Moho Forum

@ingie01 - thanks for the useful feedback. I think I'll water the acrylics down as you suggested and do the next one. The final one will be in watercolor so it pays to improve as much as possible. Still not too comfortable with this as I never really had to think about the way different colors work together before but I'm having fun so what the heck.

@mr. blaaa - that was part of my intent in posting. I saw some threads in cgtalk (in fact I posted this there as well to get as much feedback as possible) that showed WIP from concept art to finished piece and I find them very useful.

You are right on the pencil work. I'd been more of a 'doodler' through the years only rarely doing some detailed stuff with pencil and ink when bitten by the bug. Someone on awn.com pointed out that I use very short strokes for sketching and should try to go for smoother longer lines and I am struggling to break some of these bad habits and drawing with my wrist.

Bupaje - something to play with, via my brother (the painter in the family). One exceedingly cool thing I've seen him do for a number of his pieces, and always thought would be exceedingly cool for animation backgrounds. If you want linework as well, sketch out the lines in a waterproof india ink. But not necessary. To core of it requires oil (not regular) pastels and plain old crayons. Sketch out the colors in the oil pastels/crayons. When the sketch is done, blend out the color fields with a brush and some paint thinner (mineral spirits) to get a more "watercolor" kind of look, with more control. The oil pastels will tend to be a litttle more dense, the crayons a bit more transparent. Depending on the amount you work the pigments with the thinner, you can go from a straight, as layed down look to very washy within small areas. Very cool.

Another bit that I like a lot also involves crayons Sketch out areas you want to have that "crayon" look (with a large background it can work great for colored outlines, but can also be used very lightly for textures). Finish the piece with watercolors, and the wax in the crayons works as a resist and the watercolors won't touch the crayon. If you use a heavily textured paper, you can have very sketchy spots of crayon colors that will be completely surrounded by, but never actually infringe on the particular spots the crayon is at. So you have typically broken up crayon lines that are seamlessly surrounded by color. Very hard to do any other way if you are physically painting.

And if you are doing watercolors, get gouaches, too. I like to do roughs really broadly (and way washy) with watercolors, let it dry, and then go back and add detail with the more opaque gouache.

And don't forget about cel vinyl for backgrounds. It's hard to force it to take brushmarks, and hcan be a great medium if you want a smooth, graphic look. Better that acrylics, IMO.

I'll see if I can have my bro check out this thread and throw in some input. I know he's thought about this kinda stuff a lot, and he knows (or came up with) more non-standard techniques than you can shake a stick at. A great painter and if you ask him about composition and color you might get a textbook that should be written (I've tried, I really have).


And and extra aside - I figger you probably have, but if you haven't played with ArtRage http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html you really should. I like it a whole lot.

Thanks 7feet. Some great ideas and I'll play with this during the holiday break. I purchased a few goauche tubes but truthfully didn't know the difference -only picked them up because they happened to have the CMY primary colors by name. I like the idea of crayons -you are talking Crayola here I guess or maybe there is an artist equivalent? I'll also try those Prismacolor sticks -a few came with the set of pencils and they seem to have a little bit of that waxy feel.

I get to paint cels next semester and may wait unilt then only because there isn't enough time to squeeze it in now. I have worked out a few animtion ideas I may want to try in Moho -maybe as cutout animation, have to see.

I have started to play with Artrage. I was thinking I could do more color tests on the scanned images. I tried some but I'm still slow with the Wacom so still in the playing stage for now. Am going to try to join the 'speedpaints' thread at cgtalk and submit something every other day at least as a way to get more fluent.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I finished it today. Acrylic on watercolor paper. You can still see some paint strokes - tried multiple layers building up washes but I'm still too new to paint I guess because they show. I tried using my movie camera to get an image but looked very bad -think it is the indoor lighting. I finally put corner after corner into the scanner and reassembled it in Paint Shop Pro - the color didn't reproduce exactly on the scan and I think there are some seams where I did the joins in the scan but best I can do for now. I'll see if Kinkos or someone can copy the large original.

Triad color scheme basically.

Here it is for better or worse. Thanks for all the useful feedback. Have to finish my final animation now for the animation intro class.

Heh,heh,heh, and you thought that computer art would let you keep clean neat hands! Actually it does, its the learning curve with other media that's a killer. Don't lose hope just enjoy the new learning that is happening. Hopefully you aren't relying on your painting and drawing to make a living?????????
It took me all of my 60+ years to feel somewhat comfortable with the "traditional" media. (I was a public school art teacher for 30 yrs.)

ingie01 wrote:Hopefully you aren't relying on your painting and drawing to make a living?????????
It took me all of my 60+ years to feel somewhat comfortable with the "traditional" media. (I was a public school art teacher for 30 yrs.)

That bad huh? I am not depending on it yet, but hope at the end of the 18 months (I'm only 2 months into this exploration) that I'll be able to get in to a creative field at some level -not sure that it would be background painting, might be storyboarding, writing or who knows what.

I am in it for the long haul as you suggest. I like it and know that I poked a hole in the dam there's no keeping it in.

7feet wrote: ArtRage http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html ... I like it a whole lot.

Well, although not free, Alias SketchBook Pro is much better, especially for sketching (ArtRage is better at painting, though). ArtRage sometimes misses strokes, especially if you put your next stroke far away from the previous strokes (or if it is your first stroke). And I'm not the only one experiencing this problem, see the comments to this review in MacUpdate:
http://www.macupdate.com/reviews.php?id ... pid=117260

And BTW I can't escape the thought that ArtRage has an almost identical UI as SketchBook Pro. At least, it is a close look-alike.

Another appication for natural media is of course Corel Painter.

Thanks. Looks cool. When I have some real ability with the digital programs I will be buying one - probably use the freebies until then. :0

If you like Artrage, you might also like to take a look at ArtWeaver.

Still in ongoing development, but useable.

A little like an early Painter with Lua script plugins (which are also useable under the GIMP and Dogwaffle).

According to the forum, the interface may change to be somewhat less Painter-like in future versions to avoid legal problems.

Regards, Myles.

Thanks Myles, looks interesting. I'll give it a go over the holiday.

myles wrote:ArtWeaver

Rasheed wrote:I have sent them an e-mail asking if there is a Mac-version in the making

Just received an e-mail message back. No, the developer has no plans to develop a Mac version at the moment, but that could change once Apple has changed over to Intel.

I thought Mac owners would like to know this.