How did I deal with…

Digital Painting Technique for Rendering Concept Artwork

I'm using an approach based on digital rendering from 3D and post-production for photo‑realistic pictures. I am still painting by hand, so that the brush strokes are visible, but using layers, and changing their blending properties:

Digital painting by hand

This is the process I'm following:

• After sketching the contours, I am defining volumes using value and multiplying the layer
• Adding contrast and subsurface scattering
• Turning layers to add mode, and
• Overlaying tones (color).

For these examples, I am mimicking actual photographs. If you want to see drawing from live models, click on the Live Drawing Card:

Live Portrait & Nude Drawing

Live portrait and nude drawing and sculpting samples from different workshops in Berlin and Barcelona, using different techniques, including wooden pen.

PBR & Compositing

If you have a digital background, you may identify the Physical Based Rendering (PBR) nomenclature from 3D materials and Render Elements from V‑Ray and other render engines.
If you have a compositing background, you can identify passes like Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field (DOF), Motion Blur (MB) and others. When you export your EXR from a render engine into Nuke, you are dealing with 16 or 32 bit depth image sequences, which gives you a wider range to adjust your composites, get rich enough pictures to integrate on a live footage plate. At the end of the day, that's what you owe photo‑realism to.
If you want to know more about photo‑realism, post‑production, compositing and digital rendering in general, click on the following cards:

Texturing Character

Texturing a character for render time by opening UVW in Maya, hand painting and extracting PBR textures in Substance Designer/Painter, rendering EXR.

Rendering Interior Env.

Rendering an interior environment through animatics and concept, HDRI lighting, texturing, simulating VFX with Maya Nucleus, rendering EXR, Nuke comp.

Texturing Buildings

Texturing buildings for real time environment, modeling and UVW in 3DS Max, hand painting textures, applying to materials.

Compositing Short Film

Compositing short film using Nuke by rendering EXR and grouping background, character, volumetric lights, simulations and optical effects.

Rendering Prop

Rendering and Compositing a Prop Asset Skateboard Bag, Using Maya, ZBrush, Mental Ray, EXR, and Nuke.

What the Art?

I'm mimicking the post‑process procedure from a 3D pipeline to distribute tasks in a 2D program (Photoshop or Corel Painter), and painting layer after layer by hand, inside the 8 bits depth threshold until I get something similar to my reference photograph.
The artistic part in this particular method lies in identifying what layers should go with what brushes, and how to blend them, like in this example:

Exercises

Exercising digital painting in this way puts me in a comfortable position to confront concept art situations, combining 3D composites and 2D raw drawings, filling in the gaps by hand. Backing up my digital painting with this workflow, I can decide what degree of deconstruction should I apply for any specific situation.
Here you can see some more exercises:

Note that I'm talking the whole time about painting here, not about drawing. The reason behind this is that I'm using digital brushes to render value and that's part of the painting process, not drawing. Drawing contours is the exact opposite.
I came up with this method from rendering character photographic references using analog B/W pencils, as you can see in these pictures:

Portraits

Poses

For sketching analog exercises using photographic references, click on the Sketching Exercises Card:

Sketching Exercises

Sketching exercises made with pencils, using photographic references to improve drawing skills. Showing landscape, architecture, still life and process.