Sunday, May 12, 2013

Some more thoughts about thinking...about things


This is the not-so-long-awaited follow-up post to the 12-step program [i had too many coffees]...I’ve been wandering around…going to faraway places, riding airplanes, avoiding the touch of strangers... Back in June I quit my job in Singapore and moved to San Francisco to study at the Safehouse Atelier, then realized how expensive San Francisco is...and went back to Maine while I did some job interviews and more freelance work, and then in February moved [back] to Shanghai…I need to stop moving so much. Every time I move, I’m telling myself this, and then I end up moving again and again and again. So I made a post that was geared more towards getting presentable thumbnails and then I started wondering… if I could take it a bit further and make a final image with a similar approach. This has been sitting on my SSD since October already, and overall, I suppose I’d consider it a half-success at best. Maybe 1/3 success. I think it’s not really something useful, but I find it’s something interesting to think about. Click for larger images...

Layers breakdown~! As you can see, I've turned off the lines layer, and the grey layer for the final. I turned a lot of the layers on and off to test things out while working and trying to maintain cleanliness...


At the end of it, I'm able to swap out the patterns and get a new 'final render' with minimal amount of work....the possibilities are endless here, can just keep messing around with layer settings and etc and doing mash-ups of different pattern combos and etc.

And just to give you an idea of what it looks like at 100%

I feel the end result was hampered a bit by my own ineptitude, or maybe I was just a bit lazy. Still need to sort out a lot of things in my head...still feels like I'm missing something kind of important...

Hopefully someone can find this a bit useful, or at least give them something to think about...

7 comments:

Nicholas Hong said...

Wow! Thanks for sharing your process. I am really liking this dark blue character as well. Not only you have great technique to mask for painting but you really have great sense of design! Cant wait to see more!

devin platts said...

thank you very much for the kind words nicholas!!

Fernando Teixeira said...

Bangin post. Props!

Andrea Femerstrand said...

Just wanted to stop by and thank you. Really helpful and inspiring post. Haven't seen your stuff in a while, and I must say that your work has become even more awesome!

Kep it up and take care :)

Unknown said...

This is so helpful....thank you so much! I have never seen it broken down so it's so easy to follow. This is the best tutorial I have probably ever seen. Thank you so much again.

coyo said...

I've seen this going around and wanted to swing by and thank you. This is such a great breakdown of steps and layers!

You mention missing something and the only thing I could think of was maybe some very dark shadows here and there to make things pop - especially with such a bright rim light...?

Unknown said...

I really like the workflow. thank you for sharing, I will try something similar. My organization of layers BLOWS. You mentioned something missing. Maybe it's just me but the clipping mask feels too sharp. it makes it feel Cutout or greenscreen. I like to soften the less important edges of my mask layer either with smudge or a soft eraser. just my 2 cent.