Background Painting Walkthrough for Animation

alright let's go ahead and get started I want to sit down today and talk to everyone that cares to listen to this about the process of painting this recent painting I did of what I'm calling like a Southern California beach town mostly painted from imagination part of something that me and my friend are doing just kind of an accountability program where we kind of owe each other an illustration every single week and that's a it's been a pretty good way for me to kind of hold myself accountable by having something do rather than just doing personal work on my own account and then no one really expect me to see a final result it's really easy to slip up on that so this has been really fun just kind of an experiment that me and my buddy are doing and it's been really helpful I would encourage you to maybe six something like that out if you have someone in your life who's an artist also and you're both trying to self practice and self learn and do a lot of things it's really helpful to just team up and say well you owe an illustration every week and so do you and you just kind of bounce ideas off of each other and it's pretty low pressure but it's a nice way to encourage yourself to keep doing work for this painting I didn't record myself doing it because it was over the course of several days think about a week I spent on this painting on and off you know maybe a couple hours a day here and there and I just never really had the wherewithal or forethought to click record but actually thought of something that's probably even better than that and it's just I wrote down a bunch of notes about my thought process of what I was what I could remember when I was making this painting and what I thought might be helpful to someone who wanted to do their own painting I would consider this something that I would put in my portfolio as a background painter I think it shows my strengths in color and light and yeah so we're just gonna go ahead and dive right into it this is the final image but let's turn that off and we're gonna get right to the very beginning of it I kind of have some talking points so we're gonna go ahead and start with what my initial inspiration was my initial inspiration was that I was just browsing the internet one day and I happened to cross this image of Gordon Ramsay's beach house and this is the beach house that Gordon Ramsay has and I was like oh that's a really cool house design I don't know why I just kind of struck me as something really really cool right here and you know I like the one-point perspective I just kind of liked the stacked boxes there and I love beaches so that was kind of the catalyst for this whole image was just this one image I happened to pasta happened to cross on the internet one day and I saw that and I started making some sketches and basically this is the first sketch I made for this whole astray ssin it's pretty much a one-to-one copy of the photo I kind of just drew directly from the photo exaggerating some things and changing some certain elements to make him a little bit more energetic and more artistic or animation friendly I would say and in doing that I realized it wasn't really what I wanted and I also didn't want to paint exact copy of that photo I can do that all the time and there's value in that but I kind of knew that I had to do this one illustration so I wanted to make it a good one and so I started building off of that and these are four of the sketches that I made when I was starting to id8 this painting I did a bunch more sketches but a lot of them just ended up on the cutting room floor aka I deleted them and so that there I ran anymore but these are the four that I kept and you can kind of see so if I started with this one and then I'm just kind of like building off of that slowly like this is the sketch this is a little value comp that I had and then this is the next iteration of me just kind of trying to exaggerate some of those features and then it ended up pretty quickly going into this type of image and you could see a lot of where the inspiration is coming from so you got the same kind of like structure here the same kind of like square beach house type dealio with these windows that I don't know these just came from my imagination these kind of windows here and yeah so I just ended up with this composition and it was not just this that solely inspired me it was also this painting that I made I probably made this painting about two three months ago up in Silver Lake California I was just looking for something to paint and they have really steep streets there so this was a fun painting to do and the conjuncture of these two paintings kind of inspired me to do the final painting that we were talking about and all the other reference that's here is stuff that I've got her gathered after the fact once I actually started painting but it is the reference I used when actually designing and drawing up the buildings in detail but I did all that while I was painting so we'll get into that in a minute but these were my two main sources of inspiration a painting that I did and then a photo of some beach house and then I did some sketch exploration and then once I finally settled on this direction for the illustration I came to the next step which was lighting it or adding like a value compass some people like to call it I was wanting to really focus on like dramatic lighting or like energetic lighting I would say even so I did a bunch of passes oh goodness golly gracious I did a bunch of passes for lighting on this and it was pretty tricky because I knew I wanted some cash shadows coming from the left or something but I couldn't quite figure out what those cash shadows would be I kept running into tangent situations this is my first one and I was like oh that would be cool cool negative shape and then this building was all in shadow and I couldn't quite figure out what my focal point was I'm with this one so I moved on I tried well maybe if it's getting hit directly from the left that'll be kind of cool but kind of left me wanting and so I said well maybe overcast and obviously that didn't work out and I said well maybe just kind of a made up light source coming all the way from the diagonal and I said well that's cool but people will see through the lie pretty quickly so then I started experimenting with well if there's buildings there they would cast a light source that would have to make sense for the image and all this you know this isn't stuff that was done in one day like it wasn't me sitting down and just kind of working out these problems in the matter of ten minutes it I would say we ran through that pretty quickly in about two or three minutes but in reality I spent about like four or five hours just sketching and then walking away and then ruminating on it and think and that's a big part of my process when I'm doing these longer digital paintings is just kind of taking a 8 hours or a day to take a break from that painting and just kind of think about it in the back of my head and not too stressed about it but just have the I would try to have the the knowledge or the what's the word I'm looking for I would try to have the hope that the back of my head my subconscious so whatever you want to call it would try to try to solve a lot of these problems for me so that I when I sat back down to do the painting I could come back in with a little bit more energy and a little bit more inspiration or whatever you want to call it so I ended up so it setting settling on roughly this lighting comp but got a little impatience I said you know what let me just go ahead and block in my major shapes and then we'll see where we go from there so once I did the lighting designs normally I would go and do a color comp but for this one I I didn't even do a color comp only because I knew exactly what I wanted with my colors I didn't know what colors I wanted to put everywhere but I did know that I wanted it to be warm and I wanted it to be high key and high key lighting you could Google that but high key lighting is basically where your darkest darks are really really bright so your whole image is relatively bright so if we turn everything back on turn that off and then I turn my black and white layer on you could see that the darkest we get I would say it's about right here it's here but it's pretty dark if you look where my cursor is but we never go to black and we we never really go all the way to white either although we do we get pretty close so [Music] I was just trying to keep that in mind never wanted to go all the way to black never wanted to go all the way to white but I wanted to lean more towards the lighter side for this image and I knew I wanted it to be really warm because I was thinking oh Southern California beach towns and you know if we look at my my reference they're all they're all pretty bright they're all pretty colorful they're all pretty warm and they're all pretty high key I would say there's not a ton of super dark shadows I mean these are photos so you're gonna get dark shadows but I can edit that because I'm not a camera so I can kind of make up my own rules as I went along and then here's where things are gonna get a little bit kind of tricky in this video it's we're gonna click through the layers that I had and I'll supply the PSD so you can click along with me but the way I made this was kind of kind of messy I made a lot of layers and I tend to work pretty neatly as you could see in color-coded and everything is relatively organized but I had my drawing and it's a tight drawing as in you know my major shapes are pretty well defined you know this building goes here and that goes there and like I know where things go and I kind of knew the perspective which was all I bought it didn't draw perspective grid out for this because it's pretty flat the only perspective really is is these buildings here and I can pretty much just you know perspective renounce right there so it's not super perspective intensive I have another image I'm working on now that's pretty perspective intensive that one went through a lot of trial and error so I'll try to make another video about that one later but you could see even with the sky color so I started with this purple sky that was like whoo I just want this guy to be purple because I didn't want to be blue because that's a little too average citizen will make it purple and then as I kept going said we'll make it orange and then maybe green and then I ended up setting settling on this kind of cool green but basically what I started doing is my first thing was I wanted to block out my main shape which was this building I would call it the star of the painting it doesn't necessarily have a focal point this painting but if there was one thing that was like the star it was this building and the fact that the shadows fell across it I'm in a diagonal way so I definitely wanted that and I just kind of started blocking in the major bones of of this building and you can see I have tons of layers for all these shapes and I kind of just make layers willy-nilly when I'm doing these types of paintings I keep them in groups so that they're relatively organized and I can click whole chunks of space on and off at as I need but once I'm inside the group I tend to get a little unorganized so I'm just using a lasso tool if you've never used the lasso tool it's right here and you just go in and you draw your shape or if you hold off you're working on a Mac you can hold option option and then you get the polygonal lacks lasso tool and you can create shapes like that and then I create those shapes and then you can carve into them and then you just paint bucket and fill them and then let's say let's say this is the shape I'm working with just as a little demo oh my thing died who paused the video something's going on all right my pendant so like this is my shape I don't know what happened my Cintiq pin died I don't feel like stopping recording because I do want to get this in one take and what I can do is I can take a new layer on top of that and then hold option in between these two layers and then I could basically get this layer to parent on to that one so anything I paint inside the top layer will only exist inside this shape and so I utilize that a lot for this painting and you can also just do it by like alpha locking it which is this button here and then you get the same effect but I like creating a new layer and stacking it because then you have the option to turn things on and off it gives you a little bit more edit ability so I went in and I just started kind of building things out I got my my rough sketch in there but a lot of it is me designing on the fly and just trying to make things up as I go and for my intent for this painting was well you know I could I could draw this out ahead of time and I've definitely done that before for more complex images but this wasn't a super complex scene it's just you know a flat view of a house and some perspective so I figured I could eyeball that on my own here so just going in and just kind of drawing as I go and adding detail and trying to give this thing a little bit of personality and the plants these plants that are right here that I'm clicking on and off all of these were actually added in after the fact so after I kind of had all of my bones and so let's minimize downs get some bones in here I put my roads in second after that and the roads kind of started just with you know basic shapes so you turn all this off we're doing it as we go guys I mean crazy here yeah hopefully you can learn something out of this I tend to find that when I watch time lapses of artists painting and they've been talking about the time lapse that's helpful but a lot of the times just having an artist talk about the thought process of a painting is just as helpful so I don't I don't think the time lapse is necessarily needed but I would just go in here and I have the grass and the sidewalk in the middle line grass sidewalk middle line we're gonna turn those shadows off for now because that's not the order in which I painted them so yeah brush at a middle line super simple stuff and once I had kind of like my main shapes here so I went in and I made kind of what I would like to call a temporary shadow shape and all this is is just kind of a light blue on multiply and opacity has probably done to 91 percent and I went in and painted all my shadows and pretty roughly with the brush just to have the map there just like my shadow map of where I wanted all my shadows to be and then later once I was done painting all of the local shapes and colors and getting all like the bones down I went in and painted shadows into everything so at the very beginning I'm mostly just painting as if it were an overcast day just trying to get those local colors and as far as color picking you know I knew I wanted it to be warm and I knew I want it to be high key so I was trying to keep that in mind and they also second thing to keep in mind is I knew my light would be over on the left side of the image coming on from off-screen so we get those cool cast shadows I would say the time of day would probably be about 5 p.m. and this is all this is all stuff I've thought about ahead of time just I have it you know in my head that 5:00 p.m. Suns down to the left we're getting this cast shadows and that kind of helps me to know what can happen because if I know the time of day and I know the weather conditions and I know all these these bits of information I can make educated guesses about pretty much everything else um so once I get this main building here and I got my roads in I I started working on these I guess I'll call them condominiums here for these condos it was kind of funny because I didn't have much in the way of drawing so here's the drawing of the condos and they're really really simple compared to what the final painting is and I knew is like oh these this won't fly because that's too simplistic there's no depth not buildings aren't like that so I went back to my reference and this is where I started to deploy my reference a lot more heavily and I would open these up in a second monitor and just have this here so I could be like oh you know a lot of buildings in Southern California have this kind of veranda you know they have this kind of window detail and you know they have these kind of rooms and I would just steal little elements from all these buildings it's not copying the entire building for one to one ratio but I would just steal tiny little architectural elements and then with my lasso tool or my brush tool or whatever whatever I needed I would go in and start to draw those into here and again these plants came later very very late in the game the plants came because I realized it's pretty boring but yeah we're just going in here where we're adding things this is pen work hey it works again going in here and we're just adding architectural elements and if you zoom in there they're pretty loose and I'm just kind of stacking layers on top of each other I'm not doing too good of a job like integrating like interlocking layers I'm just kind of you know oh there's a shape and and that's a shape and you know that that goes there and then you let's go there and so it's pretty messy like look at that that's not super clean or like refined but go in here I mean you kind of add enough detail to where it no one's gonna look super close at these little elements here they're just kind of look at the whole the whole the image as a whole is what I want to read as like fun and this you know I kind of take that cue from my oil paintings that I do because if we look I'm just gonna take this whole reference photo thing up here because if we're gonna keep referencing that I don't want to keep going down to the bottom here because if we look at my my inspiration here this is a small about a six by eight painting and oil and there's things going on here but everything is really really loose everything is kind of like splashed in with little swatches of paint just to kind of give the the idea of those objects and that's the same thing I want to bring into my digital work I can go in and hyper render everything and make sure everything looks super accurate and real and 100% that's not what I really want to do though I wanted to get this out in a timely enough manner so that I could do another one directly after it and so we're just keeping on going with these buildings here you know just here I got my got my base for this building and then I'm just going in and adding the side of it and the roof of it I'm gonna go in maybe add a little bit of color alteration some roof details add a little gazebo on the top second floor I had a little I don't know what that would be called but just a little staircase up to a patio you know how rich people have stuff and then a mailbox because everyone gets mail and then after that I started to think about the background and the background is fun too because the drawing I had open the drawing back up here in a second the drawing I had was really really simple for the background and basically I did the same thing with the background I just had my reference up and I just kind of stole architectural elements as I went through and kind of quick and dirty out of things and I have my big silhouette and then I start to add at that later I have my big silhouette and then I start to subdivide that by adding roof lines and you know details on the foreground and I'm keeping this background area really really loose because it's far away for one and I'm keeping the values really really clumped together so that there's not a lot of differences in values because that would be distracting and then going in and adding just more things and more things and that gives the idea of a lot of detail and then at the end of that I added this little glow layer it's just a texture brush probably get it in the Kyle Webster brush pack or you could use whatever texture brush you want or you could just just just soft around brush and you just put that on there on a color dodge it's locked right now so I have color dodge on there and it's just a kind of turn color dodge awesome and we could see what color that actually is it's just kind of an almost black really desaturated yellow here but when you turn color dodge on that it gives it kind of a very subtle glow so let's see what else do we have did that and as I was painting this I didn't choose the sky color immediately like this is at this point this is probably the sky color I was still working with and then I would every now and again go back and say ah that sky colors boring and I change it and I say oh that sky color is predictable and change in say oh that's what sky is green and changing so a little bit lighter and a little bit cooler so a lot of it is if I could give you the big take away it's like trial and error and time so I would work on this for maybe an hour two at a time and then I would take a step back you know take eight hours go to work go home go to sleep go on a date whatever and then I would come back refreshed and kind of change the things that I had done before alter them a little bit and then add new elements so so nothing was ever like from the beginning I knew exactly what everything would be a lot of it was just a learning process sure my value map back on and then the reason I don't want to use multiply at the like just use multiply at the very end to just add the shadows this is a great example because look of it does to these street lines it just makes them a darker yellow because it's multiplied and it just makes things darker and a lot of the times that's fine but for things like a yellow I wanted it to be different so I would actually go in and just select that little area of street line and I painted those in their own color so once I turn the shadows back on let's see let's turn the shadows back on guys then that kind of green color makes more sense because my thought process was well if you got kind of a purpley blue esky cool sky and it's blue shadows going down and you got yellow it could be anything but I thought it might be a nice nice choice to make it green just because I tried a bunch of different options and none of them really seemed to work so nothing nothing to mystical about it you just got to try some things and if it doesn't work try something else and if that doesn't work try something else and then let's zoom back out here and then the shadow on here is multiply mostly just because I got lazy but some of them are painted directly on there and some of it's multiplied you know you you just do what you need to do for the painting a a little bit of cleanup there and then let's get into the foreground so the foreground I knew I wanted all these plants there they're in my drawing click the drawing on real quick so the foreground plants are in my drawing but they weren't to the level that they are in the final I just kind of had a rough idea of them and so I just kind of come Block in these trees and then I'm just kind of using my lasso tool and then locking the shapes I'm painting into them like we talked about to get to get some more detail in here and then I would have this plant here which is this one that I'm clicking on and off was mostly just me using the brush tool and painting and all these little leaves one by one that didn't use like a stamp tool and like make one stroke and I painted a thousand leaves I just painted each leaf individually and had a little color dynamics on if you don't ever use color dynamics it's a right here this little button and you turn it on and you can turn off apply / tip do you get the effect I'm talking about and let's say let's pick a let's pick a cyan and then turn huge it all the way up saturation jitter so you get the same color but it's saturated and then brightness changes the brightness of it and then usually what I would do is I would turn these all to about below 10% and then you just kind of get like a natural color variation in each shape and that's a really fun way for me to do leaves because it's pretty quick takes a little bit of time to paint all those leaves in but you know move them time moves pretty quickly so and then on top of that just to unify that color dynamics because it is a little onion au fide I just go in there with an overlay and just kind of a dark green with a texture brush on there and you know I just got dark green because painted a dark in there and I had overlay and then I would just kind of play around for which shapes and you you use the best judgement that you have to see what colors you want in all these colors you just get all these these things in here and they were pretty light my pan ability is really light and then I noticed there was kind of an issue with the value where they weren't standing up from the road so I needed them to be darker but obviously not too dark so I just used my curves we can check what's going on on the curves here and I just kind of a dark and pulled that down a little bit you can see what happens when I pull it down just pulled that down a little bit just to darken it not not too too much and then at this point I was like oh something's kind of missing here and I knew it needed plants so I went in and I drew in a bunch of plants some of these plants were I drew them in the foreground area so you see them there but they weren't always there and that's when I just went back into my layers and I said all right well let's trim these plants on and most of the plants were painted just with the brush a hard round brush to give a little bit of accent from all that lasso tool type painting where is really tight crisp clean edges I wanted a little bit of variation with like some looser more painterly type things I mean we got all that and I'm too crazy I'm sure some of this stuff is off somewhere who knows and then let's take a second let's turn turn everything back on on a lot of layers in here guys long where's the big fine it's like it's like 4 gigabytes and the file size that I'm working on is 16 inches by 9 inches so it is actually a pretty large file and it makes my computer Chuck but made it large because just in case I liked the results and I wanted to sell a print of it I could do that and so once I had all this turn that off once I had all this like the image is done and I could potentially call it done but I always like to do some finishing touches on my digital paintings I don't do these on my traditional ones because it's almost impossible but digital I think it to go in and do a little bit of finishing touches so it's nothing too crazy but we'll walk through what those are one by one because this is probably the the thing that if you're watching this you're excited about so the first thing I did was just used a soft round brush and put a little color dodge in the corner and the color that color dodge is just like again like a dark desaturated golden green and then put it down to 43 percent opacity I used like to lower the opacity of color dodge just because it makes it a little bit more believable and then go in there and what is this oh yeah so we'll get to that then I went in with these these are just some texture layers that are set to overlay so they're all locked let me unlock these all right so these are some texture layers so if I turn these normal they're just like just a random texture brush I had and go in here and turn them all to normal and it's just like the same texture over and over and over again and some things are masked out like I didn't want these roof areas to get too much texture because it was kind of killing the color so turn that off you could see that kind of kills those pinks and reds a little bit so I didn't want that so I turned those off I'll fit those out and I just you know lasso told them by hands they're not perfect but who cares not me okay so what these are set to is we just have our light texture layer you saw what color it is and then I would set it to overlay this one is at 6% and it's not a formula I'm just kind of fiddling around I have another one set to overlay at our soft light to 18% to kind of that kind of balance the overlay and then of the one set to overlay and then another one set to color and this was basically the result of me duplicating that and then just clicking through all of these and changing the opacities and you know I'd spend 30 minutes or something just kind of playing around and then playing around with that and then on top of all that I have this here so what this is this is like a bright purple set to lightened so you have that here and then it's just set to lighten that 44% and it doesn't really do that much like you can't even really see the difference but what it does is it limits the darks that it can be so if you look at this tree right here I'll go ahead and circle it just so it's kind of desaturating some of these really dark areas and there's kind of not letting it get to that dark area so that's what that's good for and just play around with that and then the last thing I did and was I went in with my smudge brush and I just got like a regular old smudge brush comes pre-loaded in Photoshop said strength 20 percent sample all layers is important so you're not editing something directly and then I just go in and edit some stuff that is a strong so much brush goodness golly that 3% oh that's why it was because the sample all layers at samples alpha adjustment layers too so make sure those are off and then I would just go in and kind of just smudge smudge areas that I didn't think needed that much visual importance and this is the result we can click those on and off a couple times and yeah it's just just kind of almost random but I'm kind of keeping it to the outer limits of the image because I don't really want your eye to hang out there and I kind of want you to move through like this and that's that's it guys guys and girls and students and masters whoever's watching this video I don't really care so all in all I would say I spent about nine hours on this painting for about a week on and off a couple hours at a time and just tinkering with it just trying things and seeing if they worked and if that didn't work I'd try something else and you know it's it's it's it's tough it can be tough and this was the result of a lot of paintings that were not great I spent last month doing just a lot of paintings that were like really loose and really fast and really brushy and from a lot of reference just because I wanted to up my digital painting observations so just kind of observing and recording and observing and recording and trying new techniques out and not necessarily like refining those techniques to the point where I would get finished illustrations but making a lot of small paintings so I did one a day so 31 paintings and none of those will be shown on my website or my portfolio they're on Instagram I think but they're mostly just experiments to help me learn and at the end of that month I can take all that information that I learned from those 31 days of experimentation and apply it to a more formal illustration like this so that's the video hopefully you find it valuable or insightful or maybe you're just bored at work and you need something to watch but uh thanks thanks for checking this out if you're watching this on youtube you can go download the PSD from Gumroad or if you're watching this on gum road then you probably already have it and maybe you clicked along with me but yeah have a have a great day and if you like this let me know please and I'll make some more and if you don't let me know I'll assume you didn't like it so I won't make any more so yeah yeah I love you I I love you I love you I love you I'm it's not weird to say in a video I love you

Channel: Nicholas Kennedy

Views: 40,700

Keywords: art, animation, background, back ground, bg, bg paint, painter, animated, process, tutorial, layers, photoshop, walkthrough, artist, socal, color, color and light, paintwithnick, nick, nick kennedy, kennedy, nicholas kennedy, paint with nick

Id: -3656QBywSg

Length: 32min 43sec (1963 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 09 2018