The Sentinel

How time flies! Here's a project I did four YEARS ago, and clean forgot to upload. Sure, you've seen the 3D render of this character, but I turned this one into an actual digital painting. And in fact, I like the digital painting much better than the renders... I was just sorting through old files and came across this. Sometimes I wonder where my brain is (or even if I have one...)

I've called this character "Raven," because of the black wings. The story is, he's a Guardian of the city ... nocturnal ... the last of his kind. I'd love to do something with this character, and this story; he's appeared in several other renders across the years. I've rendered him in Lux and Iray, but in fact -- I have to tell you the truth, I prefer the artistic "feel" of the raytraces, such as this one, which is the 2023 repaint of the 2019 version ... Photoshop magic:

...and while I was mucking about in Photoshop, I couldn't resist putting this one through the same process...! 

I must do more! In order to "bootstrap" this blog up into shape for 2024, I'm doing a lot of work ... getting rid of dead links and deadwood, and I just can't resist making the old images ... better!

Hello, Krita!! From scratch -- a South Australian little raven, blue eyes and all

Since I'm getting left behind in the 3D rendering field, I find myself doing more and more digital painting, and I've lately been growling about the fact I can't afford the top-end software like Corel (have you seen the price of it?!) and even if I could, my desktop won't run it, and my laptop will run it, but won't shake hands with my Wacom Bamboo. So I'd have to buy a new tablet (if they even make such things in this day and age of touch screens, which I'm not sure they do). So....

Dave had an idea. "Have you checked to see if there's an open source paint program?" he asked. Because there's usually an open source program to do the same job as Corel Painter or Microsoft Word or ... virtually anything.

And it turns out, there is. It's called Krita (check out their website), and it really is a match, and more than a match, for programs like ArtRage from New Zealand, and Rebell 3 (from Escape Motions, which produces the Amberlight program I like so much), and I'd have to guess it's about 90% of the way there to being a match for Corel Painter itself. The team has been developing Krita, crowd funded, for ten years. Give them another two, and people will be preferring this program over the top line branded stuff. Ye gods.

So -- it's a free download, even though it's the most amazing program (yes, I shall be donating to say thanks for this), and it runs like a dream on my desktop, which deliberately doesn't even have a modem ... that machine has run in isolation for about eight years now, never had an update, and it never gives a lick of trouble because it never gets messed about. I just downloaded the 97MB installer to the laptop, passed it across on a jump drive, and ten minutes later was painting!

Ooooh, boy, is there some stuff to learn! Fortunately the manual is online in wiki form, and Krita is very intuitive, especially if you have a background on Photoshop (I still run the old PS Elements 9). So -- baby steps, starting here, with a painting of a little raven sketched from an old snapshot I took at Hallett Cove about ten years ago, maybe twelve...

It's absolutely amazing to be painting from scratch, from a line sketch! In this detail shot, above, you can see the sketched underlay ... you can also see the wet-on-dry and dry-on-wet effects of various brushes, as you lay down your colors and work them, exactly as if you were painting on illustration board! This takes me back years -- okay, decades -- to a time when I used to paint this way with great joy. I'm going to have loads of fun...

And yes, the exotic, beautiful guys will be along very soon, when I get the hang of Krita properly. This painting of a little raven is just a very swift starter lesson ... I used only the "wet and dry bristles for the whole thing," because I figure, the way to learn something is to master one technique at a time. There are HUNDREDS of brushes and blends in Krita, and we're going to proceed one at a time.

Painting again! Hee hee hee!

And while I'm here, let me share another couple of Amberlight images ... I've done soooo many, but some of them are extraordinary, so here we go:

More soon ... some old fashioned renders painted up in Photoshop; and some digital art painted from scratch; and some blends of renders and Amberlight! 😃 Having huge fun with art, for the first time in way too long. The truth is, I've been so sick for so long, I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed all this!

Shades of green

Please do click on this to see it at full size -- it's actually not bad at all! The only thing bugging me is that this new laptop I'm using has such cool, cool colors that the richness seems to drop out as soon as I upload the file. Now, if I color-saturate it to make it look richer on this screen ... what happens for viewers who have screens that do show color properly?

If anyone would like to give me some feedback, you can still contact me via DreamCraft -- I still do website design and page debugging for Mel Keegan, Mike Adamson, and others and tell me what this looks like on YOUR system. Is it close to colorless? After my old laptop died a while ago, I switched to a new HP, and the only thing I have to complain about on it is ... the display is just meh.

Anyway, that's by the by: your system is probably showing the image the way I see it on the desktop on which it was created. Every trick I know is rolled into this project, from surfaces and displacement maps to depth of field, lighting ... two-stage composite background, then loads of of over-painting in Photoshop. I like this character a lot. Also having fun playing with the old, old software. Everyone else is rendering in Lux and running with the Genesis 8 figures. Well, one day I'll catch up! 

And to round it off for today -- a painting. Magnolia Flowers:

Note: this is the 2023 repaint, fixing a few problems
of resolution that couldn't be solved with the
hardware of 2017 

This one was painted from scratch, from a sketch. The photo from which it was developed has a confused background with cars and people, which actually spoils the image. You'll need to see the painting at full size to appreciate it. 😎

Today's theme is: GREEN

Today's theme is GREEN. And when I say I green, I mean ... green. I've wanted to do this for ages. Have known how to do it for  years, but never had a reason (read: excuse) to do something thoroughly exotic. But lately art has all been about work, and I'm starting to wonder where the fun went in all this, so -- need an excuse? Find the fun. Put the fun back in art.

Green hunk with pointed ears and red hair. Exotic enough?! I'll come back to this character, we'll see how he looks in formal, scenes and so forth. I, uh, like it. (If you need to know how to get this effect, scroll down. I'll tell how at the end of the post ... no, it's not a special skin map. You can apply this effect to any old skin map ... and when you remember that I'm still using DAZ Studio 3, you know how generic the technique is!)

Sticking with the green theme, though -- let me share a painting I did last year. The title is Woodland Morning:

(Yes, before you hiccup, I signed my own name to this. Mainstream art, I sign it for myself, rather than as my evil twin, he he he...) This began life as two photos of a hillside at Joseph Fisher, a pavilion at Belair National Park. It made for a beautiful painting. Am quite proud of this.

And staying on the green theme, let me go back to Amberlight and share something absolutely surreal  and just as beautiful --

Isn't that gloriously alien? Looks like a life form that drifts among the stars. I do like Amberlight, which is from a company called Escape Motions. The new version of Amberlight is out now, but I don't have it yet. (Money? What's money?!)

And that's quite enough green for today, so let's liven this up with some other colors:

Ahhh, a little red. That's better! More from Amberlight as we go along. I've done loads of art, and will share the best ones a few at a time.

Lastly, a word for those artists who'd like to be able to turn Michael (or whomever) green without investing in a special skin map (if indeed any such thing exists; which I'm not sure it does). Relax: it's easy. You can turn anything and anyone green with a few judicious clicks and an artist's eye.

Remember, I can't give you instructions for the Studio 4 interface: I don't use DAZ 4, probably never will ... Studio 5 is right around the corner now, and I'll probably skip 4 entirely and, in a year or two, hop right into Studio 5, with the newest Lux, Genesis figures, and so forth. All that belongs to the future, though, and for now, let's just turn our characters into Martians!

Load up your figure; apply whatever skinmap you need. This technique will work with swarthy complexions too, but you'll notice the greatest effects in the paler skin maps. Go into your Surfaces tab and select whichever character you're using -- doesn't matter: in the Surfaces tab, the playing field is level. With the character selected, you want to adjust the COLOR in the DIFFUSE value. The interface will give you the names of the skinmaps being used (for example, it might be JM_FalconHead.jpg), but it also gives you a field when you can pick the color on the coordinate system. Click inside that field (in Studio 3 it looks like a cross-hatched rectangle; dunno what it'll look like in your interface ... look for something offering you "diffuse color." You'll find it). Pick a shade of green and apply it to ALL of the figure at one time. The shade I used on this guy, above, was 161,243,131. You might have to pick the shade several times, test render, before you get exactly what you want; but when you have it, save your work.

The first thing you'll notice is that even the whites of his/her eyes have gone green ... so have the teeth. We don't want this. So --

The way to revert the eyes and teeth to normal is to open the Michael (or whomever) list in the Surfaces list/pane, scoll down till you see sclera, iris, pupil, and deliberately revert the diffuse color to white. Do the same with the teeth. And you're done. Render a test shot, and the only thing you may choose to do now is change the nipple color so something like a blue-green.

Red-blooded creatures have rosy nipples, but creatures with blood based on copper or whatever won't. Same process: select "nipple" and use the color picker to get somewhere between blue and green. Apply, and render a test. Happy rendering! (Oh, those pointed ears are done using Morphs++ in my antiquated system. Don't know how you'd do this with the Genesis figures, but I know you can.)

More soon ... I'll come back to this character, also share some more paintings, and some more Amberlight pictures.