Week 1- Value Study
I was quite excited to begin the course at Gnomon Visual School of Art as I have heard great things about it. At the same time, I was also a bit intimidated being taught by Robh Ruppel who has been in the film industry, doing concept art for many years. It’s a privilege being in the same room with the like of him and I knew that I would learn so much.
My first lesson began on the 11 Oct 09. He warmed up by talking about tonal values and began to show us a few examples of his work. Every facet of his piece had logic and meaning behind it. His understanding of tonal value is impeccable and was explaining the fundamentals of light and shadow. He set the class to do a quick one hour landscape to see where everyone’s level is at and then evaluate to it. I couldn’t think of any landscapes to draw, so I tried to mimic one I had done a few weeks ago. As the class has finished the task, we then went around to observe each others work to hear what Robh had to say. Evaluating my work, he said something that really opened my eyes and will no doubt affect my work for the better. He said something along the lines of…..”It’s easy for someone to fall into the routine of having light versus dark and dark versus light to create mood and atmosphere. You need to be extremely subtle with your tones so that you don’t over do the hot spots in the piece. Isolate the values you work with so the dark areas wouldn’t be too dark and light’s wouldn’t be too light, you need to have just enough to compliment each other rather than compete”.
After he had evaluated everyone’s work, he then asked us to redo the piece, whilst taking what he said into mind. The result was dramatic and I understood exactly what he meant.
Our homework is to produce four landscape that depict four different tonal value; high, mid high, mid and low. Here are the ones that I have completed. I’m looking forward to my next lesson.
Week 2-Perspective Study
This week was fairly tricky because I rarely cover perspective elements in my work. My speciality comprise of mountains, foliage, oceans and clouds. I’m not particularly good at executing cityscapes, simply because I don’t enough of them. It’s quite bad because if I only know how to pull of amazing mountain scenes, and the art director for a movie company requires a cityscape…….if I can’t deliver, then it would bad for the movie.
I was quite tempted to use Cinema 4D to model a few building and duplicate them, however I came to my senses and understood the realization that I should familiarise myself with the fundamentals rather than relying on a software that does it automatically without having grasped the concept as to pull off a good perspective piece.
I wasn’t happy with the pieces that I handed to Robh Ruppel and so I’ve decided redo a few of them. Out of the four that I should be posting up on this blog, I will only chose one for now and add the other three when I have time.
Week 3- Composition Study
In week 3, Robh Ruppel was discussing the dynamics of composition and how it will ultimately lead to a more active and successful piece. As always, he began with showing the class a few of his pieces and discussing the key elements as to how and what makes it successful. Before doing a piece, he says that it’s useful to just block in simple shapes i.e. triangles, circles and squares to create a visual rhythm of what the piece will look like at the end and how it engages the viewer. Interestingly, he then showed examples of films in the 80’s and was discussing how the actors and actresses were positioned in the set.
Our assignment was to create four compositional pieces but use the blocked shapes we were doing during class. My four, are as follows.
While I was working on week threes assignment, I was still bogged down by week two because I still wasn’t satisfied with my knowledge of perspective study. So I made it my mission to produce at least two pieces that involve a city of some sort. I have to say; I have made a big improvement since last week and have broken down buildings to a more simple form so that it doesn’t look too intimidating when I’m tackling it. Now that I have an alright knowledge of perspective, I need to keep working on it and then move on to making buildings look my appealing that just simple blocks and cubes.
Week 4 – Shape Study
This week we were looking into what makes a building look aggressive and another building peaceful. We familiarizing ourselves with what makes things look dangerous, and so we narrowed it down to sharp and pointy object. Things that aren’t dangerous are smooth and more spherical. A quote that Robh Ruppel said that was very helpful was somewhere along the lines of ‘Whenever you produce a landscape or a monument, designing just the shape has more of an impact than the detail you put in it because shapes are more memorable than detail. Troy for example, was badly done because when both armies were fighting, you couldn’t tell one from the other because they looked exactly same. Their colours weren’t different enough for them to be identified and their shields looked very similar. So we were given a task to produce ten simple silhouette buildings that depict an evil castle and ten that depict a peaceful castle. Our assignment was to produce two pieces; one was to use the evil castle in an evil type landscape and the other was to create a peaceful castle in a beautiful landscape.
Week 5 – Texturing
In this week’s lesson, we were familiarizing ourselves with texturing and how it could deliver more of a realist feel to our piece. We were also getting into grips with creating our own custom brushes rather than using ones from the Internet because when creating your own, you put time and effort into the brush and therefore serves more of a purpose.
When I first started out doing landscapes I ordered the Gnomon Workshop DVD called ‘Speed painting to Concept art’ by David Levy. In this DVD he discusses the benefits of using custom brushes that I found to be remarkable and made it a lot easier for me to produce landscapes. Naturally, I then fell into routine of relying too heavily in these custom brushes that created rocks, clouds and trees that I really didn’t understand the fundamentals of what makes a piece look believable. Discarding the use of custom brushes I found myself lost and understood the realisation that I wasn’t really creating landscapes from scratch, rather these custom brushes I refer to as ‘false imitation’ were. When I got used to creating landscapes with ordinary Photoshop brushes I noticed a dramatic progress and what was left on the screen was ultimately what I was looking for in the beginning; truth and realism.
Robh Ruppel stated, “The term Speed Painting is inaccurate and people who perform them should understand that a landscape or cityscape should take patience, careful understanding of light, value and perspective when executing one”. This really opened my mind because something that I lack in my work is patience because I’m too eager to see the piece finished that I don’t stop to think if the value, perspective, contour of the landscape, composition and shape are all spot on. For this week’s assignment we were asked to produce a barn/farm on a prairie. Something that I haven’t really done before or interested in because there isn’t much to look at really, but Robh Rubbel stated, “Before an artist can produce massive monuments and futuristic buildings, one would have to undergo something as simplistic as a producing a farm. If you can make a farm look pealing to the audience, your ready to tackle bigger obstacles”.
I’m happy with the final result because before attempting to produce this piece, I went through week’s three and four of the composition and shape study to crystallize the idea of what the outcome of the assignment would look like.
A quote Robh Ruppel said that helped me achieve this was, “Gathering form to read is important than texture” and “Pockets of Imperfection will lead to a more realist landscape”.
Week 6
During week six, we had be up to date with the assignments from the previous weeks. So here are the other three piece from week two.
Week 7
Robh Ruppel had to attend to some important meetings and so we didn’t have any class in week 7. I took this opportunity to produce a matte painting after not doing any for quite some time. I was interested to see if what I have learnt in Robh’s class would change the outcome of my piece.
I’m off to a good start with this piece. But I’m currently struggling with the mountain on the right because there’s more foliage showing than the mountain and selecting the right photo to extract can be quite strenuous because after attempting a few that I thought were right, it turned out that they weren’t. I’ll post the next stage as soon as I have finished with this obstacle.
Week 8 – Composition value
Robh gave us a simple outline sketch of a few buildings. What he asked us to do that was similar to week three’s composition study, is that instead of blocking in shapes, block in value to create the composition. So I blocked in four different types of value, similar to week one. Here’s the outcome.
There was something about that bottom right hand corner composition that drew my attention out of the others. I had an idea to create a dark alley way and have a much lighter value at the sides to draw the viewer in. I wanted to do something similar to the movie ‘Blade Runner’ where it has this worn out and yet futuristic appeal. I also want to try and input some precipitation to give it a cold and lifeless atmosphere. Here’s the outcome of the piece.
