Malcoonimages

[lemec]

Dude, I take my hat off to you!

These are some really awesome designs! Can't wait to see the book cover!

[malcooning]

beautiful

Dude, I take my hat off to you!

These are some really awesome designs! Can't wait to see the book cover!

Thank you
I hope to finish it very soon.

[airman]

very very good!
i like the two last one, the water is beautiful!!!
good job !

[malcooning]

Testing a brush.

[Paul Fierlinger]

Asaf,
which part of this very attractive drawing was done by the brush you are testing, or was everything done with it? I am particularly interested in the way your clouds came out because we are still searching for a way to color all those ocean waves we will be using in our current film. This might be just what we are looking for. Can I get this brush from you?

[malcooning]

Asaf,
which part of this very attractive drawing was done by the brush you are testing, or was everything done with it? I am particularly interested in the way your clouds came out because we are still searching for a way to color all those ocean waves we will be using in our current film. This might be just what we are looking for. Can I get this brush from you?

Actually, for the clouds, I used a brush that I made a while ago, which is in fact a modification of that same nice brush Raymond cleverly crafted long ago (The same brush the watercolor brushes are based on too). The brush I was testing was actually not it, rather one that is based on the pencil. That's what I drew the characters with. I was largely testing the connection of pen Altitude in Pressure and Aspect at the same time, with a steep brush profile curve.

To get the clouds, I made one layer with the brush, another layer in Erase blend mode with the same brush (to lighten up some areas). And one layer with a subtle gradient in Grain Merge blend mode, out of which I erased some lines to create the bold highlights. The softer patches were created in the initial clouds layer merely by using the same brush to delete, and then paint over again (this is in fact an effect created by an undesired behavior of using erase brush mode on Luma with Paper enabled - it softens up the grain of the paper, in a strange way. But I learned to live with. It's been like this for a long while).

Anyhow, I'll PM you the brush I made the clouds with.
EDIT: I'll mail it to you.

[Paul Fierlinger]

EDIT: I'll mail it to you.

Thanks, because everything you described about this brush goes way over my head.

[malcooning]

EDIT: I'll mail it to you.

Thanks, because everything you described about this brush goes way over my head.

I know what you mean. If I were you I would stop reading on the second line.
But I was actually describing how the clouds came about looking like this, not describing the brush.
But I should know better: I guess a simple posting of the TVP file would be more pragmatic

[ZigOtto]

superbe !
your black "dry" brush looks very convincing !
I wonder what could be the title (or subtitle) of this picture ?

ps: title = "DonkeyClouds", subtitle = ?

[Paul Fierlinger]

I'm testing your brushes now (thank you for the speedy delivery) but I'm not getting anything close to the results you got in your clouds. I see that I have to spend more time with the brushes than I had previously imagined, which I'll have to postpone for another day. I'll get back to you at that time.

[ZigOtto]

it's not simply a matter of brush strokes, as Asaf said,
the subtilities in the clouds rendering results from layering several painted layers in different blending modes.
I think you have to learn/experience how to exploit these new Layer's blending modes .

[Klaus Hoefs]

But be aware,
there is no way to retain the Blending Modes (e.g. "Light") of stacked layers with rendering them down to one layer (merging them). (Far as I know, or has it changed meanwhile ??? )

[Paul Fierlinger]

I can see that these brushes aren't too conducive for painting frame sequences. I think I can work perfectly well with the original brushes I have, as Asaf mentions here. Those work very well for us so far -- all we have to do is create a bottom mat for the image sequences to prevent them from being transparent.

[malcooning]

superbe !
your black "dry" brush looks very convincing !

@Zig, Cheers!
We can subtitle it: "awaiting resolution"

@Klaus, you're right, merging blend modes is still an issue. But if you work cleverly you won't have to merge them, or at least keep the problematic modes unmerged, and merge all the rest.

@Paul, unfortunately there are no magic digital brushes, just as there are no magic real-life brushes. In fact, what I like many times about the brushes, is that I can't do everything I want with them. They then become particular tools, with particular limitations, and those limitations are exactly what necessitates further invention. I end up reaching some looks, which are not natural-media, neither are "digital", but a hybrid of things that for me represent what digital painting is all about. Maybe here you can understand why most of the drawings I post here a actually brush/look tests.

As for animating such brushes, it is less straight forward. Most important attribute when animating is to keep away from over-boiling the paint. I have done some tests that used these brushes over time, and I've found that by cross-dissolving paint areas (meaning, fading one painted frame into the next and so forth) you can achieve a convincing feel. Roughly, you patin in one frame, you paint the next one. Then you stretch the layer with interpolation, and the 2 frames blend. You can do so with as many frames as you need. But it has to be done cleverly, by which I mean that if you have 10 frames, you should not stretch the layer more than twice it's length. even if you need 60 frames out of these 10, stretch it incrementally: 10 -> 20 -> 40 -> 80, and then compress it down to 60 with interpolation. In this way, the blends will be gradual, more organic, and less choppy.

I'm actually not in the habit of animating these days as I'm using TVP for illustration primarily. I hope to soon be back on counting frames as I miss it dearly and my ideas are anxiously impatient (It's the factors of money+time that depress those ideas so routinely...). and once i do get back on the horse (or donkey) I'll explore those brushes for motion use. I think there are so many options to create with TVP now that we are only tasting the tip of the fork. sometimes my mind gets bogged down with the possibilities that I end up finishing a drawing quicker, just so that I won't have to face those possibilities again - they can drive a healthy mammal insane!

[Paul Fierlinger]

Then you stretch the layer with interpolation, and the 2 frames blend. You can do so with as many frames as you need. But it has to be done cleverly, by which I mean that if you have 10 frames, you should not stretch the layer more than twice it's length. even if you need 60 frames out of these 10, stretch it incrementally: 10 -> 20 -> 40 -> 80, and then compress it down to 60 with interpolation. In this way, the blends will be gradual, more organic, and less choppy.

I've done my share of these dissolves -- even on film and that's no picnic. I have improved it by stretching the layer the way you describe, then replicating the layer 3 times and staggering all three lines, while setting their transparency slides each to 30%. I've also experimented with cross-dissolving between these layers so that as frames dissolve one into the other, so do the layers, giving the layers different colors -- all sorts of tricks. But I always end up finding a simple solution without digital or camera tricks, which I prefer.

To animate every day all day long for years is nuts, of course, but it's being nuts with a passion. Without the passion it must be REALLY nuts and I hope I'll never get that far.