Adobe Fresco: Hot Takes with Tonko House’s Robert Kondo

yes [Music] good morning good evening hello to you wherever you are i'm renee and i work at adobe and marketing i am so excited to welcome you to the very first stream of lightbox expo here on adobe live now what does that all mean let me tell you really quickly so you're on behance.com and this is an awesome community of artists and what we do here is every weekday we actually stream artists doing awesome artwork and all of the adobe products so that you can learn from them and we're going to do a little bit of that today but it's a special stream this is a lightbox expo stream and it's one of my favorite conferences that's ever happened lightbox expo brings together the best in illustration video game entertainment art so we're talking movies we're talking video games we're talking all your faves are going to be here at lightbox expo connecting and sharing art and sharing tips and tricks and today i'm so excited to have my very dear robert condo rob say hello to the people hello hi everybody hey renee thanks for having me on yeah i mean so excited you have such a cool career path and i thought it would make some sense to sort of like talk about that first because i don't even know how did you start out like in this world of entertainment art where did you go to school have you always drawn like let's let's dig deep into the past yeah i mean if we want to dig my mom was a fashion designer um and so there was a lot of drawing at home you know phone doodles were pretty elaborate uh and i wasn't a great student in high school but i loved drawing um so my biology test always had drawings in the margins and uh and sort of graduating from high school i decided that i wanted to go into art school and applied to several places and um not on the first try but got into art center on the second try um and studied illustration and uh one of the first people that i met was this guy michael griffin cali amazing artist who uh had just finished an internship at pixar and pixar hadn't at that point they hadn't even they hadn't done nemo yet they were working on nemo and he sort of he was in my first class at art center and said pixar is this amazing place and he described it to me and i'm like that sounds amazing that's where i want to go and so you know that kind of became the target while i was in school yeah and yeah and then through that it was just through amazing circumstances mentors and the right time right place sort of thing uh you know my first big job was uh on ratatouille at pixar wow okay hold up that must have been incredible because let's let's think about that timeline like pixar's kind of new but hot and you got to work on ratatouille what was that like like being in the in on the ground floor at pixar that's what it sounds like to me yeah i mean i think early on it was super intimidating i remember my first meeting there john pinkova who was the director at the time came in and the script hadn't been written he had sort of a treatment and outline and uh he kind of just put it on my desk and he's like look just draw whatever whatever you think and it's like really um because you know when you go to school everyone sort of says oh visual development is like such a coveted position and and suddenly it was like okay and i remember the first week it was like we have an art review you know this is sort of a meeting where the art department comes together with the directors and you sort of share the week's progress and i remember carter goodrich um amazing phenomenal character designer had turned in a package and so and dominique louis had done all these pastels if you don't know his work his work is incredible and yes so if you imagine the entire room had dominique louis pastels and the entire room was plastered with carter's drawings and then there was one blank board and kind of kindly they were like oh robert that's your board next week and it was just like uh i think i should leave now i think i should quit i think i'm i don't know if i belong here oh rob and to hear you say that because your art is gorgeous and so i don't know it just feels it feels like as another artist to an artist like for you to say that to to doubt yourself like i don't know it makes me feel better to hear that i'm glad i mean i think you know obviously for me it worked out you know it was like yeah they were incredible i mean the reason why pixar was such an amazing place to start was because of all the amazing artists and heroes you know it's like um i mean you know jay schuster well jay schuster was my first office mate you know and he had just come off of uh the star wars enterprise and like uh you know he really he was an incredible office he was an incredible office mate because um he is such a decisive designer and i feel like he i in my entirety i don't remember how long we shared an office but jay i don't think i ever saw jay throw away a drawing which is probably not true but i just jay's drawing it always just felt like jay from those that don't know jay designed like the pod racers and much of like just in my opinion one of the best hard surface designers in entertainment period but so kind um but you know it was like one of those things where it's like oh my gosh like i just looked at this guy's artwork in the art of books throughout my college you know and now i'm sharing an office with them and the myth is real like this guy is the real deal you know and so i think in that way too it's like learned a lot from the people around um mentors and just absorbing um so yeah you describe pixar and it sounds i mean it sounds like everybody's dream true i know everybody out there in the world is like ah i like listening to you speak about this but let me surprise them with what happened next you left pixar like and i think people be like wait how how do you do that and of course yeah why and of course i know i know what it's like even when you've got something that's amazing sometimes there's more you want to do and so maybe tell us a little bit about how you started tonko house which is what you did you went off to start tonko house and what that felt like yeah i mean you know it was you know so i worked on ratatouille toy story 3 monsters university i did some work on coco and wally and uh and production designed a few shorts there and things were going great uh it's it you know on on the last day as as well as the first day there was still that level of excitement for the people there but one thing that had changed is myself and uh you know one of the other art directors there dai sutsumi who you know we had art directed on toy story 3 together in monsters university together and we always you know he became that person that every piece of artwork i worked on you know we sort of on some level collaborated or at least consulted and uh the art department for a lot of people you know who are looking to get into the industry these feature films take hundreds of people right um and the art department is just this little group within that that sort of yeah helps push that along and dice and i just wanted to get a greater perspective on the art department and filmmaking and so we decided to make this short film called the dam keeper and the two of us after working together paint very similarly and so or at least ken i learned a lot from him and uh we decided to do this moving painting this animated painting idea and that that sort of became the dam keeper and that short film that we made while we were at pixar um through their extracurricular program um you know we we did everything we could to make it a full film experience so the first time we edited we really wrote something the first time you know our producers were producing and we rented a space across from pixar and we did it as much as we could to learn as much as we could and it was really i would say every day on that short film was exhilarating and exhausting and terrifying and i think it's sort of like going away to college you know you you sort of think like okay we're going to do this big adventure and it's got to be all these things and um when we came back to pixar full-time after taking a little break it felt like that too like we had gone away to college and come back home and everything's the same everything's great but we've changed and i think we really got addicted to the feeling of pushing ourselves on that level to really experience things that excited us but also terrified us that's so powerful like what a like i can't imagine what that was like you know because you do change right it's you're speaking about the hero's journey honestly you went away and when you came back the world was not the same yeah yeah and i think with that we realized that pixar was a place that was established you know by the ed catmulls of the world the steve jobs of the world and the john lasseters and um as amazing as that place was we also had our own stories to tell and we had our own journey and i think at pixar and within the concept art world i felt like i could start to feel how my career was shaped you know i could see like all those things that when i started where like goals were suddenly achievable and that scared me to be honest yeah and so when i thought about dice and i working together to start tonko house suddenly the potential felt like starting all over again where it just felt like the horizon was clear and we could go in any direction and and that's what it's been it's been seven years um we stepped away uh no regrets we miss people um but it's been an incredible journey and uh yeah and that's sort of you know we i mean we had to explain to our families we're gonna leave pixar to go be in like a tiny 10 foot by 10 foot room and try to make our own stuff and they what a conversation that must have been there was a lot of wine um but um but yeah it was great that's incredible and i i i don't know you just got me all chased out thinking about that journey um and i'm really excited to see your art but first i do want to do a shout out to the chat because we the chat is blowing up everyone's freaking out they're all excited about ratatouille they're excited about tonko house we've got people from peru minneapolis glasgow toronto moscow so yes this is live some of you are asking you are live and if you've got questions for rob roberts sorry you can put them in the chat and i'll try to feed them to him slowly as we look through his art and have some fun creating in fresco but um without further ado rob i would love to see your art after all this exciting chatter so yeah let's get started and look at some of your beautiful work yeah i mean i just put together a bunch of stuff um this is stuff right out of school um you know so i thought i would share it's been a really long time since i've shared any of this artwork but you know some of these are just really i mean it's funny because i look at them now and i'm like gosh these are stories from my childhood you know the first time uh my buddies and i had stole away and looked at a girly mag you know magazine and like you know this kind of feeling of growing up and the texture of growing up these little sort of snippets of of growing up and i love you know i've always you know we'll do you know more in this talk we'll do a little more of a paint demo i do love drawing you know i see myself as like much more of a draftsman my my sort of role within pixar was a lot of times focused on the world and environments um and so you know and wait before you go back let's take a look at this that picture again talk about what a draftsman is because i'm not sure that everybody necessarily knows what you mean when you say that term yeah i mean i think you know the way i see the world overall is probably a lot more through line and uh than shape so like dice who's my creative partner you know he's a painter i think a lot of people know him as a painter those that know him uh and he often starts with like big shapes he'll block something in i always usually start with like line work and i love studying little architectural details i love i do you know a lot of i studied illustration yeah but i do consider myself much more of a designer like someone who rather than sort of creating pictures as the the um the kind of final product it really is about creating almost instructions or ideas uh through drawings and and paintings but um you know it really is much more for me about refining a process you know solving a problem then sort of uh creating like something final i think a lot of people see this and they're like oh okay yeah i mean you paint and it's like well yeah but i sort of look at this as like you know i put it down as quickly as i can and i move on um is sort of the idea to to try to capture a tone and a feeling um overall um no so cute who is this little samurai i don't know it was just you know it was a project in just after school that i had thought about doing um this little summary story and uh it never went anywhere you know just it kind of resulted in sort of some fun design work um but you know this is all this is also me starting to just really play with digital work and try to make it look like painting um right so is this some of your first digital work did you do digital only yeah i mean i think yeah bo i mean you know back then uh photoshop and painting you know there was not as much as there is now um i'm making myself sound so old but uh no you are not but it was it was you know what i love about the computer and working digitally is that um it is it is so great for design work it's it's great for like oh i don't want it to be blue i want it to be purple i want it to be this is yeah exactly and but the hard thing is is that and what it does so well is like you can draw a perfectly straight line so effortlessly right and we all know that that these things are not so easy gradients all that stuff and so i think a lot of times working digitally some of the challenges manufacturing those natural mistakes that happen in painting so like the little scuffling on the edges the underpainting showing um and so i think this is really me experimenting with how to get those things that i love about real paint and real um uh the real media that's that's non-digital um right and you know quickly because i've seen a couple questions about storytelling and like a couple people are saying like was it hard to switch to telling your own stories and um did you feel like storytelling was difficult when you actually you know moved over to tonko house but what i'm understanding is you were always telling stories in your art right like always that was part of it so it's not like it was unnatural for you right correct yeah i mean i think like you know working on so this is like ratatouille but working on you know ratatouille for instance it's important for designers to empathize with the story that is being told so even though there might be a director or writer or somebody who's like really pouring themselves out onto a page it is i think the role of an artist visual development artist you know any artists that are working in these large productions to find their connection points through story into the characters into the worlds and so you know it's it's like you know what does it mean to be like a great chef who has lost their way lost their purpose right like eating a little hamburger what kind of world do we decree for that character it's like a cluttered world in which there are all these posters smiling in at him you know his own face smiling back at him but here he is eating sort of a burger like something instant um like the frozen the frozen food exactly yeah yeah the chef gusto frozen food um product that he makes um so it's it's always it's that you know it's always an element um that you're engaging with um i think it's storytelling is the again drawing and painting is a means to communicate those ideas and and sort of what's internally inside of you but um fundamentally as a designer i think that's the most important thing you can offer to both innovate the industry and the stories and um your own work is to push along you know i think your own personal experience um yeah i agree oh this is so beautiful you know you tell me you're not a painter and then you show me something like this and i'm like robert what are you trying what lies are you trying to sell me here you know i i think that what i what i really mean it's like um drawing and painting are not that far apart to me right you know they're sort of fundamentally shared principles but i think it's sort of that innate quality in which i approach the world i see the world and where my comfort lies you know i know that this is sort of a lot more of a mental exercise for me it doesn't quite flow you know so so as much as i think people see the end product and have their own ideas i know for me this is very analytical to be able to drive towards these end products you know it's a lot of sort of um thinking about oh gosh oh gosh how does the light work how does you know how am i staging this whereas when i'm drawing i feel like there's less of that process thinking there's less of that technical thinking overall okay so drawing and draftsmanship maybe is more of is is more of like nailing it down but then yeah in when you're creating the environment process you're sort of absorbing everything that could be affecting yeah and i think like anything you know it takes hundreds of people and so to make these things so thinking singularly about oh this is my only part like i'm this little tiny cog in the whole machine versus understanding that someone's gonna whatever i put like a line that i put down someone's gonna have to build someone's gonna have to texture you know so really thinking through purpose and communicating ideas that are hopefully inspiring um is important you know so it's sort of like you know it really is to me a means to an end and this is where i feel like you know drawing and painting for these feature films for giant studios and then finding a way to tell our own stories is sort of a seamless journey to me yeah um because you're just it's like saying you know oh well in school i studied acrylic painting and oil painting and then you know professionally i work digitally it's not such a he it's just a sort of an aspect of learning the tools um and not so much uh you know so singular i guess yeah that makes sense to me now before we go too much further off the monster because this is incredible i love monsters universe oh thanks renee such an amazing film in so many ways um and what i love is i watched an interview with you and dice sometime in the past and so this knowledge is just like trickled in my brain it's back here i don't remember but i do know and i'd love for you to talk a little bit about lighting in this movie because i know you thought about how lighting was a storytelling element like mike wachowski getting off the bus and stepping into the light and how like that could be more impactful if you had those sort of moments and like it's kind of mind-blowing that attention to detail um and so like i don't know how did you guys come up with that honestly like how did you make sure that the light was a story beat or a story character the whole way through because you did yeah i mean i think that's a huge aspect of collaboration you know dice is one of those people who you know when art directing a film like this these little ideas so for instance the idea would be that the film is mike wazowski's and mike has these huge goals he wants to be a scare and we thought about how do we visualize that like what does it mean to go towards your goal and we just dice had this really brilliant simple idea of like what if he's always just going towards the light just always you know and and whenever there's an obstacle it's sort of the shadow that's between him and the light and so when he arrives at school um you know there's this quality in which well he's going towards this scare school which is sort of the main building on campus and and the whole time he's going towards the light so you know it's the role of the art directors and and the art department and the teams to take these ideas and make them visually appealing which is challenging but i think the idea is the conceits are actually the credit of you know a combination of things the art directors the director him himself sort of embracing that idea and reinforcing that because those ideas only work when they're consistent in other words like if it's if it's only sort of like okay that's a cool idea for that sequence but next time it sort of starts to break things so it takes an incredible amount of discipline and i think also planning you know these these sort of color color scripts and things like that and creating paintings you know i think like something like this for instance again working digitally you take something like this which is a set design but then you take that idea of like okay but this is what it is populated characters and the actual lighting of it would be something like this and this is sort of for the set design but this is working so closely with dice in the lighting art direction and you know and that arrives at a place where you have simple things like this what you're talking about where it's like well mike is going towards the light so the school will be backlit the school is the next obstacle for him to overcome he needs to go from this hopeful place in the light into the shadow um of the school uh which is both intimidating but also hopefully awe inspiring um all the way to arrive into the center of the you know mon the scare school which is this completely darkened space um right where uh it is meant to be intimidating and scary and you know and again this is where there's a lot of coordination where do we put the windows how do we stage this so that that motif continues um and then at the same time you know really can creating instruction manuals almost like our ikea instruction manuals as to how to build stuff how to put things together um robert this is incredible like i feel like you could have built this you know like that's what's so beautiful is seeing this draftsmanship and seeing like wow and of course someone did right somebody took these incredible drawings and they literally went to a 3d program and you know made it precise and that's why you needed to develop this content but i hope some of the questions in the chat were around this like how do you think about story how do you like think about draftsmanship and how do you combine it all together into into something that makes sense for a movie and you you i feel like you've answered that you're never not thinking about it you're thinking about what the characters motivations are how you can represent that visually and then building it through how they move through the world yeah absolutely and i think you know i'm not um for instance i'm not great at multitasking i'm not i'm not great at like thinking about 100 things at once yeah um i'm somebody that really likes to simplify things just so that in my little brain i can sort of understand it and so when we design these things a simple idea like mike going towards the light as his goal is something i get right like it's not like this like really super complex deep thing but even to get that simple idea to work is an incredible effort um yeah you know so i i think like both you know myself dice our stories you know storytelling works the same way sort of simplifying things you know to a point where it's like really gettable so that it can relate but also communicate um and even when you design stuff it's like well what is what is the overall silhouette like yeah and then fill it in you know it's like yeah it's sort of those things of like well what's the focal point how are we you know we need to be drawn towards the door we need to this is where we'll be going and so i just keep thinking try to think that way you know and and and um because i think story can feel so complex people get so wrapped up in like oh but it has to be this this this does it i don't know you know i feel like a lot of times when we're simpler we're able to be a lot we're able to create depth behind it um intuitively i feel like that's a wonderful line when we're simpler we can create depth intuitively wow you worked on uh dyno yeah pete sounds good dino like there was a point in time where gadino just pulled you know at the studio to kind of bring all the artists together so there was this fun period where um you know all the designers that a lot of the designers at pixar got pulled into good dyno and so uh i had a short stint on it and i don't think like a ton of this work this was before like some pretty big story changes so yeah and then coco was one of the last projects i worked on um you know dice and i were brought on just to help really work on the world of the dead um with the art department there um it was really fun what's fun about these is just how um you're telling me that you worked early on a film and i know that these films take years to make right so they can change the look and feel a lot from what they start from to what they end up but with this and with the the good dinosaur shots i feel like um i feel like it didn't change that much which is kind of beautiful this this really feels like what the the look and feel of the film actually captured especially with all the marigolds there and all the colors so um yeah that's just really cool because it's not often that the concept art looks like the final like completely you know when you're totally no you're so right i mean there's usually like hundreds if not thousands of pieces of artwork you know that go out there and in particular what was interesting about this was that you know dice and i who were working on coco uh left early on let that's right around the time we left the studio and so we had done all this work and we really felt like oh you know i don't know if it'll end up influencing the film because we won't be there to see this through and and very fortunately you know we're really pleased to see the final product and and you know and of course like it was taken beyond what we had put out there in a huge way and what they executed was beautiful but um but also there were some ideas that we really felt like oh my gosh like that really stuck around you know um yeah yeah and i also think you know there's aspects of you know right around coco too we started to get more bold of like pitching things you know little ideas like you know what if you know there was sort of a parade and sort of an anticipation of that all the decorative lights went off but then you see this sort of light travel through and you get these like wonderful floats you know and um and all of that is sort of from this overcast style painting and we just use a lot of adobe photoshop adjustment layers to get to you know storytelling out a lot of mileage out of like a single painting um right you don't have to paint every single painting you can just modify it and do different iterations yeah absolutely and so you know it was fun and and with that we we sort of started tonko house you know dam keeper was our short which you know was our own world to sort of design and applying all the things we had learned at pixar um to this little short film we made um and we were really the adventure was really exciting it took us through tons of film festivals and uh you know eventually the academy awards which was his own experience and then with all that we we built upon that world did a graphic novel a series of graphic novels with first second in which you know we had to come up with a pipeline of working with multiple artists to block in draw and eventually paint all of that and and since then you know a lot of our artwork now is to work on our own properties our own ideas and stories you know this one is a story about um a bed and breakfast sort of in purgatory of between life and death um this sort of floating boat um that's incredible despair runs and stories of you know our own stories of our relationship with our parents and and our relationships as parents to our kids right um you know so all of it has been it's been an adventure and i think like you know for people that were wondering about how you go from an artist to then telling your own stories it's pretty seamless you know it's like it's the same it's the same thing it's just that there's a lot more accountability when you're telling your own story i think you know you don't have anyone to blame i think what's wonderful about pixar is like you're like there's so many brilliant people there that it's like f i do like 70 today and you know um 110 tomorrow it'll all work out in the end like you have confidence in that the people around you whereas when you're out on your own you know it's it's a bit of like um wow yeah it's just yeah exactly you're just a bit out there and you can't blame anybody you know and and um there's beauty in that there's beauty in owning that there's beauty in that agency even though it's scary you know like you know you did it yeah it's not unlike the first feeling of going into pixar and seeing those boards you know you're just like wait do i should i be doing this is this a bad idea you know um and this is from our latest project uh oni that we're working on with netflix right now dice is directing um and you know i serve as like an executive producer on it but also as the production designer um and so it's been really fun and then um and then also this week just uh yesterday actually in the trades um was announced uh that uh my latest book will be with first second this this book called curiosities that's a collection of poems and illustrations this looks so cute oh my gosh i love it but yeah so you're a poet as well well i'm not this is the first uh this is the first time i've i've really ventured into it and i just i've loved it you know i've loved doing it's it's sort of this this book of poetry for my daughter you know during the pandemic we just we were sort of stuck all together and so we would take these nature hikes and um within these nature hikes i found myself to engage with her on all these things we'd talk about stories of these little natural objects and that sort of evolved into something bigger and we did the social media campaign where you know i started to like almost like a live show like every day we would do a poem in an illustration and they got more elaborated some of them narrated some of them animated um and then you know unfortunately just like a lot of families and people our family had to pull together because of kovid and because of you know the older generation yes having to deal with things and so i had to pull away from that but with that we had a small collection of things and um and first second you know our publisher that had published the graphic novels we sort of shared with mark siegel who's the editor over there this idea and um we were really fortunate that they were excited about you know putting this together as a book i love it this will be our next um do you know when it comes out i'm not sure uh we still are i'm still writing some of it and illustrating some of it so i think it's a little bit on me but um uh but yeah soon soon hopefully um all right well definitely let us know so that we can buy it because i want it ah definitely awesome thank you oh this is so cool all right so we're gonna watch you draw right we're gonna get into actually drawing if you're done showing us your incredible art which you know i could probably do this for another hour to be honest with you okay cool while you get set up i'm going to just chat to some of the questions that we're in uh in the chat pod um so many people love tanco house for one there's so many people just giving you shout outs just so excited about all of it from sjsu i'm not sure who they are but maybe you do that they had a must be the san jose university there and then there was a question about do you feel like working with pixar helped you when you went out on your own and i feel like i can confidently say that like that does help you like having that structure and having that form before you go off into the world it's kind of like going to college how college helps you right like that's why college is important it's because it gives you the structure so that when you go off on your own you can have that structure in my opinion but i just know yeah what you felt like if that was the same yeah no i think like you know it's really pixar is an important step uh i think for for tonko house and the reason why is because i think uh you know from the outside that's where especially as an art department that's where a lot of my heroes worked and to kind of work with them work side by side and see that oh my gosh there's no there's no tricks here like these are some of the hardest working people i know these are some of the most talented people i know and they struggle and their struggle is not unlike any other struggle that i experienced while i was in school or anywhere else but to see that it takes away a lot of the mystery and it also gives you a sense of confidence i think that oh my gosh like this is what it takes to make something great and it's not easy and it does take more than anything hard work and perseverance um and of course talent and the right mix of people and um and i think like seeing that firsthand and understanding that like tonko house ripped pages right out of the pixar book right like we didn't there's no it's just like art like i feel like i'm not trying to reinvent i'm not trying to invent art i look at all my heroes i go to the museum i go look at a john singer sergeant painting i'm like yeah i just need to steal that right there you know and um and it's the same way i think it's it's sort of like you know there are so many things that dyson i don't know in starting tanco house that we're not trying to be inventive you know i think we're trying to build upon our life experience including pixar um to be able to you know our attempt at being the best that we can be um and whether or not that is great or not i i don't know i just think it's there's a level of confidence i think that comes with um you know that aspect i mean that's the that's the human condition that's why we're all here right so try and be the best that we can be it looks like you've opened up adobe fresco which of course is my favorite app in the universe um i'm proud to be a part of the fresco team if you haven't out there in the world y'all while rob's getting set up let me tell you a little bit about adobe fresco it is a free app there's a subscription but you can get all the goodies with free for free for nothing and let me talk about some of these goodies they're going to be these amazing tools that robert's going to show you today including live brushes and pixel brushes and vector brushes all at once all on the same canvas it's also got unlimited layers and yes you heard that right you can make as you can't make as many layers as as would crash the app that's how brilliant it is that they set this up but if you use photoshop as well and you do subscribe you can go back and forth between fresco and photoshop with something called cloud documents and we're gonna try it out today here with rob i'm gonna i'm gonna put him on the spot and we're gonna try to transfer it over to photoshop to finish it but rob talk to me a little bit about what you're going to draw and what you'd like to show the people if you're ready if not i can keep up evelyn no no no um you know i just thought a couple things like fresco i want to be honest here it's not like fresco is something that i've been working with you know since its inception it's something that actually was introduced fairly recently through you and i talking and it's something i've tried out and it's something that for me what's been challenging about working at home is the inability to kind of get up and move around um you know i think at the studio it's a lot easier because i'm meetings and i do but because my meetings my artwork my writing everything is in one spot um my mind gets stagnant as i sort of just sit in the same spot and all these things start happening in front of me so a lot of what i have to do a lot of times is put down big ideas and i think that's where being able to work on the ipad work on fresco that's mostly what i do you know it's like is to be able to put down quick ideas uh and that's what we'll talk about today and show a little bit of what i mean by that and um and then when i need to do a phyllis finished illustration i bring it into photoshop you know and that's where i'm most comfortable i know sort of all the different little tiny things that i can do but to get big ideas down sort of like little sketches and stuff i feel like this is great because i could sit on the couch i could be you know out and about i could be outside um and that's great for my mind to be honest that's awesome i noticed you put down a wash and i love that and i don't know that most people do that so could you tell us a little bit about the why yeah i mean i think i just white is so intimidating you know just like a white canvas is just so intimidating for me so i do like to be able to um put something down to work from uh and then you know one thing i like about working in fresco is basically with two hands you can do so much right um it's like on so just because people can't see my setup on one hand i've got the apple pencil on the other hand i've just got my hand free and um and i'm sort of moving stuff around with my left hand as i sort of move you know paint with my right um yeah and that setup works you know really really well um for me overall um but yeah i love the recent colors that's fun actually that's one of my favorite parts about fresco is that it keeps those recent colors and go ahead sorry i interrupted you no not at all um so today i'm just gonna you know our latest project oni is on my brain um it's something i've been drawing on for the last year or so and so i'll just do something quick i obviously can't give away story stuff because of course it would kill me but um uh but i would just you know i just really just start with what i love about um this overall is this little uh watercolor tool it does this thing where uh i like to have some sort of base to work from um that has texture that has like all these different things so what i usually do is i sort of make this like abstract something so i think people just yeah it's just a bunch of stuff you know and i just sort of create texture what i love about the watercolor tool is that it is random-ish so you get that random like you get something new and fresh out of the box yeah yeah and i think a lot of people are looking at like what is that but you know basically i take this and i take this with sort of the smudge tool yeah um and just push stuff around um to get to break up some of those weird edges yep and all i really am looking at is a little bit of color modulation you know like some warm and cool stuff like that i do think that this is probably like some form of the sky yeah um so that's the color of a sky maybe just you know and i think here you could really see how it does some fun stuff um [Music] but uh that's all it really is for me you know is just a little bit of that um and then once i have something like that i just you know we'll start to block in you know one of the things about this film funny uh our ser limited series is that uh we get to play in japan so it's sort of like the forest of japan and things like that and so one of the things that i will do is um i really like this brush in here this painting brush it's this one season um sort of which person was that i missed it cezanne oh yeah yeah that is a good one really fun it's got like the color dynamics i'm pretty sure kyle webster made that brush oh yeah yeah it's it's awesome so nice this just gives me a little bit of flexibility um with and this is just like a big you know rock i guess um so i'll take something you rock rock yeah and i think there's some basic you know lighting color principles so like i'm thinking of sort of this time of the day when uh the sun has gone down but the sky's still sort of illuminated you know that sort of magic hour where i don't know i just feel like it's just such a magic sort of moment especially related to you know childhood and being home and having that playful sort of time um and so warm inside warm like the color that you're painting because i do want to point out that you went warmer when you went to the bottom in that film yes so you know in a lighting setup like this the the the the light source is the sky um and the sky is this sort of cool purplish blue right i'm thinking sort of this blue light that's casting down and it's also casting down what's what i would say is um you know non-direct light so filtered light um in other words there's there's a spotlight in which you know if i had to draw like uh you know that idea would be hard shadows and a very directional point of view right and i think when i'm painting something like this the light is getting filtered so actually you know light is actually going um i think it's easier to just draw so i think like you know directional light would be like oh okay like this is all shadow and i think like uh this sort of idea of overcast light or filtered light is basically that the light is going in all sorts of directions and the reason why is because there are clouds and there's a sun do you like my drawings i do it's beautiful and it's bouncing the lights are bouncing that's bouncing it's getting filtered and it's sort of bouncing all over the place and so because of that um you get what is sort of what i would say are [Music] soft shadows right so there's this soft quality to the light um and because the the shadow the light is blue and this sort of soft quality to it the shadows are sort of temperature wise warm um and so that sort of helps too and that's why that's where the intent of the overall um warm light is the warm shadows are coming from and a quick color theory for those out there listening if this sounds weird to you let me let me roll back and talk a little bit about what we mean by warm and cool colors well while robert paints so warm you think hot right you think the sun you think fire and naturally you think of like hot colors and that's what we mean so when we mean reds we mean yellows all those sort of warm colors really do evoke that warm feeling and then on the opposite side we've got the cool colors and that's going to be your group your blues your purples your greens i tried to say all those colors at once there that's what you heard me stumble over is i tried to say every color on the cool spectrum in one word which doesn't exist so let's not do that but by using these colors just like how rob was talking about mike wachowski in monsters university walking through the light you can tell stories just through color just through light just through your choices and that's why it's important to kind of know these things and what you might evoke in your viewer not just color in cool colors that you like but to really think about that story that you're trying to tell and you know robert's talking about this like warm magic hour childhood feeling and let me tell you i'm here for that that sounds cozy and i like being cozy and so this is very beautiful already just from that cozy feel and i love the texture that you've got you're pushing it around with um with all these different colors like it's got gosh oh my god that blue you're killing me yeah i mean i think you know it's sort of like most distinctly the color of the light that i think i'm thinking is sort of falling down and you know i think of like this sort of how i'm painting too as sort of like a sculpting of like pushing colors like i put the blue down it's sort of blocking in and then i sort of carve back with this you know sort of mid-gray um that i have uh and sort of carve back in to get that a little bit and and on top of all this i would probably just to be honest draw um yeah so take some of this you know idea and just create some texture i think down in in in these little areas and mostly i think that'll be to help delineate like so for instance one easy quick trick to make it look like a rock and give a texture is to draw those little shadow areas like oops um draw the little shadow areas so take the shadow color and sort of sculpt these little scratches on it almost right yeah and little little thing that got a little bold but um but it's kind of nice to see that because you know you've got so many subtle shades working that all those little bits like oh they just they call out to you the little details yeah and i think like you know you just have to take this and just sort of draw a shadow side and a little bit of a light side i feel like carve back in and suddenly they feel like little pox and like marks you know um and i sort of like you know that quality of okay that's a rock right like is is the idea um it reminds me of that rock in berkeley you know the one that's in the middle of berkeley that's what i think it's called come to mind yeah if you guys don't know there's this giant rock in the middle of berkeley that you can actually boulder and climb on and it's it's in a park here in berkeley california and this is just sort of giving me those vibes cozy a sweet call out in the chat uh with with someone quoting you i think in lines and then robert proceeds to block in shapes with big bold colors um i'm doing my best to be a painter um you're a great teacher you're a great painter i think that's what's interesting is like and it's beautiful because we all have those anxieties as artists right where we're like oh gosh you know i don't know what i'm doing and then you proceed to really know what you're doing in front of a live audience you know like well you know it's incredible you know part of it is that like maybe part of it is though definitely part of it is a huge part of it is insecurity i mean i work with you know dice uh tsutsumi who to be honest like that guy is just an incredible painter and so i think it's a little bit of also like me telling myself like dice is a painter i'm not you know like um and there's a little bit of a self-defense mechanism there i get that i get that it's sweet though it's a really it's fun and i do the same thing um that's why it's so relatable yeah i mean one thing i like is this little um this guy what is it i don't know what it's called oh the touch modifier the touch modifier so when i click it um you know oops did i do something i did i changed it yeah there's two different modes so the outside ring does a different thing than the inside ring and there's actually under the gear icon and you'll see it like pop up the little the little toast is what they call it at the top where it's telling you what you're doing yeah under um app settings there's like a touch shortcut like a whole thing that'll show you all of them where is that under input scroll down touch shortcut settings here erase with brush yep and you can change it too and what happens is it'll whatever tool you're on the touch shortcut does different things so like i'm sorry i don't know them at all there's a map somewhere in the app um but it is very complicated so like if you're in the vector tools you can use it to just trim off edges of vector points so you can do overlapping stuff without having to worry about the edges and um if you're in i think you can set it to smudge gosh it's just got so much there is a tutorial y'all so don't let me babble at you if you're in fresco and you're on the home screen there's a whole tab that has a ton of learn tutorials and there is one for the touch shortcut so instead of listening to me giving you bad information please check it out and again fresco is free and you get all the sweet stuff with the free account so don't be too don't be too sad about being a free user of fresco we did that on purpose because we do want you to draw we wanted it to be free one wanted everybody to have access to it and the only thing that's behind the paywall right now are extra brushes and those are those sweet kyle webster brushes that everybody loves but you get something like gosh 200 brushes with the original version with the free version of fresco and then you can add library brushes as well you can get added to libraries so it's not really it's it's really only if you want photoshop that you should you should buy photoshop and then you get fresco as well so it's pretty competitive and we love it and of course you know i'm an artist too and it's not like it's not like if i see somebody with colored pencils i come and slap the colored pencils out of your hand and like go ah you should be water coloring you know like i don't do that right and so if possible i think it's important that all of us don't do that to each other if you like other tools that's okay it's fine this is a big beautiful world where we can all enjoy art and we can all use the tools that we love and we can even use them together because that's how much cool stuff we get in this digital age so don't forget that and it is totally fine all art is valid and all methods of creating art i feel like are valid it's all about creating that story that robert was talking about telling your story solving problems and and making beautiful cozy cozy art and rocks that's what's important rocks not what you use it's that you use it absolutely okay sorry i had to rant a little bit no that was great that was great um so i'm just drawing our little character up here um kind of chucking rocks off the edge um so i'm just blocking in i'm sure a lot of people are like wow for someone who's a professional that doesn't look like much um but it will it will no uh everybody starts with a sketch we all put our pants on one one leg at a time right so we also sketches right and then some i've got some questions in the chat so yeah you can add your photoshop brushes you have to make them in libraries um and then the paid version allows you to actually just access all kyle's brushes and import abr files and stuff so there is a page on that in the help x i should probably find that link so i can help you guys out who are having questions i do have a question that might be interesting though that you could maybe noodle on while you're painting which is sam peterson wants to know if you have exercises that you feel are the most useful for capturing color and light in this beautiful realistic way that you're showing yeah i mean i i think you know at our studio especially when like we get interns and things like that the thing that we really hammer on is observational painting so going outside or even setting up still life within your own sort of space to really study how light behaves because i think nature really is the best teacher when it comes to a lot of this stuff and it's not you know again it's my um a lot of my so you know in school a lot of times there's at art center there was a huge emphasis on figure drawing um and drawing in front of the figure things like that and um in the same way i think uh you know that observation a lot of those drawings that i did looked awful because because a lot of times they're just notes on studying the figure i think painting outdoors is very similar to me where it's a it's it's really i think of it as notes for myself i don't think of it as like this is going to hang in a gallery somewhere you know it's it's much more of like a selfish pursuit of just sitting down and taking notes and trying to figure something out and i think a lot of people sort of struggle with that because they look at paintings online and they look at some of these artists and they're just like gosh that that person can paint like crazy but i guarantee that you know at least for me there's i don't post the the paintings that you know i don't feel good about online for everyone to see but there's a lot of them you know there's a lot of those sorts of paintings um because those are the ones that matter the ones that you struggle with are the ones that i feel like really matter because the frustration and all of that comes from learning something new to me um so it's it's part of it it's it's hard to have a culture where we celebrate winning but we don't celebrate losses because losses are important uh not only in art when you when you do make a painting that you don't like i i always there used to be an exercise i would try to do where you draw what you didn't want to draw first if that made sense if you wanted to draw a really cool looking character don't draw don't just start out drawing them draw somebody who looks uncool and then go from there right so that's cool yeah learning to use what you don't want to see as the way that you can actually build something beautiful that you do want to see and i don't know we just really need to be more um okay more okay with failure i think yeah that's awesome that's awesome yes i i totally agree we got some questions in here about like let's see the bad sketches well okay we're here to celebrate not put anybody on yeah not not here but i mean that would be kind of interesting and i love that idea um thomas so thank you for suggesting it in the chat because that could be cool to go through some like ugly with some other artists that maybe you know felt like they wanted to share it like let's see the ugliest yeah yeah i mean i i don't you know i think like um the ugly sketches are usually you know again they're like notes i don't know that anyone gets a ton of out of them other than you know okay yeah that person's capable of doing a bad you know drawing because they're notes it's like if you watched you know read somebody's notes before they made a book it's like right sort of in your own language sometimes you know it's not legible sometimes and that's why it's not yeah they're great that's true that's true but it might be fun to go through bad sketches with somebody like yeah so that's a cool idea so i'm going to give you a time check we're doing great by the way you've got about we've got a total of an hour left just about so oh cool okay i figure you'll you can noodle around for the next half hour and then um we can use like the last sort of i don't know 20 minutes or so in photoshop if that sounds good to you yeah yeah that's something okay thank you yeah of course i love this i love the little oni outfit so um you you have a japanese sounding name and i apologize if that's rude to assume you is your family japanese yes yeah but i'm fourth generation japanese so um you know when we worked on this project uh and there was just so much that i needed to learn about japan about these specific things um and so you know it's not like um [Music] it was a great i mean it was a great project for me to work on also because it was there's that quality to it in which i felt like i could connect to you know i don't know roots or you know that sort of part of me that always wanted to know more about it but never made the time or never found a reason and it just you know kind of lands at the right point in my life too where i just have we do so much work in japan with with japanese partners and um and so it's it's a really it's been a really great experience to learn more you know um overall that's great and if i understand that oni is a demon right yes yes yeah oni's like a creature sort of from you know japanese folklore in japan it's really amazing because every region has their own sort of folklore oni is like an idea of this demon a lot of people think of this like red demon uh horn demon and um there's so many stories about different kinds of oni and what's really fun about what uh you know what dice is doing and everything is it's sort of his take on on all of that folklore um and so it's really you know instead of this really menacing crazy looking demon he's done this really appealing uh looking uh demon overall that's been fun fun to work on [Music] i like the scale of it being a little bit the rock being bigger um yeah that's cool wow i like how it's only been like um gosh you've only been drawing for like not even 10 like 20 minutes maybe and it's just i already i'm already so impressed it's so beautiful oh thanks it's it's it's nerve-wracking no you're doing amazing you're doing amazing and trust me there's so much love in the chat for what you're doing and so much i've got people saying like this sounds like uh this is like a couch like i'm just sitting on my couch with my buddies and talking that's the kind of vibe i love that is the vibe i like to bring here to adobe live so you know y'all out there in tv land come back to adobe live and check out what we have because we've got awesome artists like robert all week long every week long um just to so you can chill out and have fun you can put it on the background and create while they're creating or you can just you know if you're feeling lonely in these weird covid times just hang out with us um there was a question in the chat robert you keep painting and what i'm gonna do is try to do my best to pretend like i understand production roles at pixar because mindy in the chat wanted to know like what was your actual role at pixar and so i'm gonna rattle off some terms and then robert's gonna tell me if i'm wrong or not so from what i understand at pixar uh there's a bunch of different roles that you might be doing in in on a movie one can be a story artist and a story artist will help sort of create the actual beats of the story when you're actually building a scene in a movie so they'll set you up with something like oh well like mike wachowski has to go into the building and what happens when mike walks from the steps all the way up into the scare store or scare building excuse me and and as a story artist you would do quick little boards they're usually known as storyboards but you're actually showing the real action you're you're giving them sort of the the character acting in that um and so that is one job that's not what rob said he did and he can he could tell me if if he did other stuff if he did that but um then there's also a concept designer a concept designer would either create the backgrounds or the foreground characters right and that would be somebody who creates the actual look and feel so what does this um [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] guys my zoom crashed i'm sorry it was my fault i took the whole production down with my bad explanation about what happens at pixar how deep would we go how how many wrong job descriptions did i give the people out there [Laughter] it was great it was great it was good i don't even know how much you guys heard it was good it was great i don't know where i don't know where they got cut off though because you gave away the secret to the universe and they might have missed it um he did give away the secret but no uh i think we got shut down big brother came in it was too much power trying to tell you guys how um how things how things go here at pixar um yeah so i'm gonna let you paint for a second i'm going to make sure that all of my devices are not going to screw up again so let me go ahead um oh you added a staircase i did yeah sort of a carved in little staircase to the top of this rock that's amazing oops let's see if that helps with everything we'll see if that works out now i'm going to ask the chat my dear friends in the chat to let us know maybe where we i was just about to explain the concept artist role says sally well um and i apologize if i'm saying your name incorrectly i'm i'm not great at names um concept artist is you know it's kind of a weird one rob and maybe you could talk a little bit about that where there's not most people are concept designers nowadays don't you think yeah i i i think that uh is the question sort of like what is a concept artist artist um that's a good question i i think that that's a very broad term and i think if you talk to a different people they might have different ideas but what i would say is that um in order to make i think fundamentally an animated film i'll start there you know is everything you see on screen has to be invented yeah or built right so even if it's like a cup that you're like but i know that cup but someone still has to make it from from nothing um and so in order to to get an idea like that in the world and especially you know if it's sort of stylized or if you know you're looking at it through a lens of telling story it needs sort of drawings paintings you need people in the beginning to be able to articulate this is what it's supposed to look like in the end so that everyone you know whole teams can work towards it those people that sort of put together those ideas those concepts i would say fall under the umbrella of concept artists or concept designers are people that are sort of there to help articulate and figure out what's the what is this thing supposed to look like um so i guess that's that would be mine you know yeah um i heard about it right like people use them interchangeably lately um so they kind of feel like the same thing and i feel like pixar basically only has concept designers yeah i think so and i think you know for instance disney uses the term visual development a lot and pixar doesn't really use that term you know i don't know you know in the end exactly the difference all i think is you know the part that i've always loved that i was drawn towards is that moment of there's nothing and then these paintings sort of inspire like a whole team a whole vision and whole idea um and i think there's that aspect that i really at least i was drawn towards i would say yeah yeah that makes sense to me um and you know i also i saw a thread the other day it was actually taniko could i don't know how to say his last name oh yeah yeah yeah he was talking about how there's a perception of like a ladder to climb in the art world like oh if i don't become a director i'm not good or something and and it's not necessarily true you know being a director is like is is taking on many different roles at once right and if you just love to design and draw it's not wrong for you to just love that you don't have to correctly right oh gosh yes 100 i mean a lot of um you know i sort of think of it like i don't know those those fun film like ocean's 11. you know you need like not everyone can be the george clooney not everyone could be the brad pitt but you you kind of need like all these this sort of ragtag group of people who have separated interests but a collective goal um to be able to make something of this scale you know i i i think um [Music] but having interest in all of it like having a general interest and telling story i think is is the common yes um yes the common thread but i agree and i don't think you guys heard me i when i was when i was crashing the entire stream and screwing it all up uh what i was trying to say was i was talking about how it's more collaborative than people imagine you know from being a story artist to being like a visual development artist or a concept artist and even a director everybody's relying on each other's ideas to make the best possible story and so it's not like the director parts the clouds and comes from on high um and then tells you what to do exactly you know you're meant to bring your unique creativity you know to to the to the production yeah it's so good i mean the reason why i love film is because it's one of the few art forms that bring together so many art forms you know it's like we think of it as like oh just we're just focused on the visuals but you know there's music there's acting there's sound there is editing you know costume design like so all of these things i feel like that's what i love about film is that it's a collaborative effort it's it's sort of reliant on all these different parts and pieces it's like an orchestra that comes together in order to put together the symphony that you know ends up being a a singular experience but again like it's all of these things coming together and i think true filmmaking and storytelling understands on some level how to play with the volume knobs of all those different things yes um and i think the art department is a microcosm or doing art for a film is a microcosm of that same idea you know i do set design dice does color you know color and lighting design and it doesn't mean that we don't dabble like even here i'm like i'm doing color you know to that point but um i think it's that idea overall of you know this collaborative um environment that if you want to just make artwork there's also ways to do that right like um it's not like you have to be that to work in film it's just that you know i that's the part i love like i would if i wanted to just make artwork i would pursue maybe doing gallery work or you know or freelance you know freelance do freelance design work for um film you know yeah absolutely there are other ways yeah you know what's what's wrecking me i don't know if everybody else can see this but i can see the mouse on your screen will you push your mouse out of the way so i can enjoy the like it's on the yeah like on your computer for whatever reason oh yeah there we go yes no don't be sorry i didn't realize yeah i don't know if you guys watch netflix and you see that and you're like ah the mouse is a mormon medal so i've had a little bit of a tense moment i apologize robert thank you for being so kind to me this is looking so beautiful um and there's just a lot of love in the chat for everything you were talking about for taniko and his awesome tutorials and also just starting the process and talking about concept design and getting started in the industry people are really excited do you think that um let me see how do i ask this do similar studios take designers separately or is it like one who does all the things um i think they're just i think this question is about how the division of work is separated between artists so maybe um if you don't mind chatting to us a little bit about how that works like you do one person does one person get a character does one person do all the backgrounds like how do you feel like is the best way to structure artists working together yeah i mean i think every it's like a you know it's like it's like any team um you divided i think according you divide responsibility and accountability by sort of what's what what's needed and then also what the skill set is of your team so you know if if you know at pixar for instance it divides along several lines that that sort of reach into technical departments so you have a character designer you know you have a set designer you have a lighting designer right um and a lot of those things and you have sometimes too even just like what they call a shading art director who focuses primarily on the local color of objects um so the materials and things like that but all of this stuff is just you can do it many ways and and many studios do it differently um so i think it really depends just like any basketball team you might put together sort of how everyone divides up the work uh you know the goals are the same but how everyone divides the work is dependent on on sort of the skill sets of the people there are some designers out there that can do all of it and you you want them to and so the team is built sort of on that idea the structure of the team and how people work but that's also what i think is so you know really cool about um about it is like for instance i'm a set designer but i also did color lighting design i've also done character design i've also done graphic design you know for for um for our films and things like that uh so you know i think a lot of times i think a lot of people think about getting into the industry and they think about that entry-level position they think about like i just need my foot in the door and that's not a bad thought but also you know in order to if you focus on that too much you end up doing work that i feel like so that pigeonholes yourself in a way like you're like oh i just need to do a bunch of what they call packets like instruction manuals on how to build stuff and i think it's also important to have again a sense of yourself like what do you like doing what do you love doing and what are you really great at um and celebrate that through a portfolio and sharing work and your social media i think that the industry's so big in that way also that it might take some people more time but you know over time if if that's your passion and that's what you're great at i do think that the industry is really encompasses a lot you know um and and i do think there's a way to kind of find that but it does take persistence and not everyone's going to see things the same way you know no it's true and it's you're giving out some really wise advice so i just want to kind of repeat it yeah don't of course you want to get your foot in the door but you do want to be a little bit careful because you know in your heart you've got things you want to draw or you want to create and if you get i don't know if you get known as the person who does something else you can kind of sell yourself short a little bit so although yes get that pa role um but make sure everybody knows that your passion is prop design or your passion is backgrounds right and and carry that torch for yourself and don't be scared to stand up for what you want to do um so that you don't unfortunately go somewhere else with your career right you know so yeah it's not wrong to advocate for yourself absolutely absolutely this is so good how do you feel because we've got time we're doing great on time so we got about i don't know just about 30 minutes left stream from end to end so you could noodle some more or we could move to photoshop can we move to photoshop is that cool and i can show a little bit how okay so yeah if you save this we're gonna then we're gonna be looking at this document screen right this is your home screen and down there in the bottom you see the recents if you scroll down a little bit oh actually yeah just let's show your screen for just a minute let's scroll down you see that little button it's syncing there's that little blue tiny button yeah so let's actually give it a bit before we open up photoshop because that's it go into the cloud your little document is flying up through space into the world and then when it's done it's going to give you that same green check mark that you see on your other drawing so now we can switch to two heads but i did just want to let everybody know that that's it so why don't you keep an eye on that before you open photoshop because photoshop might not show you anything until that's got until that's all uploaded code sync cool exactly that and let me see if i can find some other follow up questions while we're waiting for it to sync um okay so what is there a difference between draftsmanship and technical skill that was a question that we got in the chat um is there is there a difference between technical skill and draftsmanship i mean i think like i'm not sure i don't think the importance the importance of that right like distinguishing between one or the other i think that yeah draftsmanship i think is just i use that word and this might be wrong this might not be universal but i just use that word as as like a drawer like you know your ability to draw like draft something you know put it down on paper i think sometimes drafting is is considered almost from like an architectural perspective of like really sitting down to draw plans drafting like plans um that are architectural sort of elevation views or you know that's sort of almost like your ikea instruction manual to on how to build something uh i think in order to do drafts to have draftsmanship there's an aspect of technical skill they're one in the same thing right so that's great yeah well it looks like ourselves we're seeing so if you open up photoshop now maybe we'll wait till till we make sure that photoshop is is all good we'll let you switch your screens and we'll open up photoshop and okay all righty and so we're probably good enough we're probably in a good place where we can show everybody behind the scenes so if you go to file you should be able to open your cloud documents from here you go file you go to open just regular open and it's going to open up like this but then we're gonna go to cloud documents yeah there we are um and so there's your fresco file right there that we were working on and it should open up now sometimes this also takes a little bit to download and again it's because it's going into space right and so it's gonna depend on your internets um but what's cool is that you can go back and forth between fresco and photoshop all you want and i had a question like do you have to no if you go to my instagram as an example all that stuff you see on it is completely done in fresco not in photoshop so you don't i mean fresco is a fully featured tool for making artwork it's just up to you and robert wants to work in photoshop so let's show you both yay there we go and you can see all your layers are just like you left them yep yeah it's pretty awesome so the only reason why i love photoshop is more my comfort and familiarity and also just you know i think the ipad is great because it forces me to work i don't know if you noticed but i always shrink down the document and work almost like a thumbnail level and so you know for me photoshop my cintiq i'm working on a cintiq and it's just a bigger surface to draw on it's you know it's just there's a little more comfort for me here um and usually some of the things that i'm doing are pretty simple i just digital painting a lot of times has this quality where you look at it and you're like oh that's a digital painting and some of it is because of you know while the brushes are amazing and they do all the right things on a fundamental level there's just sort of an execution sometimes that i'm like i just for my taste you know sometimes i'm just a little bit uh wanting a little more of that tactile quality and so this is just a real scan of a real watercolor painting um wow and i'll show you i'll show you what it actually oh what's going on here what it actually looks like is um [Music] rasterize this uh is this sort of like really it's just a sheet of watercolor paper that i had painted and scanned um and i'll take something like this and just put it on sort of overlay you can see it's like overly bright it's doing weird things um but immediately it makes it look like you watercolored this like yeah yeah i mean that's what i love that's what i sort of love about it you know it's on overlay so what that means is basically at sort of a 50 gray um it is anything that's brighter or darker than 50 gray will show up so if it's perfectly 50 gray it's transparent um in my texture layer so one thing is the blue is not totally helpful for me um so i might neutralize that a bit by going and desaturating that level overall yeah um and i just want to maintain the values that i did have going on right i'll point out that you're using a clipping mask so that it only affects the watercolor layer right yes right right so it's not it's not universally so yeah you know if you do it universally it'll look like that great so but you can see that's exactly what it's doing it's desaturating it's darkening a little bit uh and but it's just affecting that layer um and right away you can see that like from where it was before to where it is now there's just a quality of texture integration noise um that across it sort of pulls things together for me um the other thing that i like to do is some big you know temperature color wipes so like right now i do like the overall simplicity of the image like this simple rock with the sky but when i look at it and there's color modulation right in other words like there's a little bit of like warm cool color relationships in the sky that i like there's a subtlety there but when i step back it's just really just purple and um this kind of gray rock so what i end up doing is um i usually will pull in something like a warmer maybe color um oops that's kind of pretty but not the intent um so i might pull something like this in and you can see again like digitally you're like it just looks digital all of a sudden um so again like i'm just trying to affect some of the things that are underneath there um and i'll slide some of the opacity down um you can do a lot with blending modes and sort of gradients and just you know bringing in lighting yes yeah absolutely um and so like right away you can see there's this like you know we you talked about in the beginning the idea that i explained you one of the words you used was like oh it feels warm i think you said something like that right yeah i did um and i think that feeling that that descriptor again is like a simple idea but uh but i i i agree with that right like it's sort of this warm moment it's that moment that i want to feel warm it's interesting to me when you look at this and you're like it just feels like a little bit one hour too late like 15 minutes too late and like it's time to go home yeah uh and i i i feel like i still want the presence of that warm light that sun um and so you know the direction of this is sort of that that it would be towards the horizon and the light is shining off screen um and i think with that you know we get a little bit more of that warmth overall um it does brighten overall a little bit and so you know again a lot of this is just playing with uh these layers i think people might be like but is that really painting and i'm like i don't i to me it is to me it is because i care most about you know that getting to a place where it matches what i see in my head to me craft to me it's crafting an image like there's this term that maybe people i don't know if they know it but i always i use it it's straight out of the renderer right like when something looks straight out of the renderer it's not a good thing it usually means it either looks old or like they didn't do any effects on top of it and it came right out of my play blast you know like it's just not a great thing yeah and i feel like this is a really great technique for people to make sure that they're they're i don't know it just feels more like a photograph where it feels more crafted than something that's just straight painted by adding your effects by thinking about lighting and i get what you're saying that it's not really painting but i think it's an important part of painting because look at what you just did you improved it just through like a few little clicks and you're getting to a really beautiful place with it just by oh wow look at that so you can see you know i mean it's it's again it's like it's not a lot but and it's not like you know again like working on this in fresco the reason why it's so great is again because of like i'm able to be mobile i'm able to be outdoors i'm able to look at stuff and be around things that that are not my desk um which i know for the purposes of this it's not but in in in real life in real practical application um and you know while i feel like it's not 100 there it captures sort of the spirit for me of all that again it's note-taking and then i am able to just bring it back and you know really make it a little more into what i would say is like a little more of a cinematic quality to it um overall and uh and you know it's like some things like so for instance in my diagnosing you know again like i feel like a lot of painting is just like writing it's a lot of editing um you put things down and then you sort of see things and you're like oh i don't quite like that so for instance it gets really heavy under the rock for me like this big dark shadow gets really heavy and so rather than again going back and painting it because i like the base of what's there in terms of paint strokes color module all that stuff all i'm really going to do is um take that rock layer and group an adjustment layer to it okay um and just play with lightening it um a bit yeah and you can get so far with this what's cool about these well i'll babble a little bit while you're doing that you know these are adjustment layers and they're in photoshop they're in photoshop on the ipad and they're in fresco fresco has a smaller set of just the color based ones to make sure that you know it's going to be like focused for illustrators because that's why we built fresco and so what you can do with them is non-destructively edit the colors that are already on your canvas and all of them have these sort of boring mathematical equations behind them we don't want to hear about but they do different things as an example the multiply layer literally multiplies every number by every color every color has a number and it multiplies them that's all it does and the practical upshot of that is that white becomes transparent on a multiply layer and so that's a quick way that you could like put in a sketch and take the color out of the sketch if it was on white paper you just set it to multiply and you can paint underneath it and the white becomes transparent so there's all these really fun things that you can do with adjustment layers and i'll be honest with you as much as i understand most of the mathematical equations and what they're supposed to do i never think about that i just like go through the entire list and tell me if you're wrong robert but i just go through the list and just try them all like yeah i mean i i really fundamentally i use like overlay um and multiply the most yeah other than that i don't i can't say that i'm completely aware of what it might do to a painting to your point you just kind of click through them you know and you're like oh that kind of i like that like that that looks cool well it's cool again they're non-destructive so if you don't like it you can take it away and then actually in photoshop if you notice they all have a masking layer and so you could actually paint it in so say you just wanted the rock to have it on there you could paint in that mask and just have it be affecting that rock and in fact you kind of are aren't you i'm sorry i missed that you're just painting and you've got that going on each one of those little um gradients that you've added to your masking layer separates the layer of effect right so it's only affecting a little bit of the picture yes yeah um absolutely and and i think one of the things like for instance uh right now what i've done is uh i've flattened down everything um i still maintain my layers just in case like in in this group this folder but i basically take this um because what i want is um [Music] like we talked about in the beginning the source of light is sky uh a lot of times when you look directly at a light source your brain does a lot of work to sort of compensate between light and shadow um and so because of this there's actually a quality of softness between uh the oftentimes what is light and shadow so for instance oops i don't know why is this not working um i'm gonna inverse this i'm gonna select out just the sky paste it in here and one of the things that i can do in photoshop that i that again like it's just like a little bit of a blessing it's not it's not make or break the image is the ability to run some of these filters and so like i might run a bit of a uh a filter tool to be able to get a little bit of that light bleed and it's not doing everything that i want um right because it softened out the whole sky and everything right but i think what's uh really nice about it is the ability to again if i have all these things loaded up i'm just selecting everything um and i create a layer mask using that uh what i'm able to do is you know it's just i'm able to maintain my sky but get a little bit of that light bleed and again i don't love losing the entirety of my character um and so i'll just bring back by erasing into that mask so this is this is that mask what it looks like yeah um and i'll just bring back uh some of that that's so effective master's super powerful i love them i you know i don't know you you i saw some traditional artwork so that was kind of incredible to me because i think i'm so addicted to undo and masking that traditional artwork starts to start to get me nervous do you think yeah i mean embarrassingly i feel like there's been times when i've been painting with real media and then kind of my hand does that thing as if it's on a keyboard to undo uh so i i too i'm sort of a little bit conditioned um and intimidated by real media but you know i think there's stuff that real media does that is again really hard is um in digital media sometimes but the tools now especially like you know the tools nowadays are incredible is those happy accidents you know like oh i didn't mean for that to happen but i kind of like that that's kind of a cool you know quality to it um i really i really do like um it is fun we all love it when that happens when it comes for free because let me tell you in the digital world nearly nothing yeah nothing's free you're so right you gotta add your little scratches you gotta add your little bumps you know and uh yes yes i love this we're rounding up with about 20 minutes left so you please enjoy yourself yeah of course of course let me go ahead and check out what's going on in the chat over here everyone's just really excited that um we all love control z that's our savior um and a lot of lots of love for the fact that we just roll through the adjustment layers and you don't know what we're doing because it seems like that's a real that's a common feeling we've got steve out here suggesting that you flip the canvas uh which is interesting because you know i flipped the canvas constantly and i've not seen you do it once yeah i i'm just um [Music] i don't even know how to do it how would you do it is it is it you just transformed the whole thing there's a button in fresco that i would use and so i don't know how you do it here there's a way to yeah flip canvas and then you just you know you get fresh eyes on it yeah you check your composition oh what happened there you go it just took a minute yeah it's funny it looks backwards to me now it's like an image that doesn't have an actual direction but it just looks backwards yeah yeah yeah i don't know i feel like this scene doesn't necessarily have a lot of balance that i don't for me when i'm drawing a phase i always try to make sure that like the eyes are not like creepy you know so like i know what you mean yeah that makes a lot of sense actually this one i don't know it feels balanced already so i don't know that i would need to flip it yeah i mean if i'm being totally honest i don't i don't do it often you know like i don't really that's not part of uh not that it's i think there's huge value in it but i think i'm just dyson i talk about this i'm i'm a bit of a lazy painter right like i i sort of run out of energy after a certain amount of time and um like dice is really great he could work on a painting for 20 minutes a week like and he just he always manages to find a level of interest and excitement about it i feel like i'm really i love sketching yeah you know and it's like as long as i stay in that mindset uh that it's a sketch um yeah and i just you know that that part of it is just i know so few tools in photoshop to be honest um and i just use those same tools a thousand times over um i kind of love that although i've got i'm sort of a switch hitter with both of those but because i admire jay schuster who you brought up he's the same way he draws it and he's done he doesn't he doesn't think about it you know he's he's over it and he's on yeah yeah but for me i don't know i sometimes i labor like laboriously paint and spend hours on something and i'm jealous of the ability to just like just get it done and get it get it out there because because i feel like i'm not good at it i mean i think yeah i i mean i think it's it's a little bit again it's like a little bit of insecurity on my part of just feeling you know that um that disposability of a sketch do you know what i mean like just like i'm not trying to perfect it i'm just trying to get an idea down and move on uh i believe in quantity you know i believe in like yeah do a lot of it and you'll get better at it so for me i try not to labor over something and i try to just measure like well you know like if if this were a real thing that i had to do for production i'd be like well what's the value do i keep making this better is it going to get that much better because there's a certain point where i feel like it'll take you just as long to go 10 more than it took you to get to like that 80 90 mark at that point i'm like well i could do a whole other painting or i could just you know try to perfect this and for me because again it's about ideas concept story i gotta go do that other painting like that's that's worth so much more to the team to myself you know um and so in that way too i feel you know i feel um i tell myself that i don't know if that's like yeah i don't i just tell myself that it's good it's good i see what you're saying because it's true like it's kind of what makes some of those production paintings so beautiful is that they are unfinished you know you see these pictures that are you know because you're trying to get a movie mate you don't have time to create some beautiful rendered 40 000 hour painting like you got gotta just get it enough to tell the story enough to tell the next person down the line what to do and then you're good right and so if you can make three of those paintings you're way more valuable than just one perfectly polished gorgeous piece of art i you know i hear you and i think it brings so much life you know to it because those pieces of art still do look unfinished and that's beautiful i think i mean they don't look unfinished to somebody who maybe doesn't do art all the time but you'll see it in like the details or the jackie edges over here and that it makes it feel alive to me and i like that yeah yeah i mean i feel like you know especially when you're making concept art for something that doesn't exist you know it's not like there's a real there might be a rock you know to your point there might be a rock somewhere that looks just like this and a little girl that looks like this and birds flying in the sky and all that sort of thing but i think of it as like if i were on location and i was gonna do a painting of this scene it's a moving scene you're only able to capture it so quickly capture it so quickly and there's something to that too that quality in which it feels real through execution in in the way that you paint it in the same way you might paint it if you were sort of observing it um and uh and again like whatever i put down on canvas is going to be open for open season for everyone to comment on as well yeah so if i spend a lot of time on the character and it's off i'm going to get notes on the character it's like well the eye's not quite in the right place her arm kind of seems kind of short like but this no one's going to come in and be like wait a second is that character on model they're just going to be like yeah that little block there is is the girl for me i'm like great because i just want you to comment on whether or not this is capturing the tone of the scene is it capturing that moment and if so great let's move on you know um and so i try to also even though it seems like a little bit sloppy i also try to make the artwork appropriate for what it is i'm trying to talk about so that i'm encouraging everybody to talk about the things that i'm trying to exhibit or communicate and talk about and so that's why doing the really detailed drawings versus little studies like this are sort of an important part of being a concept artist or you know working in film is you know you you kind of pull out the different parts and pieces for different problems that you're trying to solve um so yeah and that's that's that's the fresco pipeline of working for me is that you know studies um and capturing tone and moment overall now do you get to do this a lot for your personal work there's a question in the chat about that like you know how many are how many personal pieces of work are you able to do in a week and do you consider the stuff you do for tonko house personal or is it work you know you know it's funny i think the same way i did at pixar where every piece of artwork i do is personal um and it's not like you know when i put myself into someone else's world that they've created it's my responsibility to be an audience member first and foremost in other words like enjoy it on that level someone else's work someone else's story but then you've got to dive in like you've got to invest you've got to risk something as an artist and i think the risk really is making it personal feeling like this is my point of view this is like what i want to say about it this is the moment that i think is important now dice as a director may come and look at this and be like i want that light hitting her and i have to be open to that it's his film it's his story ultimately but i also think it's important for me when i pitch it to let them know why i've picked the moment after the sun has gone down you know it's like dinner's right around the corner it's that moment in which it's like she's a little bit up into mischief chucking rocks out into the forest who knows who she might hit and it's like that that fleeting moment that it's like okay well you know it's it's like the sun is going down um and you know because of that i could imagine too that like dice may come in and say you know well that's cool and everything but really i just i really do want that and you know so so then again working digitally i just feel you know i might be like well okay like let's let's see what that really feels like and i would take something you know like this and and sort of play with what that might look like and again i think this is just so much easier to do um digitally than traditionally right like i could just sort of start to really quickly um well what does it mean to have the light sort of catch her and catch a bit of that rock you know um sometimes you get that you know when the sun is just burning it's low in the sky and it's all bright yeah and it's like you know it's i i don't think you know for me there is like a quality in which it's like okay well you know it would probably be catching the sky a bit there'd probably be you know quality of of it in in sort of the clouds a bit you know um yeah adjustment layers are so good for that and i can imagine working quickly getting direction getting notes you've got to be able to switch it up without feeling like you have to make a whole new painting yes yeah totally um it's really just wild we got about 10 minutes left my dear so you keep on having a good time maybe we'll spend the last five minutes sort of chatting with our friends in the chat if that sounds good yeah that sounds great see what's going on out there it's so cool that we had such an international like group of people we had people from indonesia we had europe it is awesome it's so cool you're bringing in the whole world here somebody's asking if you can bring a psd into fresco and yeah you can so just like what you saw us do with photoshop you can either go back and forth with cloud documents or you can just open a psd in fresco like if you have it on your ipad or even on a windows machine because fresco is actually on windows as well so kind of fun let's see what else we got here from our wonderful audience who have been so great we got a question about being a jack of all trades or specialize in one type of design such as character or scenes and gosh i don't know for me will william's asking this question and i feel like it's really what you want to do like instead of asking what's best for the universe like what do you want to specialize in and if that's going to be characters then you should go hard on characters right but even character designers um even character designers should be drawing backgrounds right just so you can try it just so you can get that sort of experience out there at least i feel so like i feel that way what do you think rob yeah i i i agree it's sort of like what you're interested in and um you know i think fundamentally you should i like to think of myself as a filmmaker first and foremost um so you know and then you're part of a team sometimes it's really great to specialize because you need a specialist but sometimes the team just needs you to rise up to to do to solve where the problems are you know um and so i really do feel like there's there's a huge quality of um being open you know being being curious about all of it but also go where you gravitate towards you know and and think about it as a team it's like you know yeah like um having an interest in character design if you're a set designer is important you know i don't think of them as separated separated things in that regard you know yeah um yeah yeah i think it's a great question though we got a request to zoom in so we can see the whole artwork i mean i'm kind of i know you're all the way out there oh it's so great wow i love what you've done with all the adjustment layers too and you've brought it so far with those like really fun yeah wow we've got this hint of this forest in the distance which is really cool yeah i think there's a little bit of you know i think like if there was more time i think what i would be doing is a little bit more uh careful painting of you know that that sort of light that we're talking about you know um this sort of warm light that's hitting stuff yeah but you know for the most part i think fundamentally the idea is there you know it's like right um right oh wow we've even got people from pakistan and mexico sorry they're all shouting out their locations for us when i mentioned that which is amazing just crazy i do love that this is like you know this is a worldwide audience and so we're teaching everybody in this world to draw through lightbox expo which i love yeah yeah i do to oh it's so good i i'm so personally jealous how you work small because i i get nervous and i get into the details you know yeah i mean you know again i think there's for me there's a little bit of i get nervous working big you know i think just like answering the questions of like what is that thing what is that blobby thing whereas like if i'm here i'm like oh yeah i know what that is you know it's like um but yeah i think it's also you know again that that idea to keep whoever my audience is like a director or whoever also focused on the bigger idea um so i i do zoom in when if i need to like convey the design of the clouds or the girl or the rock or the trees or any of that then you know i would be working a little more detailed and that sort of thing but um yeah oh it's so great though i even think it's beautiful big though but i get what you're saying and i thought it was brilliant the way you described it is if you show this to a director and you spent too much time on the character and they're just close enough that they're wrong that is the feedback you'll get right but um it's kind of like giving a presentation you want to be careful about what details to bring up or to not bring up so that you keep people along your same path so that you're telling the right story and you know you're just telling stories visually and trying to make sure people don't get lost in the wrong details yeah totally so cool so i'm just coloring these layers so i know which ones which yeah how to get back i love that you know i don't color my layers often but it is a handy dandy little thing in photoshop that you can right click and add a quick color so that if you just scan it visually you can tell which one is which you know you've got to come up with your own ideas of the color scheme but it's fun really cool yeah yeah so you know i think this is sort of what i would say would be my pitch right this sort of idea i think like you know the director may make a note about how the light hits that this would be that start you know i'd probably work on this a little bit more um and then you know coming out of uh fresco into photoshop you know this is sort of that that sketch right so you can see that evolution of just really i think fundamentally still for me this is like fundamentally you know all the all the bones are there um this is sort of a texturing of it all and some some lighting effects and then and then really the big adjustment stuff of taking direction and doing quick things with it um you know sort of where adjustment layers are incredible but yeah yeah it's so beautiful we only got five minutes left what do you want to do do you want to just like hang out until for a second you've been drawing for like an hour or so yeah yeah totally um i mean if there are any questions or anything like that you know i think some questions in the chat i'll pick a couple i know there was one about pitching the story and that could probably take up the whole five minutes but maybe quickly just talk to us about like what that's like and do you mind making the image a little bit bigger so we can see i know sorry to make you nervous but no prettier there we go wonderful that's perfect um so yeah what happens when you pitch a story like if you were pitching this idea um pitching this idea i think like uh pitching i i think one of the most important things about pitching that i think people skip right over especially as an artist is that uh as a designer i feel like we feel so compelled to pitch a solution yeah so we come in and we're like oh it's gotta be this this this this and it's like i always think that pitching actually begins with fundamentally being on the same page with everyone in the room and so it needs to actually start to me with being on the same same page as to what question are we answering so you know if i sort of talk about this and i and i equate it to after school feeling growing up and being off by that little moment where my parents are off making dinner my friends have gone home it's just me alone up into some mischief i equate this with this sort of time of day i think about you know um i think about los angeles and the sky in los angeles these sort of pinks that are probably from you know particularly in the air which is probably not great but beautiful skies um and then i think about you know and i sort of put that out there that the problem we're trying to solve is capturing that is that feeling right like you know the visual solutions i'm putting forward are are sort of pulling from that pool of ideas now if the director at that point is like wait what no i'm thinking like early morning no one's woken up kid gets up early and is out there up into no good then i know right away like okay well what i'm about to share with you may have value in the sense of closing down this option you know and then my pitch shifts in the moment uh so that i can still talk through it like oh these are the reasons why i'm not defending the idea but these are the reasons why i went in that direction and i read it this way um and then it invites a conversation the director is now having a conversation about deeper about a moment than probably they have had up until this moment and then there's value in that that he may go back to he or she may go back to story and say like you know in the art department they had this image what do you guys think and you know and this is how i feel like the collaboration of like i'm not a story artist you know you talked about storyboarding you talked about you know and but but it doesn't mean i can't influence story it doesn't mean that i can't like put things forward to influence writing or all these different things in many ways what i'm trying to give the director is this is what i really love about what you've written i this is what i really love about what you've done and this is how i connect to it and this is why how i'm hoping that we can connect to an audience is through my my take on it my passion for it comes from this moment and i'm trying to get the director excited about their own thing first and foremost and so coming with a problem putting it through a personal lens and then pitching a solution you know a possible solution with an openness that i do have to uncouple myself from the train and or decouple myself from the train at that point that as much as personal investment i have in this idea i need to be ready to move on to something completely different potentially um and i think that's that's key you know to pitching ideas oh my gosh that was such a good answer yeah no it was perfect and sadly now we're running out of time and we've got like the they're giving us a little hook thing so oh yeah i'm gonna thank you so much for your time this was incredible and please don't go away we've got more streams coming to you so don't leave guys we've got more you can always catch the replay and please check out robert's work on his instagram or also on tonko house and we can't wait for that new book to come out with your cute little your mushrooms and all that stuff update the adobe live team come back and maybe talk us through the book it'd be great anytime yeah thank you so much for having me and thanks for you know showcasing tonko house and what we do it's super exciting and and uh fresco's awesome so thanks for introducing it thank you so much all right guys stick around we got more coming up at 12 we've got kristen garland of she-ra and the midnight gospel so don't go too far okay thank you so much rob bye guys bye everybody rabbit never felt

Channel: Adobe Creative Cloud

Views: 3,491

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Adobe Creative Cloud, Creative Cloud, Adobe CC, Adobe Cloud, Adobe creative suite, #MakeAdobeCC, #AdobeCC, #ACCTags

Id: a_UcXxul74w

Length: 116min 48sec (7008 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021