Science Fiction Archive - Nadine de Macedo

Dark Fan Art – From Comic to Realism

Nadine — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 10:04:00 +0000

[Advertisement] Have you ever failed drawing a realistic digital portrait? I bet you did. Drawing realism is hard. But here is something, that may embolden you: It is more about observing nature and light than matching the exact shapes and details. In this post I will turn a comic-like illustration of Dark characters Jonas and Martha to a realistic portrait. In my previous post, you gained some insight in my ideas and concepts of my fan art of Jonas Kahnwald and Martha Nielsen from the Netflix series Dark. This follow-up will give you hints on realistic digital portraits based on a comic-like or vector illustration. How to draw light, shades and reflexions realistically Here is the point of this digital portrait painting tutorial:What makes a digital portrait realistic?Is it about the details? The textures? I think both, but in my honest opinion catching light is the essential thing to go for, if you’re talking of naturalism and realism. Colours are not absolute. There is no blue, black or red without the impact of light. Try to imagine colours as a blend of basic colours, shade, reflexions and light. Do not try to match the exact colour – catch the impression. Form and texture will follow automatically. After some years of observation, I finally found a scheme that worked. I do not know if this is correct, but it’s the way I work today. direct lightAreas, on which the light shines directly, are shaded in light unsaturated colours. The brighter the light, the more saturated the area. You can observe this on the jacket and the thumb. direct reflexionI use bright saturated colours on areas with direct reflexion. You can see this on the tip of the nose or the highlights in the eyes. These look so bright, because they are surrounded by less saturated colours. indirect reflexion of a gleaming sourceWhile shading these areas, I mix a highly saturated colour of the indirect light source. The apricot tone of the cheek is a good example here. You can also see this effect on the bottom of the hand, which is illuminated by the yellow jacket. shade and indirect lightYou can paint a scene in indirect light with unsaturated colours. Shades will be in greyish or taupe undertones. In this picture, the light simulation is quite complicated and intense. Therefore, I tend using complimentary colours for shading. Just watch the neck which is shaded in violet. At first sight this sounds complicated and poetic. Just give it a try! Take a photo, analyse the light sources and spot them. After some time you may see light blue spots on faces and olive tones in shades. If not, you may visit an exhibition of impressionistic art. Impressionists work a lot with the impression of light and overemphasize them. Turning an outline into a comic artwork One of the first steps in drawing illustrations or comics is drawing a neat outline. You may be tempted to fill in your colours here, but wait. It took me some years to understand, that this is actually a bad idea, if you want your artwork to look realistic. A coloured version of an outlined sketch always looks like a comic or vector illustration. In most cases your neat outline is not good enough for a realistic digital portrait. Proportions are perceived differently when coloured. It would be a waste of time to correct the outlines and the colours. Therefore, I prefer finishing the comic sketch first, before putting any effort to make it as realistic as possible. This is how the artwork looks like after colouring it in a simple way. Taking the right pencils for a vector like illustration In comic-like or vector-like illustrations, one uses other pens and brushes then in realistic or naturalistic drawings. I paint outlines with a hard brush that scales with pressure. Please do not link the pressure sensor to the opacity. While colouring in, I use nearly the same brush! I achieve the comic-like or vector-like style by using only two to three shades of each colour. I do not mix colours, I pick them from the colour wheel. Lighter shades are taken by shifting the colour to the top and to the left – For darker shades, I shift my base colour to the bottom and to the right. In this way, I gently play around with saturation. I do not change the hue! You can follow all steps in my YouTube tutorial on digital art or in my last blogpost. Honestly, my way of colouring is a bit unconventional. Professional illustrators tend to shade a picture in greyscales first before fitting in colours. I do not care how you draw and colour your images. It’s the result that counts. Let us conclude, why this way of drawing reminds us of comics: The picture has black inked outlines We use only a few colours The colours do not reflect the surroundings The shades are either high saturated or greyish How to turn a comic drawing into a realistic digital portrait It took some years to understand, that drawing realism has nothing to do with details. As I said before, one should focus on the use of light, shade and reflexion. Did you know, that you only need some strokes to make an object look wooden? Neither you don’t have to draw every single hair to catch the impression of hair! How do you digitally paint a portrait? First, we need to inverse the steps I mentioned above: Remove the black inked outlines Use more colours Mirror the surroundings depending on the texture Use shades and textures wisely Step 1: Soft shades I start with my comic version of Jonas Kahnwald. By applying a large soft brush with 50% opacity, you can smudge out the edges and create softer shades. I usually mix colours of adjacent areas. Just look onto the cheeks, that is the effect I want to achieve. Step 2: Remove inked outlines We move to the hardest part of the digital portrait: Removing the harsh outlines. First, I reduce the opacity of my ink layer to something like 20%. Then, I redraw the layers behind the digital ink. I recreate these outlines without using black or any other harsh colour. Use brown, taupe or greyish shades instead. Afterwards I reduce the opacity and recreate the outlines once again. Repeat until the outlines disappear. The best way to achieve realistic edges is to draw the base a soft brush. Then, I take a darker or lighter colour and sharpen the brush by changing its diameter. The smaller the brush and the higher the contrast, the sharper the edges. You need sharp edges when drawing eyes and ears. It takes some time, until you find the relation that works best for you. It has a lot to do with the age of the people you are portraying. The younger, the softer brushes are used. While working on a realistic portrait NEVER use black and white. Experiment with colours, blend in soft browns, greys or taupes. Work with different hues and saturation. There are plenty of colours which can look black or white without being exact black or white. Step 3: Edges, edges, edges… In my honest opinion, realistic portraying is all about defining edges and light. In this step I have focussed on the eyes. Try to get these edges properly! The eyebrows were drawn with a small sharp pen. When drawing hair is important to follow the natural direction of growth. Step 4: How to draw hair digitally Before drawing hair, I create a new layer. I draw plenty of dabs in different colours. Gaussian Blur is perfect for blending colours. You can already see the effect on the picture before. Here comes my new trick on drawing hair digitally: I use the smudge finger tool. Wait, what?! You can overlay the smudge finger tool with a hair brush. This is a special brush tip that consists of points with different opacity and diameter. I smudge my blurred area in the growth direction of the hair – et voilá This works fairly well with straight, soft and wavy hair – As long as do not cross paths. It’s a very simple technique! Step 5: Adding plenty of light effects Maybe the result of step 4 looks realistic enough to you. Since Jonas is holding a light emitting metal sphere in his hand (and he’s also wearing a yellow rain coat!), we have to add lots of reflexions. I use a brush with low opacity and high saturation. I share everything yellow and orange, which is close to the light source. Now, the digital portrait of Jonas Kahnwald looks like this. You don’t have to see the rest of the picture to understand that there might be an intense source of light in the bottom. Step 6: Once again soft shades It is time to redraw the digital portrait of Martha Nielsen. Drawing her was really tough, because of her hairdo. We repeat all steps we did on Jonas’ digital portrait starting with adding soft shades. After quite a while my picture of Martha looks like this: Step 7: Try once again! The second step of my drawing tutorial, is to turn the outlines into realistic edges. After two hours of work, this looks quite okay, but this isn’t Martha. Sometimes it is better to open up a new layer and to redraw everything after some days. If you watched the video, you may have noticed, that I mirrored the image quite a few times. It really helps to spot the mistakes. Another hint: Finish the skin before drawing hair. Draw hair on another layer. Otherwise, it will be difficult to correct the hairdo. You will not draw these eyes once again, right? Step 8: Drawing plenty of hair Some days after, my second try of the digital portrait of Martha Nielsen looked way better. I focussed on her nose and the chin. Drawing her hair was really tough. Though using the smudge finger technique of the previous step, it took me hours. Her bangs were hard to draw, but I figured out that the selection tool can be used like a pair of scissors. Step 9: Softening the textures The result of step 8 does fairly well, but I do not like these hard strokes in her face. Therefore, I use a soft large brush with low opacity to even out the skin texture. My digital portrait of Martha Nielsen is done. Have you noticed something? I haven’t used any textures. You don’t have to use textures, when light and shades are well one. Textile can be easily drawn by studying folds. Drawing hair is mainly about catching reflections. The only “texture” I used is a hair brush. I would have been able to draw this picture without it, but it would take twice the time. Besides, the hair brush is a nice tool to draw jeans. Here is the finished fan art of Dark In total, drawing this fan art of Martha Nielsen and Jonas Kahnwald took about 15 hours. Do you like the digital portrait? Bonus: How to make draw a glowing antique metal sphere Speaking of tutorials, I found a nice way to draw an antique metal sphere with less effort. Photoshop has an oval selection tool. By pressing CTRL it can be used as a round selection tool. Just fill the selection with plenty of colours in between yellow, olive and brown. The more greyish and olive hues you use, the more antique it looks. I also added the yellow tone of the jacket to it. Gaussian Blur will do the rest for you, if you don’t leave the selection! How do I make it glow? Well, I just made a new layer with a layer style. In Photoshop there is an option called outer glow. Pick an orangey colour and set the width. Now you draw white lines into the layer –...

This post Dark Fan Art – From Comic to Realism was published at Nadine de Macedo.

Dark Fan Art Jonas and Martha

Nadine — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 14:14:00 +0000

[Advertising] After watching the third season of Dark on Netflix, I had to draw a fan art of Jonas Kahnwald and Martha Nielsen. In this post, I will present my artwork and tell, why Dark is a science fiction series I will never forget. Good reasons why you should watch the science fiction series Dark If you haven’t heard about this realistic science fiction series Dark, it is time to catch up. Dark is one of the best series I ever watched, because it works without spaceships, aliens and supernatural powers. While watching the first episodes, one might think that this story is going to be a mystery thriller or crime. But this is definitely not the case. Dark is about the mysterious disappearance of children in a German small town called Winden. Episode after episode, the circumstances become weirder. It seems like everyone in Winden is hiding secrets. The story is complex, because it takes place in several epochs with dozens of protagonists. Dark is the kind of story, I was missing on TV for a long time. This is the reason, why I had to show my appreciation by drawing a fan art. Symmetry as a leifmotif in Dark Some people might have noticed, that Dark works a lot with visual effects. If you haven’t noticed it yet, think about the kaleidoscope effect in the trailer. Symmetry is a main motive in this series. I picked up that theme by arranging the protagonists symmetrically. Even the pockets and the seams of the yellow rain coat are in perfect symmetry. Martha and Jonas stand divide the circle into a golden section. In my coloured version, you can see that the dark sky is drawn in the complimentary colour of the iconic yellow raincoat building the perfect contrast to the foreground. You can enlarge or scroll through the drawings by clicking them. Reference pictures of Matha and Jonas Before drawing this fan art of Jonas and Martha, I had to collect plenty of reference pictures of the series Dark. I used a lot of photos of the main actors Louis Hofmann and Lisa Vicari. Another source was the Internet Movie Database for screenshots and trailers of the series. I also searched for reviews and insights. Though drawing a comic sketch, it was very important to me, to match the expressions, hairdos and traits of each character. My main source for drawing Jonas’ iconic yellow jacket were online shops with similar pieces of clothing. On my YouTube channel you can watch me draw the outlines. Just click on the picture below. Digital Vector Art Before drawing this fan art of Dark, I did not decide whether it should be a realistic or comic like portrait of Jonas Kahnwald and Martha Nielsen. Therefore I drew both. Recently, I had a lot of fun with drawing vector-like illustrations. I think it’s because they don’t take so much time. Only by drawing a few strikes, you can characterize the person sufficiently. For each basic colour you choose only two to three shades lighter or darker. I call this style pseudo vector art. Technically these aren’t vector images, but rasterized images. Due to the reduced colour depth, they look like vector images. How to generate a background After a couple of years of photo manipulation, my hard work paid off. I was able to generate this background in less than thirty minutes. Instead of drawing the nightly sky, I just used a colour gradient tool. Either, I did not draw the sphere in the background. It’s just the result of the elliptical selection tool, a large blurred out pen and some wave filters. Adding the transparency to that sphere was not the biggest deal. You can use an alpha channel mask and modify it via grey tones. The spruces in the background are made with a special brush or stamp, which I collected some years ago at Deviant Art. These are commonly used for photo manipulation. How to draw digital light effects digitally There are at least two ways to implement a glow effect into the sphere in the background. You can clone that sphere layer, fill it with white colour and use the Gaussian Blur. Another way is to select the area outside the sphere layer. By choosing a soft wide brush, you can draw the glow manually. Let Gaussian Blur do the rest for you. The sparkles above the metallic spheres were drawn with a haystack brush. If you don’t have one, you can quickly improvise by drawing a pin and setting the scatter parameter to the max. The dodge and burn tools are designed for making things glow, but they only work if used on slightly desaturated colours. You can intensify the light effects by showing the impact of light as a reflexion on skin, hair and clothing. I increase the saturation of all surfaces that point to the source of light. Gently tilted surfaces are mixed with an apricot colour. The yellow reflexions of the rain coat hit hair and skin. Since the colour of the jacket is quite intense, you can exaggerate the yellowish undertone on the skin. From October 9th on, you can watch the second part of the tutorial on my YouTube channel. 2,5 hours would be way too long for a YouTube video. Therefore, my coloured version of this fan art will be presented at ten times the speed. I hope you learned something on digital art while reading this post. Have you enjoyed my Dark fan art on Jonas Kahnwald and Martha Nielsen? Have you already seen Dark? Do you have recommendations for realistic science fiction novels or series? Please comment, if you know some novels or series like Dark. I am searching for realistic science fiction stories some month, but I did not find any. Our libraries are filled with space operas, military science fiction and young adult dystopias. Sometimes I like reading those too, but I miss the science inside science fiction and a bit of day to day conversation. Today’s novels are more about thrill, sense of wonder and exaggeration. Since I’m finished with my science fiction classics of the 30s and 60s I need some interesting books or series. I also like to find some stories which are related to my realistic soft science fiction writings. I read stories in German and English both. Thank you in advance! P.S. This article had to be tagged as advertising, because it’s about a Netflix series. I do not make money or gain any reward by naming the series, the characters or online offers. This post is about my personal experience with this series combining it with my artwork.

This post Dark Fan Art Jonas and Martha was published at Nadine de Macedo.