you loose the vibrance of the color in PS, or do the colors start to posterize?
I am asking because with a RGB model then the darkening should be destructive. Say you have a red FF-20-20, that you darken a lot to say: 10-0-0. You've lost all G/B info, and reversing gets you FF-00-00, because each channel has only 256 discrete colors.

I thought I'd hit that problem in Gimp when trying to layer light sources to color a piece, as an experiment, because I made my base surfaces dark colored, lit by layers of 3 light sources:
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/6110836

Notice how the final result is dull :P
- Maybe the blue suit (base very dark blue) looses vibrance, because it needs to get re-saurated as I re-brighten it with light layers?
- Maybe there's magic that you can't explain and need to over-saturate and hue shift the highlight colors with a color wheel, so masking lights will never work
- Maybe it is because the colors don't mix: you mentioned complementary turn gray and muddy in gradients and i made that mistake: Blue <-> yellow and green!

blah I'm still taking advantage of your willingness to talk colors. :P sorry :D

My idea behind this (failed) method:
1-flat color the character, even if colors, textures are complex, lights are not mixed in yet.
2- cut out a mask of the character, and etch the shading assuming a light direction. Ignore falloff of the light even if it is punctual.
3- light in the mask, either punctual (like the rings) or diffuse (like the moon), and adjust light in one click instead of retouching painterly style on single layer.

Sorry... now it's a long post :/

sorry you replied to me not Kamui D:>

That's the blog, yup! Super useful stuff there, as well as in his books -- definitely check them out!

Moving on to your questions:

1) Any digital painting program should use the same color model, even if the color picker tool and other GUI decisions are slightly different. The big difference in the way color works is between additive color and subtractive color. All digital art uses additive color, and all traditional media uses subtractive color. That's a factor of the physics involved in how the color is being created, and is not just a design decision that could vary from one program to the next.

2) In digital painting, if you make a piece very dark or very light, then bring it back into the middle range, you will lose color information, yes. As you suspect, you've taken a full range of values and collapsed it down to only include a smaller range of (darker) values. You can then shift that range back toward the middle, but there's no way to accurately expand that range back to its original breadth. You could either have an unposterized narrow range of only midtones by just lightening the piece uniformly, or you could force the range of values to spread and get a posterized broad range. There is no way to get back an unposterized broad range without adding new color data (ie, painting new values in manually).

3) The reason why your colors are getting muddy and desaturated in that piece is mostly due to reason #3 -- you've got blue and yellow cross-fading, so everywhere along that gradient is going to be pretty neutral/muddy in hue, leading to a lot of greys. Even if you crank up the saturation, you're still going to have gray. The painting problem you're running into is how to paint figures with multiple colored light sources, and your mistake was to make each light source a diffuse, directionless glow that hits all surfaces of the figure equally. Instead, think of the figures as three-dimensional objects -- the yellow light would hit the surfaces that are tilted toward the yellow light source. Same with the green light. The light blue moonlight would only illuminate the edges, casting a rim light on the figures. There may actually only be very few areas that are lit by all three light sources.

Here are a few examples of strongly directional lighting from my gallery, if they help. Notice that the color of the lighting only affects the surfaces the light picks up.

Gold rim/side lighting
Yellow/orange side lighting
Yellow under lighting

In general, so long as you know the brightness and angle of the light (which is important for rendering values correctly), you can always get the hue and saturation right later.

Interesting to read your perception:
Actually, I did light according to what you say: each lighting mask is for one light source, then multiply. Each mask is fully shown with a uniform fill light, but rings have a gradient light inside that mask. The mask does become quite sloppy far away from the source. Now, it tells me maybe my shading sucked on this :D

Final looked like this:
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/6274630

In 2) my point was (sorry I am a CS nerd) that if color is encoded HSV and not RGB, darkening does not change H,S, so there is no loss of color precision. In RGB, all 3 channels drop, and there is loss of color information.
However you made me realize there would be a loss of brightness precision, since there can be such a gradient in the colors of the surfaces even before i light them it would fail too as an approach, just not as badly since that gradient would be narrow and dull (before lighting).

Was an awesome panel and learned a bunch. Hoping I can actually make good use of it.

Cheers, and good luck! Like I say, try picking just one thing to focus on and really keep that frontmost in your head while you're working. That tends to really help me!

KAMUI DEFENSE FORCE REPORTING IN:

It was crazy awesome getting to see you in person and be a creeper in general! Though that aside, your panels were stupid helpful and I learned a bunch. I'll be looking forward to applying techniques learned to my art, thank you!

Also, hope your arms didnt fall off from holding that portfolio all weekend olol

Only the left one!

And that's awesome to hear, dude. Glad it was useful! Now go make more art!

I totally made a furry account so I could post furry things like you. And I recorded you, for an entire hour.





Man, doesn't that sound creepy or what?


In all reality, you totally owned both of the panels despite technical difficulties and interruptions. Did you give that friend of yours a stern talk? Regardless, I took plenty of notes on my sketchbook over both of the topics, and I would say that I'm having the darnedest time trying to not zoom in or out of my pieces anymore when working digitally, or undoing things.

That, and even though I would absolutely love to write out a near essay of questions I have for you based off of color theory, composition and of the like, I'm too tired to write it, and I bet you'd be exhausted to respond to it properly. Amenophis basically covered a good amount of information and advice from you! I guess one question would be: What types of books would you recommend for compositional design, or color theory? Especially color theory, since there's a lot of convoluted books that just give color swatches and tell me what they're stylistically suitable for. I remember getting some excerpts from my Color Figure Drawing class about the proportions of color between complimentary schemes to make it feel balanced. Such as having a 80%/20% ratio between Yellow and Purple, and core shadows have the most saturated color or something like that.

Also, how do you go about making such fancy embroidery or textures for your art pieces? Do you make it by hand using Illustrator, Photoshop, Corel Painter, or do you rip it off of photo or texture sites and apply it to your work? Specific examples would be here:

Vacay - http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1436556/
the Seventh Chakra - http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3130957/
天体観測 - http://www.furaffinity.net/view/2724998/
Coffee Cats - http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1625098/
Vigil - http://www.furaffinity.net/view/2349895/


Also, you say you go for a Norman Rockwell approach to your one-shot narrative or plug in animals at a whim. Do you ever intentionally make something a certain species design-wise, and how do you tackle their aesthetics? Ever regretted choosing one animal over the other, then switched midway? Ever scrapped any ideas after investing hours to do that pelvic fix you kept mentioning in your lectures? My guess is yes, but who knows! I'm just foolishly curious.

Dammit man, it's nearly 3:00 in the morning, and your Vacay picture forced me to lollygag in every single one of your gallery and scraps pieces for minutes each at a time to find it. And I also made a huge fatty comment. And I know for a fact more questions will pop up, and I'll want to make you countless of unhealthy desserts.

Er, finally, sketch more on paper damn you! I love your design work, get loosey goosey like Voln or something!

Glad you found the panels worthwhile! And yeah, resisting the temptation to zoom in to 300% all the time is rough at first, but once you get used to it, life is soooo much easier...

For books on color theory, James Gurney's is a great place to start. His blog is amazing, and his books are wonderful collections of that knowledge. Plus he's a cool guy. Richard Schmid's Alla Prima is another amazing resource on color (and painting in general), but it's a bit pricier than the Gurney books.

As far as proportions of color to make a piece feel balanced, I think there's a lot of room for deviation from any set rule. In general, your lights will be warm or cool while your shadows are the opposite, and generally the most saturated areas are the borders between light and shadow.

I vary on fancy pattern work. I really enjoy drawing floral patterns and frames, so all of the flower drawings in my work (the vines in Seventh Chakra, the chrysanthemums in 天体観測, the flowers in Coffee Cats and Vigil) are done by hand, usually in pencil, then scanned in. Other more complex arabesques, like the wallpaper background in Seventh Chakra or the paisley in Vacay are prefab textures that I've just dropped in.

I sometimes play with species intentionally, sure. Like I mentioned in the composition panel, playing to (or subverting) things like predator-prey relationships can be fun. I have a number of pieces with fox-rabbit couples, and the rabbit is almost always the bigger/more protective party. Or the fox leading the lion in the Heat cover is comical because of their species (and corresponding size/expected power difference). For pure design reasons, there are also times when I think, "I want to paint something with a wacky hairstyle" so I'll go with a lion or something else with a mane, just because I'm not generally a fan of adding head-hair to animals that don't have it naturally.

Do I ever scrap multiple hours' work because of poor staging? Probably not, but I'll make a note of it so I remember to do a better job of it in the next piece. It's like any mistake -- you decide whether it's more time-effective to fix it, or just to chalk it up to a learning experience and move on. If the piece were important (a book cover or the like), I would be more inclined to start over and do it right. It it's just going up on the web, it's not that big a deal. Those I mostly paint to learn and push my skills, so as long as I learn the lesson, the finished product isn't as important.

I'll definitely be working more on paper, but I don't know that pencil is really the place for me to get loose. I sling paint around pretty freely when I'm paint-sketching. For me, pencils are more for when I want some precision line work done ^_^