Click for full-sized image		Milestone: Final Image Date Submitted: Saturday, 13 May 2006 Title: Farewell Kiss Notes: In my entry, 'Farewell Kiss,' I've tried to depict the beginning of two journeys: Both the literal one where the boy is leaving on an adventure, and a more metaphorical one, the start of a romance for the two characters. The picture should speak for itself, though, so I leave the rest to the your interpretation. Thanks to everyone for joining me on the journey. Your support, feedback, and help has been invaluable! -mike CGTalk: CGTalk Thread | CGTalk Post
Click for full-sized image		Milestone: Final Coloring Date Submitted: Monday, 08 May 2006 Title: All the recent changes put together into the whole... Notes: Well, here we are with all of the recent changes... Plus more purple flowers added on the hillside by the fence and some of the left column shaved off to make the composition circle the main characters more. And that's it for all outstanding comments about this piece. I'm completely caught up. So last call for things to change, or I'm going to pack it in! -mike CGTalk: CGTalk Thread | CGTalk Post
Click for full-sized image		Milestone: Coloring WIP Date Submitted: Saturday, 06 May 2006 Title: long hair on the girl now Notes: Then again, there's something to be said for long hair, too. I kept fooling around with the hair for a long while afterwards, and this is where I ended up. What do folks think? It may even fit the face even more, and I kind of like it (and it reminds me of my wife's hair, too, only she's a blonde. :) ) Takes care of that short forehead as well...! -mike CGTalk: CGTalk Thread | CGTalk Post
Click for full-sized image		Milestone: Coloring WIP Date Submitted: Saturday, 06 May 2006 Title: reworking character faces Notes: Well, here we go again. I completely redrew the girl's face. I drew some sketches of my wife posing for me, spent an hour or so the other day just filling up a huge page full of faces of girls making kissy-faces, and took the best parts of those to form this face. In the end, I think the face reads as "kissing" better than the old. Is it better overall? Who the heck knows. I'll leave it to you all to comment on, I've been staring at it too long this morning, I need to take a break. I also made her feet slightly smaller and some other subtle changes in her body. I tried a new hairstyle or two but it lost her character for me. The long hair may read better from a distance that it's a female, but I have to stay true to the vision as well. And I don't subscribe to the view that in order to look "feminine" she (or any character) has to have long hair, lots of make up, large breasts, etcetera. I think we can work towards a less narrow view, right? There are also more changes that I've worked on since the last post: Made lots of subtle adjustments to the boy's face, including a larger chin (thanks, jose!) and some reworking on the neck (thanks, jeromoo!) He now looks more masculine and perhaps more anatomically correct without losing his character. And I added those stirrups, Sam! Anarki3000 - The birds are still in the sky. I just moved tehm over to the right hand side by the town. Check out post #516. Jeromoo - Yeah, [i]those[/i] are some nice god-rays you posted. I didn't want to go too hard-edged and obvious in mine, it was too unsubtle. Yoff - I can't remove the flowers from the lower left. They have to be there compositionally. If you're looking around the picture clockwise, they're what curve the eye back in to the main area rather than letting the eye fall off the page. Plus they add another layer of depth in front of the main characters, which was lacking before. cgkrusty - Thanks, and good seeing you again! (we'll see you for the next challenge, right? ;) ) Anyhow, that's all for now, please let me know what you think about the new changes! -mike CGTalk: CGTalk Thread | CGTalk Post
Click for full-sized image		Milestone: Coloring WIP Date Submitted: Wednesday, 03 May 2006 Title: character faces Notes: Hi, everyone. I've been working on just these faces (and her hand) for a couple of hours tonight. I think that's about all I can do this evening. I've made some more revisions to both faces: He's got a more pronounced chin and sideburns, a nose-job, another haircut, some stuff to make it clear he's a he. (and apologies to those of you who "liked it better when the rider was a girl." I can appreciate that, but it wasn't the intent of this piece, and so your comments helped me to realize that I wasn't conveying my artistic intent clearly enough. As for the girl, a smaller chin, a little blush, a refined forhead, changes to the nose, and so many changes to the neck and chin, I've lost track of exactly what all I did. I also smoothed out her hand so it isn't so masculine (serves me right for using my own hand as a model!) and made her feet a little smaller (you'll have to see it later.) Anyhow, I've been staring at it too long, time for some other eyeballs to take a turn. Let me know anything you can see to help make her face especially even better (except for changing her hairstyle.) Metro - thanks! I'll be sure to post this as a desktop-sized image, but only when it's done. Black - It's not that I have you pegged as a dark, creepy person, just a person who was especially tuned in to that one CGTalk Challenge I was doing on Cthulhu. You were one of the most frequent posters in that thread, and were defnitely up on your Lovecraft, so I associate you with that. Anyhow, I think you're absolutely right about the tail - I'd intended it to curve around behind her, but it doesn't really look like it has the mass to do that right now. You're right, I think refining the shadowing on the tail could help fix that. As for sketch #63, i love the guy carrying the gas, kind of like the woman, and didn't care for the background at all. It was too much work to force it into this challenge topic. Maybe it will be better when I can work on it freed from a challenge constraint. Yoff - You're probably right that more Echium (trhat's what those purple flowers are called) qwould make it look more consistent. But not having them isn't killing the piece, so we'll have to see how lazy I am and whether I get around to adding more! ;-) Sam - Oh, if you only knew the whole story for this world, I'm sure you'd see that there si some perfectly rational explanation why he has no stirrups... but in fact I don't really have any world story so there's only a real-life excuse for not having the stirrups, which is that I forgot to put them in. (Actually, though, you pretty much hit the nail on the head as far as the columns are concerned.) Maybe I'll add some stirrps in... We'll again just have to see how lazy I am (and whether they look good.) Fiduciose - Thanks! Can't wait to see yours further along, too! Ramy - Yeah, it does look better now - thanks again for the help! -mike CGTalk: CGTalk Thread | CGTalk Post
Click for full-sized image		Milestone: Coloring WIP Date Submitted: Tuesday, 02 May 2006 Title: adjustments to some bckg elements Notes: This one's for you, Ramy! You had some excellent points in your last post, thank's so much for pointing all those things out. So now the arch looks more round and continuous from left to right. And the hill in the lower right hopefully looks more like a hill, like it's got some curve to it instead of being the edge of a cliff dropping off there. A definite improvement, I think. OceanBlueSky - Thanks for your post. I think you've got a good point. There's still more I can do to make her look more feminine, including a lot of changes in her face and hands. I'm not changing the hair - i think it looks cute... and if I get the other parts right it will be clear that she's a girl even though she has short hair. So next post... By the way, my wife and I had no idea where Christmas Island was so we looked it up... Wow! Sounds like you live in a pretty neat place! Anyhow, that's all for now... closing in on it... -mike CGTalk: CGTalk Thread | CGTalk Post
Click for full-sized image		Milestone: Coloring WIP Date Submitted: Sunday, 30 April 2006 Title: face revision Notes: Hey, all, thannks for your notes. Looks like we got a large enough critical mass worth of people calling the StriderBird rider a female that he had to go and get a haircut and have some reconstructive plastic surgery. I hope he looks a little more masculine now? Oregano, ElectroNico, ElGrozni, xric7, and Elrond - Thank you for your kind words and encouragement! :) Cixi - I'm flattered that I'm your first post here. Thank you! I did try a lot of other colors when I was first doing my color comps, but honestly, the dark brown/grey I'm using just worked the best in the composition. Black can be considered somber, but I think it has other interpretations as well, but I'm sorry it makes you uncomfortable to look at it. Emptyparenthesis - Thanks for your note. Nothing in the rules said it had to be an Epic journey, just a journey (or at least the beginning of one.) I happen to think it feels like alarger journey than you do, because of the scale and depth of the environment and all of the gear on the StriderBird (bedroll, pack, etc.) but we'll just have to agree to disagree. Remy - Thanks for the post, you made some excellent points. It's not in this post above, but I did go in and make a lot of changes to the arch-way. I think it reads a lot better now: more round, a more consistent color throughout... it looks good, I'm glad you pointed that one out. As for the characters' faces, let's see how they look close-up (and with a bunch of new changes.) As for the point abount the hill, I just reread your note and realize I misread it earlier. Now I see what you meant, and understand. I'll have to take a look at that too. Thanks for commenting on it! Thank that's all for now. Kepp them notes coming, I still have some time... -mike CGTalk: CGTalk Thread | CGTalk Post
Click for full-sized image		Milestone: Final Coloring Date Submitted: Saturday, 29 April 2006 Title: Farewell Kiss - final coloring Notes: And here we go: Final Coloring. You've got a couple of weeks still to tell me everything I did wrong and can still improve. Get to it! :) -mike CGTalk: CGTalk Thread | CGTalk Post
Click for full-sized image		Milestone: Coloring WIP Date Submitted: Saturday, 29 April 2006 Title: glow effects in the background Notes: I still have the sky ina seperate layer from the rest of the painting, so next I select the whole foreground, invert selection, and save as a selection. I go into that channel and blur it so that the selection bleeds over the background columns a bit. I fade out the selection on the left side of the scene but keep it strong on the right. I create a new layer above the line art and load the selection and then fill it with a reddish-orage and set the layer to Color Dodge. (In truth, it takes a little experimentation to get the exact color, opacity %, and even Layer Blending Mode exactly correct, but that's what I ended up with.) So what this does is makes the columns and the sky glow, as if they are backlit by the sun. On another layer I draw some pale yellow lines perfectly horizontal, blur them, and Transform them into a diagonal direction. These become the god rays. They're in Hard Light mode at 50%, but it took a lot of experimentation to get there. Oh, and lastly, you can see in this shot the final solution I came up with for the birds: Took them out of the sky on the left, and but them down there swooping around the right side of the village. -mike CGTalk: CGTalk Thread | CGTalk Post
Click for full-sized image		Milestone: Coloring WIP Date Submitted: Saturday, 29 April 2006 Title: colorizing the line art Notes: One of the final steps in the illustration is to colorize the line art. This entire time I've just been using the greyscale line art I scanned in at the beginning. But the black and grey lines are a bit unsubtle. So remeber that depth-map layer I maede way back when? In case you don't, it was a greyscale layer masking out sections based on how deep in the scene they were. I used it to generate the atmospheric hazing in the background. But now I get to use it again, this time to colorize the line art. Using the Adjust Hue Saturation controls, I colorize the line art to a nice warm red. This works well on the main characters. However, it's too warm for the lines in the distance. So I load up the detch mask and use Hue/Saturation again to make the lines selected bluer and lighter. Now my lines are gradually getting cooler as they recede into the distance. The above is a detail of what my line art layer looks like. It is still set to multiply, by the way. -mike CGTalk: CGTalk Thread | CGTalk Post

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