Tonal Sketching - Concept Art Workflow

[Music] what's up guys this is Hardy from digital painting studio today let's talk about one of my favorite workflows and something that I seem to be leaning on more and more the longer I work tonal sketching so we'll talk about how to do it why it's awesome but also a few important limitations and I will Design and paint a dude riding a giant bird while we chat this is one of those ideas that's been rattling around in my visual library for years well today is the day lots to dig into so let's dive [Music] in okay so tonal sketching this is almost entirely the same thing is shape design or shape carving with a few important differences so I've said here before that I believe shapes are the most important thing in design and painting and I feel pretty justified in that statement it's something that I have heard virtually all of my Art Heroes say and that small change in my mindset has had a huge impact in my work and in my career and it's usually where I see the fastest leaps forward with the artist who I work with it is a powerful con concept we are just hardwired to instantly process shapes and Silhouettes you can recognize most things just by their silhouette a car a tree a person a hedgehog wrecked Ralph practically anything I saw a video years ago I tried to find it to link it here but I couldn't track it down but it had a slide with all of these famous characters like Han Solo and Chun Le it had a whole lineup of dozens of these all you could see was their silhouette but you instantly knew who each one was so shapes and Silhouettes just resonate there's something that our eyes and brains can decode very quickly very easily so let's use that as designers let like speak that language directly to our audience [Music] so how do we do this the basic workflow is just to use a brush and on a layer start blocking in shapes and this is one instance where I think the shape of the brush that you use actually does really matter and I love using a very angular brush for shape carvings like this it feels like it it kind of forces me to be more deliberate with the movement and the lines that I'm creating so if you would like this brush it's available for free in the freebies channel of the DPS Discord Linked In the description but the idea is to just start working out main shape relationships and this is why I love this workflow it's kind of like sculpting you just slap in a Big Blob of color you start shaping it and whittling it carving away from it with your eraser and you can stretch and pull with those transform and warp tools it's awesome like you can bend things around it feels like clay so when something feels stuck or like it's not quite working or if the action lines aren't flowing you can just stretch or bend or add or subtract until it just clicks into place it's [Music] awesome the really freeing part of all this is if if it sucks just trash it and start over get that dud out of there and start fresh this is such an efficient way to work that you can very quickly get something down on canvas and decide pretty objectively if it's good if you like it and if you don't end up so married to each design because you don't have so much time invested in each one I find I'm so much more comfortable trashing a 15minute tonal sketch that's not working then I would be on a line art piece that took much longer so the efficiency here is really undeniable and for professionals that is huge that is time and [Music] [Music] money [Music] so farther along in the process once the main silhouette is looking good I create a new layer and I clip that to the silhouette to start defining interior shapes and I think about value here where would light shine to illuminate the important part parts of the design and because the silhouette does so much of that heavy lifting it's so recognizable you can usually get away with shockingly little interior detail and it still feels perfectly clear what we're looking at I love letting these little highlight shapes be really intense and high contrast in important parts of the design but then I can get all smudgy and faded out to shadow where it isn't important this adds some nice Brushy texture and it's just another way where we can show our viewer where we want their attention to [Music] be so try this workflow out if you haven't already it's super loose and liberating and it just keeps things flowing out of your stylus and I think that anything that keeps an artist feeling loose and expressive is a good thing when your designs or paintings start feeling labored over when you're really grinding away on something if you're zoomed way in just lost in the pixels that seems to be where Things Fall Apart this can be an awesome way to avoid [Music] [Music] that now for all of its many advantages tonal sketching has some limitations since it feels so much like a shape design and a painting at the same time tonal sketching almost always leads you to a fork in the road and this is a very classic digital art dilemma if I want this design to end up as a color painting should I just start over and paint it in color or should I just convert the grayscale image to color using layers and blending modes right I actually really don't like to colorize grayscale paintings into color in most workflows now there are some great videos explaining why you should avoid this Marco bchi has my favorite he has this outstanding video that I'll link in the description if you want to really drill down on this question like why doesn't it look right but the basic idea is that colorizing a detailed grayscale painting creates several really annoying problems and it just doesn't end up looking great colors end up muddy and with this it it takes on this like bizarre pastel Easter egg look the values and the colors since they're being done separately they tend to have areas where the two don't quite match up and it will drive you crazy now there are artists who can do this beautifully cryst sof young the amazing figure painting and portrait artist he does this in many cases he Paints in grayscale and then colorizes and his results are gorgeous check his stuff out but it takes a great deal of care and attention to detail to sort of walk the same steps twice and for a concept art workflow where we're trying to explore and crank out ideas quickly and Loosely communicating the maximum amount of story in information with the fewest marks having to do things twice in that way just ends up creating headaches so for that reason in this painting I'm coloring this one essentially as a Duo Tone It basically just has two colors blue and this nuclear yellow and I'm going to turn this one into more of a fun graphic look rather than trying to make it feel super realistic so I'm totally cheating here but it still looks pretty cool and and I can finally check the dude writing the bird project off of my to-do [Music] list [Music] so I really like how this is taken shape and I know for a fact that something like this would have taken me weeks and lots of Agony if I approached this with lines and very deliberately kind of describing each material so this is sort of like a cheat code I just went directly to shapes I use Simple highlights to kind of clarify a few interior things but other than that we are mostly leaning on the silhouette to tell us what is what what is the design language what do we want our viewer to feel about the world that this bird and this Rider live in and all of that makes this painting incredibly efficient I think all in this one was about 2 hours of design and painting which is pretty good for a professional workflow it's kind of just get the idea out there get it on canvas make it look cool make it something that you are proud of call it done and move on to the next project so this workflow is awesome for [Music] [Music] that hope this was helpful if you haven't tried shape design or tonal sketching if you're a line artist by nature which I certainly was I would encourage you to break out of your comfort zone and give this a shot it really changed everything for me when I stopped seeing my work as lines and started seeing it as shapes and this workflow can do that for you that's it for now guys new stuff coming soon but in the meantime good luck with your artwork paint something cool today

Channel: Hardy Fowler - Digital Painting Studio

Views: 86,624

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Id: egd3zXxRYFo

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2023