How to Paint : Part 2 -Tribute Painting

Boy, I must really like you guys to post something like this. Here is the painting as it stands so far. Remember when I said that the painting would look worse before it looked better? Now you'll realize I wasn't joking. It's a rough start, but then again, they all are.

Do you notice how the curtains are sort of... off? There's a reason for that and it's an embarrassing one. In the process of putting on some preliminary shadows for the curtains, the canvas got turned around on the easel. When I stepped back I noticed that the folds in the curtains didn't match up with the screen-grab that I'd taken for this project. I shrugged my shoulders and set about to putting it right. Heck, this isn't that big a deal, I thought. I'm a good enough painter to fix things on the fly. So I grabbed a brush and went to town.

It wasn't until I stepped away a second time that I noticed that I'd had the canvas inverted and had somehow managed to paint the folds upside down. Grrr. It still isn't that critical of a problem because I'll be fixing and tweaking the painting as we go along. But it really isn't something I'd deliberately set about putting in my way!

The painting is a murky specter of what it will look like when we're done, but you can still catch a sense of what it will become. For now we'll let the paint dry overnight and gather up the courage to assault the canvas in the morning.

Designing Eve's Life Logo

Have you ever had an idea for an art project that seems really simple, something that you can knock out in a single afternoon without breaking a sweat but once you get started you realize it's becoming more complex than you ever dreamed possible?

Here's just such a project, documented for ya.

I wanted to make the "Life" logo that appears on Eve in the movie "Wall-E". When the robot takes a plant sample for analysis, a glowing green light appears on her surface. The light has a stylized tree design. It's a simple logo but very pleasing. For reasons I won't go into here, I wanted to make a sticker of that logo and put it onto the gas cover of a Honda Fit.

This should be simple because Wall-E is an insanely popular movie and if there's one thing that the Internet is good for it's pirating images from popular entertainment. A quick check with a ruler showed me that the gas tank cover was approximately 5.75 inches across, which means I'd need an image from the internet with a high enough resolution that it won't dissolve into a pixelated mess when it's printed to that size.

After lots of searching around, this is the best I could get my hands on:



Yeah, that's it. The image looks fine when when seen in the original picture, but blow it up to any workable size and all the detail becomes a muddy mess. Times like this call for Photoshop. Sort of.

First off, we don't want to confuse PhotoShop with details from the image. You and I see only two colors in the above image, yellow and green. PhotoShop recognizes the thousands of shades between them gets all funny when asked to differentiate the hues. There are tools in the application which help, like increasing the contrast in the image, reducing the palette and then selecting one of the colors and having the program select all similar shades of the specified sample.

Or you could do a quick tracing with a pen. That's my method. Trace and scan, and you get this:


No beauty pageant winner, but good enough for what we want. Scan that bad boy in, (or girl as it may be) and then copy it into a good font creator like Font Magic. Why a font application, you rightly ask? Because we only want a simplified ray tracing of the image, not the data in the image itself. In other words, we want the formula for the curves.

Now I'm not going to bore you with the rest, but once the image is scanned into the font program, the lines are smoothed, it's saved as a unique font letter and then imported into Windows. Photoshop is launched and the letter is typed, rasterized, mirrored (because I only smoothed one side of the image since mirroring it would make it more symmetrical than I could ever do by pushing around contour anchors), and then a few Photoshop effects are tossed into the mix. When done, the image is re-sized to 5.75 inches and we end up with:



Now that's more like it! Still, this was one of those easy projects that suddenly becomes a hornet's nest of details. But done is done, and that's all that matters. Now to put it on the car!

How To Make A Tribute Painting : Step Two

We're going to skip over the step where you lather a thick coat of Gesso onto the canvas that you've chosen for your painting and just assume that you've taken care of that already. Once the white surface has been prepared, you're ready to go.

Grab a pencil and sketch in the outline of the painting. For this step, it's more important to make the lines visible than to worry about whether the lines will show through the paint itself. It will. Let me put it another way, there is nothing you can do to hide the pencil lines used in the sketch. They will continue to show through the paint, ruining the overall effect and shining like a beacon of amaturishness that will blind anyone in the same room with thing when you're done. You might as well just give up and accept it.
Now there are those who think they'll be able to make the lines dark enough to be visible on the white surface, but light enough to disappear when painted over. The drawback towards this theory is that it is more likely to bite you, the painter, in the tookas. The first coat of paint will totally obliterate the lines which defeats the purpose of having a sketch in the first place. Relax and let it happen. The lines will show through and you'll deal with them when the time comes.

Now, take a good look at that picture I posted up there. See it? That's the best the painting is going to look like for a long, long time. Just like a dinner at Applebees, it's got to get worse before it gets better. The next few steps will seem like little more than deliberate efforts to deface the above image. So enjoy the view while you can.

As you can (barely) tell, I've sketched the full poster onto the canvas, cropping out the fence that was in the original image. "But why would you do something like that?" I hear you ask. Yes, the fence was part of the immerse world which Syberia is known for, but the point of having a tribute painting is actually making something that only existed in digital form before and bringing it into the corporeal world. For this reason, you just want to get the poster, not the scenery. "Yeah, but at the same time the world around the poster is just as much a part of the digitally created experience that I'm trying to capture. While the poster appears in the world as a hermetic element, nevertheless it is joined to its surroundings by tone which merges harmoniously with the experience. Wouldn't that necessitate capturing the fence in the painting as well?" you ask. To which I tell you to put a sock in it.

The various elements in the poster don't match exactly to the dimensions of the canvas, but it's close enough for our purposes. Let's take one last look at what we've got so far, and then go on to step three.

Dragon Queen Timeline

(Click on the image to get the full effect. Dunno why it's not displaying correctly on this page.)

Here is a timeline progression for the dragon in the "Psycho" series of paintings. At the start of the series, almost all the color had been applied with the exception of black. The rest of the images just show the difference that black made to the overall piece.

I did do some color touch-ups here and there, but for the most part, it was complete on day one!

How To Make A Tribute Painting : Step One

So you've decided to make a tribute painting, eh? Good for you! In your heart you know it's the right thing to do, and soon you'll have a beautiful piece of artwork that you created with your own hands, a tribute to a great adventure that you've undertaken which (in some small way, but a real way all the same) has changed you and helped shape the person you are today. Odds were stacked against you, with nothing but your wily mind, quick wit and inflexible determination to guide you, you managed to not only succeed against the trials facing you, but come out with your head held high. You go, you! Yeah!

See that picture up there? That's your blank canvas. Get a good, long look at that thing. You're gonna be staring at it for a long time. Just warning you now.

With your steely resolve burning in your heart, the only question facing you now is determining which of your mighty deeds should be immortalized through the effervescent magic of acrylic? Syberia II, you say? An excellent choice. We'll go with that.

Syberia II has a storyline which rivals a good 75% of fantasy stories out there, and what makes it even better is that you not only lived the adventure, but toughed it out all the way to the end without going online and cheating by peeking at some disreputable walkthru. Not even when you got to that ice maze with the small rat which kept running away from the owl you'd summoned, and you knew that he was supposed to get those berries (I mean, heck. Everyone could see that he needed to get the berries! But did he get them like any good vermin would? No! He just cowered into that dead end place making you shoo off the owl, have him crawl out and then summon the owl and he'd go down the wrong tube again... Yeah, good for you for not giving up at that point and cheating. I'm proud of you.).

Uh, where was I? Oh yeah, how to paint.

Well, before you can paint you need to have some image in mind. And Syberia II has many gorgeous scenes to choose from. You're looking for something unique, but also something that captures the complete immersion of this fantasy world. While prowling around the Soviet inspired town you discover this image:


Perfect!

Now as you're well aware, the perspective is off on this image. You are looking at the image through the eyes of the protagonist, Kate. What you're going to have to do is get her centered in front of the image you want, or at least as close as possible. In this case, she's looking up at the image, but that's alright. We're not looking for perfection, just a clear shot of the image we want to capture. Once you're ready, do a screen grab. Now, close out of the game and open PhotoShop.

Huh? When you pressed the screen-grab key on the keyboard, the game crashed and dumped you to the desktop? Yeah, that happens. A lot. But what's art without a little suffering thrown in for good measure? Anyway, stop complaining and open up PhotoShop.

Now do a quick paste and you've got your inspiration! Correct the perspective, and your image suddenly becomes:



I know that in this example, it looks pretty much like the original image. But there are some differences so don't skip this step. You're going to take a 3D image (from the digital world) and put it onto a 2D medium (your canvas), and to accomplish that in a realistic manner will require you to adjust for distortion. And besides, you want to do it right. I mean, this is Syberia we're talking about here. Such beauty demands your attention to details.

If you get into the habit of always doing the distortion correction, you'll save yourself problems later on. Sometimes you're not going to be able to line up on that perfect screen-grab and this will save you from many frustrating attempts.

Psycho 2 of 4

I think I'm done with monkeying around with black paint for awhile. I like the results, but went nearly cross-eyed trying to squint at that endless field of black to make sure I plastered every nook and cranny with paint.

Sad to say, those wrinkles are present in this picture as well, and they don't look like they're going anywhere. It's not that big of a deal, really. If it starts to get to me I can just put the painting in a heavy frame that covers the corners, or even just have the canvas stretched on a new frame. Actually, unlike most of my paintings, this is a series that I would actually like to see framed. The originals in the Psychnauts game have heavy gilt frames which add to the over the top stylistic eyesore of the whole things. So if I do decide to have these framed, I'll aim for something that is really outrageous.

In the meantime, I'll learn to live with saggy corners.

If you look carefully at the Queen's gown, you'll realize that I messed up on the design. I actually started the quilted pattern on a panel of the gown that was supposed to be left blank. So in this way, the original sketch is going to look different from the finished project. It worked out well and I decided to leave it alone. For the playing card to look like an official Hoyle queen, the gown must have equal parts of pattern and undecorated panels. So instead of just adding to the design, I held back and didn't decorate the panels I'd intended to embellish. When all is said and done, it looks perfect!