Speed Painting

Today we had a lecture with Felicia about values and a little bit about Photoshop. We looked a little bit at different brushes and brush settings and experimented with using brushes in color dodge and linear dodge mode. We also looked at some short films showing the difference in hue, saturation and value and how you can create environments really fast in gray scale using foreground, middle ground and background.
After lunch we got to do some exercises using what we learnt earlier. We were shown photos of mountain landscapes in gray scale and given fifteen minutes to draw it. The purpose of this exercise was to start thinking about value when drawing, it also makes you think about contrast and how to use atmospheric perspective.

This was the first one, I think it looks a bit flat as time went by really fast.
















Here I realized I needed to work faster and I managed to get some atmospheric perspective into it. You can see that the further back something is, it has less contrast and is lighter while the foreground is the darkest part. Also you can see that the mountains are darker at the top and lighter at the bottom, creating contrast to the next level of mountains' dark tops.

This one did not turn out very well, it was a picture of treetops with thick mist between them and time just ran out way too fast. I should probably have used the tree brushes instead as I would have been able to do more a lot faster, I should also have used a different brush for the mist. My attempts at atmospheric perspective got lost somewhere in the mist.



















 
This is the final one, a picture of snowy mountain tops. I think it looks ok but it could definitely use some more work to it and I am not too happy with the contrast between the grounds in it, it should be clearer what is in the foreground. In general I think it reads well though, especially when you zoom out a bit you can clearly see the snow coming down the mountain side.

I think it was a good exercise and it is definitely something I should practice more. I had thought of doing this with the background image I am working on for our game and now I am sure I will. I think drawing it in gray scale first will improve the quality of the values in the image greatly since it is not something I am very used to working with or thinking of.