Digital Painting Tutorial on 2D Artist

2D Artist Magazine recently got in touch with me asking if I would like to make a painting tutorial for them.
I had a couple of illustrations published on their magazine a while ago (I mean this one and this one), and I was chuffed they got in touch with me again.

“Would I like to write a painting tutorial? Hell yes!” was my first thought. Suddenly followed by “Me? Really? Would anyone actually care about how I do things?” further followed by “oh well, I’ll do it anyway”.

Long story short, if you get this month’s issue you’ll find a nice painting tutorial about a villain who uses nasty spores to hurt people just because he can.

Drawing was the easy part. Writing the actual painting tutorial was to me like threading on a mine field.
Where’s the line between trying to be informative and being patronizing?
What’s the level of knowledge of the average 2D Artist reader? Am I showing stuff everybody knows? Am I trying to teach grandma to suck eggs?
Eventually I decided not to care and write about things I found relevant, regardless of what I thought most people could find trivial.
After all, one of my colleagues, a seasoned professional, didn’t know he could select layers by CTRL-clicking on their pixels regardless of your active tool, so well, even veterans could find out something new.

FOR EXAMPLE.
Something not everybody uses as a way of colouring is the Blending Options in the Layer Style palette (double click on the layer icon in the Layers Palette to bring it up).
I mentioned this in the tutorial but the word count forced me to be
concise, so I’d like to say more about it.
The Blending Options Palette controls how a layer blends (duh) with the underlying ones.
I always ignored this feature, until I realized how heart-warmingly cool it can be!
The basics: The uppermost slider controls what parts of the active layer will be shown and what parts will be hidden.
The other slider dictates which parts of the underlying layer will be revealed though the active layer.
Here’s a quick example: create a new file.

Paint this on the bottommost layer

and this on the topmost.

Now double click on the topmost one and play with the sliders.

Now, one of the reasons why I never really used this feature is that I didn’t know how to use it properly!
When using it to achieve subtle effects the result was always messy, with harsh edges and bad gradients.
Until I found out you can split the slider arrows! Those buggers are made of two halves, did you ever notice? I didn’t!

Try ALT-Clicking on the innermost half of either arrow and drag it towards the centre. Whatever blending you were trying to achieve will now be now soft-edged and nice, perfectly blended.
Now, if in your head you haven’t yet found an actual practical application of this technique, first download the painting tutorial on 2D Artist Magazine, then go on reading:)

This is an old concept I made for a Runescape quest a couple of years ago.

Since I had to paint different points of view of the same city I had to find an efficient way to do it.
So I modelled the city on Sketchup, took screenshots of the relevant views and painted over them.
The first pass was always the following:

I created a Photo Filter set on Warm Colours on top of the Grey Scale screenshot of the 3D view.

I tweaked the blending mode so that only the lit parts were affected.
Then I created another Photo Filter set on Cold Colours and I blended it so that it affected only the parts in shadow.

As you can see in a handful of seconds I went from a greyscale image to a strong separation between warm and cool colours I could properly paintover. I manage to paint a view like this in only 5-6 hours.

Another example is how to paint over fine details without using selections.
In this character I designed for Runescape I painted the highlights with 100% white on top of the chain mail, then blended it so that the dark parts of the texture could be seen though the white (below I painted an exaggerated example of this on the already finished drawing).

You can use this for a lot of things! For example, I never use Overlay mode on the texture I (rarely) put on my drawings, as they tend to mess with the colours. I keep them in normal mode and I tweak the sliders to reveal only the parts that I need.
Give it a try!

by Paolo Puggioni

Pathfinder – Ranger vs Dragon

This is an illustration I made for one of Paizo‘s Pathfinder books, the Player Companion: Dragonslayer’s Handbook .
As a matter of fact, I’ve been lucky enough to have worked quite extensively for the people at Paizo during the past few months.
Which, by the way, is the reason why I haven’t been posting on this blog as often as last year: between these and other freelance assignments I’ve been unbelievably busy!

So, in theory there would be a whole lot of new stuff I could pick from my hard drive and brag about.
In practice, very little of it has been published, so I’m afraid most of it will have to wait to see the light of day.

This is for what I believe was the second assignment I got from Paizo. Which, by the way, is one of the clients I recently enjoyed working with the most .
The setting is still Fantasy enough for me to be in my comfort zone (I keep being asked to draw Fantasy stuff, have you noticed?).
However, both the visual style and the game itself have a strong personality on their own that makes it both challenging and enjoyable to draw for.

Moreover, I must add that the requested revisions are always minimal and the process admiringly smooth, which again makes my work for Pathfinder even more pleasant.

But I digress, back to my dwarf.
This is one of Pathfinder’s iconic characters. If you want to know more about him have a look here!
When I got the assignment I had to read the brief a few times, as I thought the aspect ratio of the canvas was some kind of typo.
It wasn’t.
I had never drawn anything on a canvas that tall and narrow, which made the composition of the first few sketches quite awkward.
I eventually settled with these.

I would have personally picked the first from the left, as the head and neck of the dragon had in my opinion a more interesting shape.
However, I must admit the big mass of the dragon and the smaller one of the hero have a better balance in the final one, so I’m quite happy with it too.

It looks like I’m good to post some more Pathfinder illustrations from the bunch I’ve already done.
So well, you’ll see more in the next few days.

by Paolo Puggioni

Game of Thrones – Oath of the Nightwatch

There’s still some Game of Thrones artwork I have to post.
Actually with this one I should be pretty much finished.

I haven’t been drawing much lately. Which could be a bit depressing if it wasn’t for this post on Muddy Colors by Petar Meseldzija, which cheered me up a little. Apparently even world-class artists regularly go though periods of low productivity, and it’s not always a bad sign.

As a matter of fact, there’s a whole bunch of things I would like to start working on, and a quite ambitious project for which I might have to involve the friend who made this website for me.
(He doesn’t know it yet. So yes, if you’re reading this, there might be work heading your way at some point:)).

In the meantime, alas, I’m actually going through a period of mental laziness. Even at work it’s more Excel spreadsheets than anything else, which usually sucks the creativity out of anyone.
But things are changing fast around me, so we’ll see what happens in the next future.

Anyway. This is one of the last pieces I made for Green Ronin’s Game of Thrones RPG.
They both depict Men of the Night Watch taking their oath.
The recruits on the left hand side are swearing before a Septon, a priest of the Seven Gods.
The Brothers on the right hand side, faithful to the Old Gods, are instead taking their oath before a Heart-Tree.
That’s how Jon Snow took the Blacks, as any Game of Thrones nerd would know.

Both scenes take place at the end of the day, the sun setting and the night approaching, which is obviously a symbol of the kind of life ahead of them.

As I said before, the chapters about the Night Watch were hands down my favourite in the Game of Thrones books.
The constant threat of the cold, and the evil things creeping inside it, the peculiar, unforgiving code of honour of the Wall. And the grudging dedication of the brothers, for whom the Watch was the only meaningful thing left in life.

Also, their Oath always gives me the chills.

Night gathers, and now my watch begins.
It shall not end until my death.
I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children.
I shall wear no crowns and win no glory.
I shall live and die at my post.
I am the sword in the darkness.
I am the watcher on the walls.
I am the shield that guards the realms of men.
I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.

by Paolo Puggioni

Nymphs Again

I eventually managed to finish the Nymphs I sketched a while ago, just in time for the deadline.
As usual, I was caught into something completely different in the meantime, and I managed to complete only one of the three drawings I had planned.
Plus, I’m an idiot, and I forgot to take home from work the only drawing I finished, which was the result of a few lunch breaks.
So, no time for the several tweaks I had in mind and other changes, I just submitted it as it is.
Oh well, that should do I guess.

At least I’m quite happy about this one, the nymphs are as pretty as the lore requires (I hope), but odd enough to come across as non-human.
As I said before, I think nymphs should be at least a little unsettling. I mean, they live on the shore of small rivers, and possibly catch their own fish and eat it raw. So I figure they must be skilled predators, with agile fingers and sharp teeth.
And of course gills.

I had started (and almost finished) a whole illustration. Unfortunately the result was so poor that I just deleted it. The badness was so wide spread that it wasn’t even possible to point my finger on something to fix. Just easier to throw it in the bin and move on to something else.
Sometimes it happens. Not a good feeling when you waste time this way, but it happens.

Too bad the sketch was pretty good I think, I had great hopes:(

Anyway.
Nymphs are done, now my new endeavour will be drawing a card for my sister.
My little sister gets married, and she wants me to draw her cards, how cool is that?

I doubt I’ll be allowed to post them though, (also, I doubt anyone but few selected people would care) so in the next few days I’ll keep posting images from Game of Thrones, for a change.

by Paolo Puggioni

Game of Thrones Artwork from The Night Watch

Last year I made a bunch of illustrations for another Game of Thrones RPG rulebook, Green Ronin’s Night’s Watch expansion set.
It’s always a big fat pleasure to be part of something as massively cool as Game of Thrones.
Plus, this time it’s a double pleasure since George R.R. Martin himself mentioned the release on his blog

I know, I’m supposed to act as a professional and consider this as part of the job, nonetheless I couldn’t help giggling like an adolescent when I read that.
I mean, George R.R. Martin put his seal of approval on my stuff:)

Anyway, the drawings.
I’ll post them all in the next few days.
This is a half-page with men of the Night Watch fleeing from a horde of Wildlings descending from the mountains.
I know, I’m being redundant by saying this since the image portrays precisely men of the Night Watch fleeing from a horde of Wildlings descending from the mountains. But in case you were in doubt, that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Now, I was pretty happy about the result when I finished this.
However, looking back at it after all those months there are lots of things I would fix, like the guy’s anatomy (god his posture is awkward), his face and another few things here and there.
The dark side of the hill the chief is standing on could have been lighter, and pushed back in the distance a bit.
Also, the Wildlings are all the same value, with little atmospheric perspective.
Oh well.

While going through George R.R. Martin’s blog posts I also noticed HBO released the teaser for the next season of Game of Thrones.

Nothing much to see, but it does remind me that it’s almost behind the corner.
Damn I can’t wait.
Nonetheless, Mr. Martin, please go back to writing Winds of Winter. That’s the stuff we want!

by Paolo Puggioni

A Dragon Slayer

I made this dragon slayer over a couple of lunch breaks.
I think that all in all it took slightly more than an hour.

Now, I don’t time myself, and I normally find those who boast “hey look what I did in just twenty minutes” quite silly.
I mean, good for you dude, your pipeline is very efficient!
But my friend Dave (who occasionally lurked behind my shoulder while I was doing this) and I were noticing that a while ago I wouldn’t have been able to finish a piece in such a short time. Which means that if not skills, at least experience started kicking in at some point.
Who-hoo! One more reason to think that turning forty doesn’t suck!

I have been trying to draw things under slightly unusual light conditions lately.
This scene is taking place late in the afternoon on an overcast day.
The light is mostly grey, with the occasional bright beam making its way from little specks of blue sky peeking out of the clouds.

To be honest I added some blue sky as an afterthought to justify the bright blue reflections on the Dragon Slayer’s armour and the dragon’s scales.
They shouldn’t be there under those light conditions. Planes in shadows turn blue when facing up, but only under clear sky.
One thing I’m particularly happy with are the wings of the dragon.
I had already tried to recreate that lovely thin, transparent lit from beyond skin effect in the past. Unsuccessfully, alas.

There was a guy at school with ears pretty much perpendicular to his skull. They shone as red as a traffic light when the sun was behind him. The other kids picked on him all the time. I thought his ears were cool, and they would have been challenging to draw convincingly.
This effort is for you, big-eared kid from my past whose name I can’t remember.

Anyway.

I know, I always end up drawing dragons and the like. What can I say? They are fun. Which is exactly what the dragon slayer in this illustration might be thinking.
So here he is, at the end of a long working day, tracking a dragon to his nest in a bog.
Would he notice how the delicate skin of its wing catches the low Autumn sun?
I like to think he would.

By Paolo Puggioni

A Battle Mage

I started drawing something random a few days ago and it turned out to be a battle mage.
Or in any case a guy with an aggressive posture wielding a tool that might come across as magical. Call him a battle mage if you please.

I’m not a fan of night scenes, or anyway drawings set in poor light conditions.
There’s nothing wrong with them in general, it’s just that they’re the favourite pick of beginner illustrators and any art website is full of them.
Anyway, that’s pretty much the set of colours I started my Battle Mage with, and I stuck with it.

(Completely unrelated: while I was drawing I watched Apocalypse Now for the first time. My god what a movie. If you haven’t seen it I would recommend NOT to watch the Redux version. The bit with the French plantation people is just pointless. Anyway).

Fun things happen to our eyes under poor light conditions.
First, if the light is below a certain threshold, our cones just shut down. We can’t see colours anymore, full stop. That’s when rods are more active. As they are particularly sensitive to light, when it’s dark it’s their moment to shine (ha ha). Rods are colour blind, but they are good friends when you are trying to get to the bathroom at night. Just give the time to wake up and they’ll sort you out.

Another thing that happens under poor light conditions is a whole plethora of colour illusions appear.
First, rods are more sensitive to the frequency of green light. This means that if you place a dark green object next to a bright red object at night, the green one will seem brighter. In my battle mage all the greens are bright. Check.

Second, we tend to unconsciously associate colour with familiar objects. So we’d probably still read a pink painted lemon in dim light as a yellow one.

Then there’s the thing about blues. We tend to see moonlight as blue, where in fact it has a slightly redder component than white sunlight.
Apparently that’s due to a synaptic bridge between rods and cones, which accidentally touches the cones’ blue receptors and tricks our brain into believing we’re seeing blue when in fact cones are minding their own business, completely unaware. I mean, people who take the perfection of the human eye as proof of God’s existence don’t know what they’re talking about.

But I digress. To sum things up, colours are all messed up at night and you can get away with a lot. If I stuck with Science you wouldn’t be able to see the red robes of the battle mage. But are they red? Or do you see them as red just because the metal is green and you perceive the darker colour nearby as its opposite?
Who knows. And who cares! I was watching Brando kick ass while I did this, I just thought it looked ok, so there you go.

by Paolo Puggioni

Sketching Nymphs

Nymphs are one of those subjects I always try to avoid as much as possible.
‘thing is, pretty much any illustrator with a predilection for Fantasy has drawn nymphs at some point.
And has likely saved them in a “Things Everybody Does” folder together with elves and driads.

I am not saying there isn’t any nice artwork for them on the Internet. It’s just difficult to come up with something original with so many nymphs around.
However, there is an art challenge going on at the always awesome Art Order blog, and I thought I’d give it a go.
The challenge, if you haven’t guessed yet, is about nymphs.

Now, first of all the brief is pretty interesting, and it makes the old subject actually quite appealing.
Second – and this is the reason why I changed my mind about the poor nymphs – one of the judges is no less than Tony DiTerlizzi himself, and I thought that the chance of being rejected by one of my all-time heroes was priceless.

You see, back in the nineties I bought ALL the Planescape Box Sets just because of his artwork inside. I remember I started browsing a few pages in a comics shop I used to go in Genova, and was captivated, stunned and amazed by his beautiful drawings. I didn’t know, back then, that the game would have entertained me and sparked my imagination for years and years to come. Planescape became a beautiful journey, and DiTerlizzi one of my favourite illustrators since.
The idea of he himself looking at my artwork and thinking “gosh this is crap” is just too good.

So, I don’t know yet whether I’ll have the time to finish everything in time, but here are the first sketches I made.

In lore, nymphs are always quite attractive. However, I tried to imagine what I would think if I met a group of them while walking (for reasons unknown to me) in a swamp.
You are making your way though quicksand and mosquitoes, you part a bunch of tall grass leaves and suddenly there they are, half naked girls just hanging out, looking at you in surprise.
Wouldn’t a certain feeling of, umm, uneasiness, mix with the welcome discovery of various naked girls in a swamp?

I thought nymphs should be at least a bit disturbing. I drew them with eyes slightly apart, and with an unusual shape. Their fingers would be long and dangerous, developed to catch fish (what else would a water-dweller eat?).
The fact that one of them is chewing on a raw fish should add to the slight unpleasantness.

I don’t think my wife would appreciate my hiring three models to pose nude in my study. Also, my floor is a Lego bricks minefield and I would need to pay for health insurance cover if they were to walk barefoot anywhere in my house. So I grabbed some images from this awesome website, which is stuffed with reference.
Anyway, I’ll try to colour these sketches in during this weekend. We’ll see.

by Paolo Puggioni

A Paladin Outfit for Runescape

This is a Paladin Outfit I made for Runescape.
Not much to say about it, it’s just a paladin armour.

Paladins are quite straightforward characters. They’re self righteous people with a thing against evil. As a matter of fact, I never could stand paladins in games or literature.
Self important, rigid blokes you can’t really argue with, and not particularly entertaining at the pub unless you fancy making fun of their bigotry (and possibly risk being cut in two by their holy sword during the process).

Ok, in games and books paladins usually speak directly to their deities, so there isn’t that “hey, who told you you’re good and I’m not” element that makes bigots so unpleasant in real life. Their answer would always be “my god did, really, now die”.

On the other hand, they tend to make game-play quite relaxing. Like “hey, there’s a guy dressed in black. And his armour has spikes and skulls, let’s kill him”. You don’t have to put too much thought into playing a paladin. If it’s evil it has to die, full stop.
Thieves and mercenaries are more fun, I’ve always thought.

This was an outfit destined for the shop, so the requirements were about a classic, quite iconic paladin armour.

The only slightly more unusual element I managed to slip in is its colour. Instead of the canonical, high reflective  steel armour I went for a white enamelled metal.
Which is, by the way, the kind of armour you would spend the most time cleaning.
Can you imagine how easily it would get dirty? If I lived in a Fantasy world I’d totally be a villain. You wear black and you don’t have to worry about stains.

Anyway, if I were to design an actual in-game paladin I’d try and convey the concept of a religious fanatic  a lot more.

To me a paladin is closer to an agent of the Spanish Inquisition than a good guy who learnt how to fight despite his distaste for violence.
I’d see Paladins as strict, close-minded people well determined to crush any opposition to their faith.
They would wear the sort of attire meant to scare infidels away, and possibly a hood, and cruel weapons.
They would carry symbols of their power, and be vocal in their convictions. And they would roam the land and mindlessly destroy anything they consider wrong, and maybe hang trophies of slain enemies on their armour, just to be sure their intentions are clear.

That would be a paladin I would play in a game. If I weren’t so fond of stealth and deception. And the occasional collateral damage.

by Paolo Puggioni

Undead Guy

Nothing particular, just a random Undead guy.
The relevant thing about this guy though, (relevant for me, at least), is that I sculpted his face in ZBrush first, and coloured it later in Photoshop.

It might seem nothing worth mentioning, but for someone 3D-resistant as I am this is no small achievement.
What’s the word for someone who kills potted plants just by sitting in the same room?
Whatever that is, I am the 3D-model equivalent of those people.
Everything I do on a 3D software seems to come out slightly wrong. After half an hour of work polygons start sticking out from unpredictable places, common commands give unexpected results, things go generally not the way I’d like.
But I’m stubborn, so every now and then I give it another try and slowly but steadily I’m also improving.
Plus, I hadn’t tried ZBrush on my Cintiq yet, hence this Undead Guy.

There are two main goals linked to all these efforts on ZBrush (did I already say the learning curve is STEEP?).
The first one is that the lighting of some complex scenes is difficult to figure out without a model of sorts.
Some people make maquettes, others hire models. People like me, who for some reason can’t do either, just mock things up on a 3D software and take that as a reference.

The second goal comes from a recent freelance misadventure, so to speak.
When I was working on this I sent out a first version to FFG‘s Art Director, confident I had done an amazing job, and she came back to me by saying “that’s nice, however I’ll need WAY more details on the guy’s face!”
Thing is, that was pretty much all the detail I could already thing of. Nonetheless I painted over the first version and submitted a much more refined one.
Long story short, I had to go through four revisions in total before the final was approved.
I’m just not THAT fiddly with details, and it’s a lot easier (at least for me) to come up with a convincing facial anatomy by sculpting it first and taking that as a reference, at least when lacking a live model.

I’m still not sure about it, I’m just considering whether I could use that in my pipeline when it comes to paint more realistic portraits and bodies. For a start, colouring over a greyscale image always give a dull result, at least colour wise. But it’s worth making some more experiments.

So, here’s the big ugly Undead. Kind of a shortcut really, sculpting a ravaged, old skin is easier than a smooth, young one.
And what is he thinking of? Is he looking at the moon after he just discovered his days as a living being are over? Is he romantically longing for some fresh brains to eat? Is he evoking the Dark Powers to fulfil some of his unholy dreams? Who cares.
He’s just some random undead guy.

Here’s the process. Not really interesting maybe, as I barely coloured a greyscale screenshot. Yet here it is.

by Paolo Puggioni