Scenery background - Recreational Park

This is actually an artwork done in November 2010. It is based on a really nice recreational park, Taman Rakyat, Klang, Selangor, Malaysia. It was created as a background for an animation that I am working on. It takes 4 days to complete, done with Wacom in Photoshop.


The process are quite the same as my previous work, Inside a forest (I know its a lame name but who cares. haha..)

 I start with a simple sketch, and then I draw using Negative space technique, closely follows the reference photograph. Note that I do not trace the photograph at all.

 Then I paint the rock shape on the rock wall using basic paint bucket tool. Next I create a new layer on top of the rock layer and add a texture using brush tool. I then set the layer to clipping mask. Walla, the rock is now textured. Next I paint the dry leaves using plain brown. For the ground just side of the leaves, I use
plain brownish color and stroke a slightly dark brown horizantal lines over and over to simulate ground texture.

I enhance the rock wall with green random strokes and dark shadow to simulate dirtiness. For the bushes at the top of the rock wall, I paint a plain green for the base color.

I add a yellowish green on some leaves to simulate depth and the sun shines. I copied the line art layer on top of the color layer to darken the bushes. It also increase the sharpness and contrast of the bushes.

For the 3 steps above, I enhance the light and dark areas of the bushes, and paint some branches of some trees in the bushes

Just like the bushes on top of the rock wall, I paint brightest area of the leaves with yellowish green and dark green for the shadow area. I then copy the line art layer and paste it on top of the color layer.

For the cliff between the upper bushes and the bushes on top of the rock wall, I use soft painting technique, where I define the texture of the cliff using brush strokes. I start with yellowish brown as the base color. Then I use the color picker and choose slightly dark color to define the cliff texture. After that I choose slight brighter color than the base color to define the cliff contour that receive the sunlight.

Once done, I proceed with the forest on top of the cliff, behind the upper bush. I define the forest with soft painting technique too as I stick with my previous paint style where I use negative space drawing on for the foreground while the background I've used soft painting.

The trees on the forest are painted one by one for the first few, to make sure they are unique to each other and the details are clear. Then the far forest at the left of the canvas was done as a clump, because details are not clearly seen on such distant.

Then I paint on the sky. Its experimental so  I'll not cover the details here.
Hopefully anyone who read this can learn my digital painting technique that I use here. Any comments and questions are very welcomed.
Thanks for reading

Happy New Year 2011

Hi,
Happy New Year everyone.
Its already 2 month since my last post, but that doesn't mean I sit idle okay. I'm currently working on a personal project, which is a 2D animation, which is similar to japanese anime. The plans starts since last august as far as I can remember, but while the production start, I always go back to the planning stage. This is because I want to make sure that the story is good enough, the storyboard is working so that the animation can be accepted by the audience.

The story part is always my weakness. I want to create a sci-fi kind of story but due to the animation length constrains, the story need to be revised back and forth to make sure audience can understand. I'm working alone, so the longest animation that I can do with at least the same quality as the japanese anime may be quite short, maybe around 20-30 minute.

Last time my friend from facebook has refered me to a training set by a a goverment agency, named Multimedia Development Corporation (MDEC), under trade name CGSkill. They provide a free class which are Pre-Production, Games art and 3D Animation. The training offer came right on the time as I just graduated from my Uni, but then I have to choose only one.

I decided to take the offer, and I choose Pre-Production. The reason is that I dedicated to develop my own 2D anime styled animation and those other two courses are more to 3D. Pre-Production covers Scripting and Storyboarding which is essential for creating an animation. Im not sure whether they covers the concept art and model sheet but they do said they have sketching class.

Anyway I still have a long way to go, and this is just a beginning.
Anyway, thanks for reading and have a great days ahead!