Location: Index >> Special Features

By: Feng

Introduction

I’m going to do some hands-on work and demonstrate how I personally produce a painting for either a video game or a feature film.This tutorial will explain in detail what I’m doing at each step. I timed each step of the painting so I can provide you with some actual data.

First off, we need to find a theme. Most of the time, production paintings are used to sell an idea; thus, we will try to include as much information as possible in this painting.

My theme is a very simple scene; a beauty and the beast type of composition. The overall design will be a Mayan/Aztec inspired beast, which is about to carry out either destruction or obedience against a beauty’s offering. It’s always good to keep the story simple, but execute it well and with interesting designs. Well, lets get started.

Painting 1

This is the most important stage of the entire painting. It is in this step that composition, design, and story is roughed out. It is vital that your idea is captured at this step. Start rough and block in all the shapes. I don’t worry about small details at this point because I’ll paint the details in later. The key is to make sure that the over-all design is communicated and the composition is good. Here, I chose a low camera angle, to help show off the size of the beast. The strong one-point perspective will also give me some nice fore-shortening of the head, giving it scale. The beast has three heads, so to keep the composition balanced, two heads are looking at the girl, while the third looks slightly off page. If I made all three heads look at the girl, the balance will be too right-side heavy. The pixel size of this painting is currently at 1536 x 654.

Once the over-all composition is done, it’s time to block in the basic value and define the bigger shapes. I’m not worried about lighting at this point. The goal is to separate out all the elements, so you have a mental image of what is taking place. I keep the “line” layer above the colors to help me see the shapes.

Painting 3

This is a very important step, which is blocking in lighting. It is from this step where I’ll be getting my future values from (darks and lights). This scene has a slight back-light situation, so the main beast will be much darker. I decided to choose a red/gold color scheme to help show off the golden material and make a big impact. At this stage, it’s okay to start “loosing” the line art. Lighting wise, I wanted to extract a few areas. One is the beast’s center head, the other is the girl. Last area is the seating area above the beast. Once these steps are finished, the rest of the work is purely labor. You’ve already done all the difficult parts. You can now spend time defining the shapes and add in the details.

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