The Secrets Behind Professional Artwork (The Answers You’re Looking For)

[Music] thank you [Music] hey guys Zara from this pixel and welcome back I remember many years ago working on card art I was working working on a fantasy card for Lord of the Rings and the idea I came up with the idea I wanted to capture in this image was that feeling you get when you've been up all night and you have to go back home and you're really exhausted because you haven't slept yet but the sun has risen it's the terrible feeling you have watching a sunrise when you haven't slept yet and I kind of wanted to recreate that feeling it was a feeling that I would get very often if I went out with my friends and we stood really really late or one of the things I used to do all the time was my friend Chris was um join all the other chess players we'd all bring our chest mats to the local Dunkin Donuts that was open 24 hours and we'd all take our own respective booths because the place was pretty quiet overnight and we'd pretty much have chess tournaments every single day we used to go there at least four or five times a week and sometimes we'd play all night if we really got into it it was a lot of fun but then we'd pack up our chess boards and we'd walk back home and that's that stale gross staticky feeling where you're you're very hypersensitive I've noticed that you were very sensitive to Smells of the city and everything like that everything felt just overwhelming and then you go to bed and you'd you'd go to sleep I wanted to recapture that feeling in the card it's the idea I had was that the character would be the whole the The Prompt of the card was that there's this one of the writers of the north who was leaning against his stuff and he's exhausted and in the shot I wanted to have that sunlight shining into the camera from behind him so he's being backlit which is generally a little bit more dramatic but he's got this bright sunlight shining right in the camera past his face well I drew it I did the Black and White Version I sent the rough thumbnail to my director and she liked it she said that's cool so I spent the next week sketching it out or at least painting it out in black and white and then came time to color it and when I went to color it everything went to everything fell apart I I tried over and over and over and over again to get this lighting to get these colors to get the sky to get the character to get this subsurface scattering effect to work and for the life of me I just couldn't get it to work and I must have spent about three or four days doing around I don't know at least a dozen iterations of this trying to get these colors and experimenting with different things and I couldn't for the life of me figure it out where I found the eventual solution to this unlocked a certain part of my thought process of my psyche it made me realize something very important about the artistic process I was trying to solve that problem using nothing but the tools that a visual artist a digital painter a fantasy illustrator might reach towards to find that answer color composition posing gesture values lighting blah blah blah blah but it turned out that I needed to learn more about photography to solve that problem I didn't know anything about exposure I didn't know anything about professional photography I didn't know anything about how light behaves and how it how it interacts with the lens how it affects the way you need to change your shutter speed or your aperture how you need to aim a camera what kind of lighting situations are best for certain types of situations but for some reason I'm trying to paint this trying to make this image look good trying to feel like we have that that bright light shining in your face and it just didn't look right the color of the sky didn't look right the exposure on his body didn't look right and then I realized I learned about exposure that week I learned that having light in the lens forces you to make decisions as a photographer who's my subject well my actor is the subject that's my talent so if I was to expose the camera if I'm thinking like a camera if I expose my camera for the character that means that the sky is going to completely blast out and overexpose meaning having any color in the sky is a mistake that Sky needs to be bleached white it needs to be completely glaring White and the Very fact that I had any color any shade any kind of texture is contradictory to the way light behaves and how exposure behaves now of course nowadays we have high dynamic range color profiles like log profile we have high dynamic range cameras that are more algorithmic that can process images and get what's called dual exposure so it can give me two different exposures one for the sky and one for the character and it kind of compiles it together to create these digital images that might feel a little bit uncanny valley have you ever noticed that modern cameras tend to feel a little bit unnatural even like the most beautifully processed sharpest most punchy clear 4K images you can get something doesn't feel quite right well notice that a lot of people like my daughter for instance are really gravitating towards Polaroid cameras even though they're greeny and and the lighting and they're mushy looking and they're soft but there's something very natural and very nostalgic about the way that this instant camera process is filmed like the Polaroid cameras are getting this big Resurgence because we know when something is behaving in a natural way and we can sense when something's not and when a camera behaves in a way that the a normal human eye doesn't behave even if we're not aware of why we can feel that there's something off about that right and that's what was happening with my image is I was entering into this uncanny valley with the lighting in my in my scene and it didn't work and as soon as I just took my Hue saturation slider and I just pushed the I just pushed the value right up to 100 percent all of a sudden everything worked and all of a sudden I felt that bright glaring light in my face but then I realized even more it didn't quite feel glaring to me how come when I'm staring at direct sunlight which by the way I recommend you don't do if you can avoid it all right but if you stare at the Sun what why does the sun feel so extremely bright and glaring and how it doesn't look white at all the sun is not white the sun is extremely bright so then I started to learn about things like well simultaneous contrast and I started to learn about things like for instance atmosphere so one of the fun facts I learned from Neil deGrasse Tyson a while back because I binge on his Star Talk videos all the time is why is why is the Sun yellow and why is the sky blue interesting why is the sky blue well a lot of people say it's about atmosphere well what about atmosphere well if you think about it what is white light white light in its purest form is where all of the colors of the of the visible spectrum of the rainbow Roy G Biv red orange yellow green blue indigo violet are represented at their highest capacity at their purest capacity at what would be called a hundred a hundred percent CRI color rendering index now I know a lot of you photographers out there are going to be correcting that that that term because now there's new terminology for photography and professional lighting but that's basically what it is all the colors of the rainbow are at 100 and when you mix all the colors of the rainbow you get white light white light is when you combine all light together well that white light every one of those different wavelengths of light are different sizes blue has a different wavelength than red has a different wavelength than yellow has a different wavelength than Orange has a different wavelength than green they're all different wavelengths of light of different sizes and our brain picks up on these different sizes that white light hits the atmosphere our atmosphere is full of particles dust pollution etc etc and those little blue particles are the roughly the same size as the blue wavelength of light causing the sky to Glow with blue light and all the other wavelengths of light it's scatter you've probably heard of light scattering well now you know what that means these scatter and they get lost in space and we perceive this as being a glowing blue sky and that glowing blue light shines down on Earth filling all of the exposed Shadows on a blue sky day with blue light okay now that you know this look at a shadow that's exposed to the sky on a blue sky day and then look at a shadow that's that's hidden from the sky like underneath the car you're going to see black shadows and you're going to see blue Shadows holy painters who know about light watch a Marco Bucci video you'll see exactly what I'm talking about you look at you you start to see this and you go holy I'm starting to see what I did not see well how does that reflect back to my painting well if you put it in the context of my painting if I'm if I'm looking at the sun there's a reason why when you grow up when whenever whenever your Elementary School teacher said okay draw the sun you'd grab that yellow crayon or that yellow pencil crayon or that yellow marker wouldn't you and you draw a big yellow circle but the sky's not yellow the sky's white in fact to the human eye this this the sun is the purest form of white light measurable to the human eye this is why when you when you go out and buy a professional pair a professional light for for video for doing video like the ones I use in my in my uh my YouTube videos you'll always see it says a CRI rating and it'll give you a number usually nowadays it's anywhere between 96 to 98 CRI which is extremely pure to White Light basically saying measured against the sun this is 98 accurate but what happens when you extract Blue from White you get yellow and if you extract a lot of it if a lot of that atmosphere has been has has sucked out a lot of that blue light which is the complementary to Yellow you get orange right so essentially when you look at that beautiful Rich orange red sunset you're not looking at an orange Sun you're looking at a white sun that's had the blue blue light extracted out of it at least to human perception right because human beings have a certain range of perception when it comes to the visible spectrum of light so when I painted that Sky I didn't paint it white I painted it as an extremely bright cyan blue and you think well no wouldn't you have wanted to paint it in extremely bright yellow no because that's where simultaneous contrast comes into the picture so when you're staring at that sun your eye is being exposed to extremely bright yellow photons of light so your eye is going to compensate for that by shifting into the blue cyan Spectrum so when you're looking next time you look at the sun if you look away from the Sun you're going to see this annoying cyan blue ball in front of your face again don't do it unless if you value your eyesight but so by drawing this bright bright sky with this ever so off-white cyan blue created this illusion of glaring brightness so when you start the image you feel like you've got a flashlight shining right in your face other artists that know this extremely well would be artists like would be the artists who came up with all those lighting effects for World of Warcraft I remember them talking about how they drew extremely bright objects extremely bright sources of magical light they dipped into this science as well the whole point of this fun Journey Down science alley is that the answers for artists very often exist outside of this little cocoon we call painting this little cocoon we call anime this little cocoon we call cartooning or illustration it exists in the rest of the world because us as artists are being influenced by the world around us not just by this immediate tool that we have at our disposal and when you realize that you realize that as an artist as a professional and in my particular case as a teacher indulging in all of the aspects of life that you find fascinating History Science quantum physics astrology philosophy you name it biology all of these things feed you as an artist the inform you they round you out they help to bring answers in places you wouldn't imagine so many of us want to draw a certain if you look at something like for instance look at Keenan Lafferty's art I'm a big fan of his artist just freaking gorgeous stuff right if you look at Keenan Lafferty's art there's so much that he's doing in his images to get those quote Dynamic poses or if you look at a lot of that Splash art look at the stuff from League of Legends and look at the stuff from from that very like Street Fighter things that are super super Dynamic where you get these really cool low dramatic angles with really hyper-exaggerated sizes the answer to drawing that way is not just drawing your character in a cool pose the answer to drawing that way is understanding how different focal lengths function in a camera again this is a photography answer not an art answer so how is Keenan positioning that camera in relation to the character is it close to the character or is it far away usually it's going to be right up against them and usually they're going to have a part of that body that's right up close the hand the butt the foot something is going to be positioned extremely close to that camera and the lens being used if I was to imagine what lens I would use to create this very dramatic perspective in the shot I would use an ultra wide lens well what is an ultra wide lens what is an ultra wide lens focal length and what focal length is going to create a different effect well if I'm doing a skateboarding thing I might go with a focal length that's around I don't know maybe an 18 millimeter on a full frame camera well next time you watch a Rodney Mullen video chances I was probably shot with I don't know an 18 millimeter a 20 millimeter it's probably such an ultra wide lens that it creates this fisheye lens effect to it why is it creating a fisheye lens effect well it's because or it's called Barrel Distortion it's because what's extremely what an ultra wide lens will exaggerate what's extremely close to the camera it'll really make it feel like it's close up to your face so when somebody's when the skateboard passes right in front of the camera or the wheel passes right in front of the camera the wheel gets humongous it takes up half the frame but Rodney mullen's face feels like it's 13 feet away because it's exaggerated that sense of depth it makes things feel Incredibly Close and Incredibly far people who do race car games know this extremely well when I used to play Daytona because I used to work at an arcade and I was one of the best Daytona players Daytona USA players in the entire city of Montreal because I played all day I could I used to do competitions and stuff and my favorite camera angle to use was the camera that was positioned right on the front bumper because it's extremely close to the ground and it's an ultra wide so it creates this extremely hyper sense of speed next time you watch the movie Cars you'll notice that the camera is right up next to the ground and it's using this Ultra wide lens so you get the whole feeling of the stadium but then that road is coming at you at full speed if I do so with a 50 millimeter lens that's a little bit more human eye focal length or if I do it with a telephoto lens it's going to barely look like he's moving at all see so these different effects create these different things next time you watch Fight Club and you see the scene where where Edward Norton is staring right in front of the camera as he stands over the photocopy machine and it looks completely dead inside that was shot with an ultra wide lens why because an ultra wide lens gives off the impression that when something's close it's right up in front of your face so if you're watching something like the Grinch who stole Christmas and and and Jim Carrey's going and he's going up in your face and you feel like he's really jumping up in your face that's done with an ultrawide lens because you want to get that feeling like he's an inch away from you that's the effect that an ultra wide lens has it exaggerates depth it exaggerates closeness if I took that exact same composition and I did it with an 85 millimeter or 280 millimeter lens really with a very long throw a very long pull it really it really zooms out far to see what's really far away you're not going to get that effect of something being up in your face even if you compose that face exactly the same way it's going to look like that person's faces across the room and your eavesdropping on them it's much less invasive it's much more it's much more curious in that sense who uses the telephoto lens to create this beautiful kind of compressed picturesque flat two-dimensional look watch a Ghibli film and a lot of the shots you know when you're watching an anime film and there's a character walking and they're not actually advancing towards the camera it's just kind of like this walk cycle and you can see the grass moving by and the sky the clouds are moving up behind his head but it doesn't look like he's advancing towards the camera that much or if you're watching a scene from the movie Gladiator with Russell Crowe and he's walking through that field of Wheat and he's approaching he's approaching his home and it feels like his home is it's there but he's moving extremely slowly close he's he's walking towards it but he's not advancing towards it that's an effect caused by an by a telephoto lens you've just tried to create effects you just looked at people's drawings and you're going oh I wish I could draw like keen and laugh at it I wish I could do what he does but you don't understand all of that little those the secret science that goes in behind it I started getting into calligraphy recently why because I had to start re-prioritizing slowing myself down I talked about that in an earlier our talk right I had to start prioritizing slowing myself down again because the world with AI and technology and all of this stuff its over prioritizing speed tick tocks it's over prioritizing speed your it's life is passing by such a numbing speed that people are starting to take for granted the power of thoughtfulness people are no longer reserving the right to think anymore because I gotta feel that Gap with the next thing and I thought no I want to torture myself with slowness I want to slow down my tempo I journal every single day I'll change my inks for different colors to us so I can enjoy different colors and different styles all right four or five big Pages big big pages in my journal every single day and I write slowly and every single word is thoughtful that's one of the things that calligraphy has granted me the ability to do I'm getting better my line is becoming more controlled I'm becoming more thoughtful and be and that thoughtfulness is penetrating into my how I teach it's penetrating into how I conceptualize and I realized the reason why I'm not concepting why I'm starting to feel like I'm sometimes I'm really struggling to come up with ideas is because I'm thinking too and the human brain doesn't work at that frequency the human brain needs to thought stop and think and find an answer and consider it and contemplate the different possibilities and then when my brain is completely satisfied with it I write the word and that translated into my artwork which made me all of a sudden go oh my God how much more do I now respect tattoo artists I'm looking at the calligraphy of my arm or these beautiful designs by by some of my the tattoo artists that have worked on my arms like MiMi Sama and Julie Hamilton and I'm looking at them going the line quality is exquisite they're really good at it and I thought to myself of course it is a tattoo artist has a person's per identity tied in to every single Mark they make they have to accept when there's a blender the same way a doctor would but it's their ambition it's their goal to leave a permanent thoughtful and professional mark on a person's body they take that line very very seriously because every line that they make every decision that they make is permanent on somebody else's body and they take that they take that accountability very seriously they they have an amazing sense of moral responsibility that they are taking other people's identities into consideration every single time they leave a mark that's why they know they need to slow down they need to press harder they need to think more they need to plan they can't be satisfied with something mediocre not if they're serious professionals that plan on making a living for themselves and then you take that slowness you take that thoughtfulness and you multiply this over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours there's a Japanese tattoo artist that my my first tattoo artist Mimi Sama had had introduced me to called Nisa or niso you can find them on Instagram and isso oh he'll do entire body tattoos that are look like they've been done on a computer they're so beautifully flawlessly well done incredible quality that doesn't only require his his slowness and thoughtfulness and perfectionism but his patience his endurance if you could if if I as an artist could inherit one fiftieth of his discipline I would improve as an artist 20-fold [Music] and I intend to because I have I have the rest of my life ahead of me to use these tattoo artists as Role Models as a precedent as a quality standard as a patience standard and then I think to myself who else takes human life extremely seriously a cook but what a good friend of mine the daughter of of my friend Marlene who owns the horse riding camp who I've talked about in the past a very dear friend of mine her daughter dated a guy who was a cook for a long time an incredible cook and it was an incredibly high stress job like being working in Cuisine working in like high-end restaurants and stuff like that is an incredibly stressful job I mean all that Kitchen Nightmares should aside my very glorified stuff it is incredibly stressful well think about what they're doing what you create ends up inside a person's body that's pretty intimate stuff that's pretty serious stuff that's something you need to take extremely carefully that's why if there's unclean or unsafe cooking environment that's why a head chef will destroy you for doing that because you're potentially putting another person's health at risk by being careless about how you wiped off that counter or careless about the date on that fish that could potentially poison somebody and send somebody to the hospital [Music] it's that standard it's that quality standard as a human being and as a professional that translates into your standard as an artist spend some time and watch Stephen sapata paint or Draw because he likes to work with pencils a lot watch Bobby chew pain listen to Bobby Chu talk and what Bobby Chu does Bobby Chu talks like Steven sapata draws like Bobby two paints slow and thoughtful he reserves his right to think and in a world where everything needs to be done quickly and efficiently it can be very challenging for the average Joe or Janet to slow their brain down so people go oh God he's taking too long click click I gotta get past this but there's a reason why Bobby Chu and Steven sapata are Masters At what they do it's not only because they're good at drawing and because they've practiced it's because they've learned the value of thoughtfulness they've learned the value of slowing themselves down and this permeates into their form of communication because you can't slow yourself down as an artist unless you can slow yourself down as a person you have to slow your Rhythm so I start getting into chess I've been put when I did that podcast with uh with all of some of my favorite artists where we were talking about Ai and stuff like that Antonio had had slipped in that he got into playing chess and it made me go yeah I missed that I used to play all the time so I got back into it now I'm knee deep into chess and I'm slowly but surely grinding My Level back up and sometimes I'm a God and I'm destroying you know high level players and sometimes I get my ass completely handed to me by you know 700 rating entry level chess players and everything between sometimes I feel like the smartest sharpest most aggressive player on earth and sometimes I feel like a complete scrub that that keeps getting taken by the stupidest stupidest cheesiest moves but chess just like art just like everything I've been talking about requires you to slow down your thoughts it requires you to think it requires you to to contemplate not only what you're doing but what your opponent is doing as well to get inside their head to say not just to go okay he did this I'll respond this way he did this I'll respond this way you know instead it's you look at them and you say why did she make that move what was her intention what does that move open up and have to slow myself down and think and once I've considered all of my options I make my move and I constantly am influencing Myself by every imaginable Walk of Life and when I sit down to teach a class with my art students and when I'm sitting down trying to figure out trying to find the solution to a problem in my own life when I'm trying to figure out how to solve an artistic challenge I'll try to draw it and that sometimes maybe 15 of the time it might solve the problem it might solve the problem for my student but very often it doesn't and we have to learn how to pull together resources that we haven't only learned from drawing techniques but from everything from every single Walk of Life so that we have these things at our disposal compositionally body language animation Norman Rockwell these things all tie in together how normal how I teach when I'm when I'm teaching composition visual storytelling you can learn almost everything you need to learn about visual storytelling and illustration by studying a Rockwell painting because he is the most academic and most in-ear faced in your face example of of how you translate thoughts and feelings into images how you communicate visually as effectively and as literally as if I was as if if as if I was speaking it to you using regular language why well he knows how to put those pieces together he knows the he knows how Humanity interprets different shapes different different positions different ways of interacting how different people interact between each other how different people's roles play in different situations where a person's position on a page completely influences not only the way you interpret that person but how you interpret the entire story and how he frames it with a beautiful bow in the end how if you look at a Norman Rockwell painting there isn't a single detail in any of his paintings that isn't as thoughtful as a grand master chess player every single teacup every single towel every single crumb every single hair brush every single letter on every single sign has been put there because he's a he's a grand master painter who knows that every single thought counts every single move counts everything contributes to the big picture he's an absolute master this is where I can't recommend channels like online Art Academy enough with Charles Bernard Charles Bernard to me is one of the best art teachers on the platform he's he's he's a product of the famous artist school he taught there he learned there he taught and learned the same school that Norman Rockwell and Bernie Fuchs taught at and so many people now they hear the word famous article and they go oh cool interesting he didn't he didn't study at Cal Arts no he studied at the famous artist school and that's a very big deal you don't understand what a big deal that is but most people go oh he's just an old guy who taught at some old school no the famous artist school is Iconic it's a Powerhouse school where some of the greatest Geniuses of our time taught and learned and he's a product of that go subscribe to his damn Channel he's he's a he's a diamond of a teacher and he and all of this information is sitting there he's a well of knowledge and what I'm telling you is many of these obstacles many of these challenges that we face as an artist financially professionally artistically technically expressively you name it are answers that don't just exist in your Sketchbook they don't exist in your cool case of Copic markers they don't exist on that new edition updated version of Photoshop or procreate or clip Studio they exist in expanding your knowledge into venues all around the world remember that art is not just an image on a page art is how a person takes the life existence Your Existence as a human being your understanding of the world and you bring it together you tie it together into an expression and the more informed the more thoughtful the more enlightened the more educated the more connected you are to the world around you the better artist you become in every which way shape and form all right hopefully that inspired you to get out and start learning something and of course I love you all with all my heart and happy painting take care thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] thank you

Channel: Adam Duff LUCIDPIXUL

Views: 16,093

Keywords: mastering art, amateur vs professional artist, how to get jobs as artist, how to succeed as artist, ai art, how to draw creatures, lovecraft creature design, horror creature design, AI Art, midjourney, stable diffusion, dall-e, the future of art career, how to use midjourney, how to use stable diffusion, social media for artists, how to grow on instagram, how to create concept art, online art school, art class online, how to learn art online, how to make money as artist

Id: J4M1njbwF04

Length: 35min 47sec (2147 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 17 2023