Behind the scenes + process: Painting

This post documents the drawing process of a painting practice I did last year.

Inspiration

Painting is a piece from a series I named ‘Childhood’.

The series is characterized by vertical compositions accompanied with a full-body figure, complimented by a white border and small scenes with special themes. And for this illustration, I chose the theme of "drawing on an easel.”

I passed by a small art studio down my street a few months ago. The students' lovely green aprons and their tasteful old wooden easels left an impression on me, so I took some photos as reference.

Based on the photos, I drew a brief full body sketch of a little girl.

Photo finishing and model reference

To achieve the existing perspective in the draft, a similar angle is tilted in the photo and MagicPoser came in to help build a good model reference for the lighting & pose.

The sketch is cleaned up with finer lines according to the existing reference, and based colours were then filled in.

Create a new layer and set its mode to Multiply. Draw the shadows according to the model reference.

Selection of scenes

At first, due to a limited amount of references, I could only think of some small indoor scenes for the background—like balconies, small gardens, greenhouses etc. But they are not impressive and interesting enough, so I asked my friend for more ideas.

The result I got was quite unexpected! She replied with "Use the movie poster’s background of "The Sound of Music!''

The poster’s scene in "The Sound of Music '' is really classic and beautiful. Compared to the common gardens and greenhouses, the mountainous region acting as a sketching subject is indeed magnificent.

However, in real life, alpine sketching with strong light would make it almost difficult to see the canvas… then I remembered a scene from the movie "The Wind Rises", in which the main character brought their own straw hat and umbrella to paint.

With the shading effect of umbrellas and straw hats, sketching in bright light does work! And I happened to have first-hand material on alpine grasslands—I traveled to Ngawa, China a few summers ago and took a lot of photos of mountainous views with cows.

Sufficient background material for this illustration~ I decided on an alpine background!

Choosing the right photo

The travel photos taken at the time amounted to hundreds, and I could not decide in a flash which one was the most suitable… The only thing I could do was to select the scenes that were closer to the perspective of the current character, and placed them in one by one as the bottom layer to try them out. Finally, I settled on the one with the most impressive picture effect:

Albeit the background perspective and light and shadow are quite consistent with the role, the cattle at the front of the picture and the subjects overlap, which makes the picture slightly crowded. The shape of the distant mountains is also relatively simple; the layout won’t leave a deep impression at first glance.

In the picture below, the projection of the clouds on the distant mountains is very wonderful. The mountains are layered on top of each other; the more distant the mountains are, the higher the brightness, the bluer the shadows, the clearer the spatial layers, and the richer the color changes. The cattle are mainly distributed around the main character, which makes the figure still stand out and the picture does not look crowded.

These new advantages led me to choose this image as the background. However, there are still quite a few other problems. For example, the main character's green apron is too close to the green of the grass, and the easel on the ground lacks projection. The main character's attire is also more suited for the indoors, with a missing straw hat, leather shoes and other equipment for outdoors.

Adjusting the character's clothing

I added a straw hat and leather shoes for the character, and adjusted the apron to a blue shade that’s similar to denim.

Adding a white border

I copied the border layer from the previous Alice piece and moved the border up so that the figure's feet area was separated from the background, giving the image three layers of figure-border-background, which made the before and after rhythm  more cohesive.

After that, add the shadow layer of the previously drawn figure, and the picture already looks very complete.

Fill the content of the canvas to increase the texture of the oil painting

Although the picture has been completed to a high degree, the canvas in front of the little girl is still blank...

I observed that there were several cows in the area where she was, so it was quite appropriate to sketch a large cattle. I reused the previously discarded photo of the cow’s background and moved it to the top of the girl's canvas by shrinking and stretching it.

Import the image into the oil filter software Glaze and check the third category from the bottom left to the right.

Cut and paste the resulting oil-painted texture image to the top of the canvas, as if the little girl had painted an oil painting.

Processing of the background

The work on the little girl's canvas was processed quite successfully, so I conducted a similar experiment on the background image. But the result was not completely satisfactory.

For one thing, the brushstroke effect is too strong, and many of the original clear forms are blurred. Secondly, the dotted elements of the lawn at the bottom of the picture are too rich, which strongly conflicts with the clean dichotomous light and shadow of the figures.

I think the second problem is related to the fact that the original ground is too detailed. So, I used the same automatic selection tool as I did in "Different Seasons" to select the entire grass and then fill it in to simplify and unify the grass color.

(For more details on the photo selection process, see my former post:https://www.patreon.com/posts/behind-scenes-51590958)

Subject refinement and adjustment

The refinement of the figures were accompanied by a simultaneous adjustment of the scene. I merged the entire figure layer for refinement, given that the previous general relationship had been established.

On the characters, I deepened the pupils and eyebrows of the characters and added hair strands from her temples.

On the folds, using the brush 画笔 in procreate, I lightly smudge the transitional bright blue at the intersection of light and dark.

Finishing the background and adjusting the overall tone

I wanted to add a certain oil painting texture to the background in its current state, so I adjusted its opacity to 60%.

Place the oil painting style background (3-0) from the previous filter below the existing background layer (3-1).

With 60% of the existing background on top of the one with 40% of the filtered oil painting background, the image naturally has the texture of an oil painting. The dotted change of the lawn is there but it is not too eye-catching. Compared to before, the current scene retains both the shape and the texture of the canvas.

I took out "The Sound of Music" movie poster background for comparison, and found that this picture is more bright and airy.

And the effect of this poster happens to be very close to the colors in the filter software. So I imported the background into MIX (a filter software) for color mixing.

After toning, the colors are indeed clearer and brighter, but the black cows also look more prominent—too prominent which brings the airiness of the image down. To counter that, I copied the wilderness on the left side of the picture, flipped it horizontally and pasted it on the right side of the picture to cover up the whole black cattle to let the painting look more airy.

Final color grading and refinement

The figures were toned accordingly with the background, and more brush strokes were added to make the image more vivid.

I added the projected shadow for the easel, which had been missing before, and added yellow dotted flowers to enrich the image.

The color rendering of this image in the MIX filter effect is extraordinarily varied, so I couldn't resist checking out the rest of the tonal effects.

The existing version has bright tones with green grass, but the vintage tone with orange grass in the right image is also very much to my liking! After some agonizing, I overlaid the two images together with 50% transparency and the tones were finally settled.

Finally, place the oil-painted illustration as the top layer and set its layer mode to Lighten to add texture to the lower projection of the character.

That's all! Thank you for reading.

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It's really interesting to get inspiration and reference sources from my own life! It's also fun to choose from a variety of filter software to simulate the effects of oil painting.

But also because I was trying various things while painting, the process of recording this post is quite trivial haha… anyway I hope  the content I've provided is helpful!  :)

Still thanks to my friend Valerie for providing me with help for English translations, and you're welcome to comment if you have anything to talk about!

See you next time!