Manuel Rodriguez
Email: manuel.loryen@hotmail.com
The Making of
Mind Share
​
This is to me the most fun part of the process, the point where(when?) I get to experiment with photographs, shape blocking, and just every bit of rendering.
As you saw in the previous page, up to this point is all about preparing my assets for editing.
Now then, the next step was to use different photographs to start blocking the shape and texture of the hair. Notice however, that while I used 2 photos for the girl's hair I used a low res for the man, as it wasn't the first time i painted realistic short hair. This is because like i said earlier i wanted to experiment with his hair, and combine the different types of hairs and faces from the reference I had picked earlier. I learned that week that the trick to paint realistic hair is not to focus on light and shadow, but mainly to show strands, direction and weight.
As you can see in the image above , i tried combining two images to make a realistic ponytail but i soon gave up when i realised that the dramatic effect wouldn't be as strong with one.
So I went back to researching reference of Kristina Pimenova, and I came across to a picture of when she was 6 years old. While I needed the character to be older, have a different facial expression, we hair and an over all different hue and saturation; I realised, this image had Pimenova in the right position for me to start painting and applying these changes without having to paint her from scratch.
So cut off her head from the original image and pasted it into my illustration, I used hue/saturation editor on Photoshop, in combination with the curves editor and the colour balance window, to change her over all values closer to red and to make her hair and skin darker.
I know, I know. It's a cool and easy trick but it still looks weird. Well this is the last step before i start hiding my techniques from the viewers. In the following step, I will be dressing up the characters accordingly to their original design, although with some minor chances, for example changed the black and red coat for a black jacket based on the soldier reference seen below, this military clothing was more intimidating and fitting for this character, also the red would be distracting in this and future images, so i decided to keep his colours fairly neutral so I wouldn't have to force a change of wardrobe every time.
As you can see I also used the image of a grey hoodie, because like I said I was trying to stick with the original design and colours, but in the end, only used it as a base for my folds. (Once again I am using the hue and saturation tool in combination with Curves to get the colours and tones I want.
According to the description of the scene, Mutant #007 (the man, who has the ability to react faster than bullets and is known as "the invincible"), had just been in a fight against numerous soldiers, therefore I wanted to him to have some wounds, this would show that while his strong and still undefeated, he was still human and relatably weak. This would further improve the connection between the viewer with the image.
​
While I had already painted scars on "Soldier-76" from Overwatch, I wanted to show that I could paint more realistic and diversified types of scaring. So while cutting would give me the exact result I thought searching online was the better option.
Given the size at which the image would be viewed, I didn't need to spend 20-30 min to make super rendered wounds and just roughly painted the red and orange bits of blood seen above.
I the quickly blocked in the colours and tones based on my reference, (refining all these blocked in shapes comes last in the process).
Like I mentioned earlier, the rain was going to be a key element in my illustration, so to make it I made a custom brush by simply making 6 thin strokes of white, running in the same direction and changed their opacity to create a better sense of depth and speed.
​
It also occurred to me that if that if we think of this as being a moment in time being captured by my imaginary camera, the lenses would get wet and have stains of steam on them.
To make these last, I used simple circles around the canvas, which look randomly placed but notice how I did not obscure the actor's faces. Continuously, I coloured some of them in yellow and blue to ones again create a sense of time, and make it seem as if the drops had hit the camera at different times. Lastly, I blurred most of the drops using the "Lense Blur" option,
(Still on Photoshop).
While making detailed and warm coloured characters over a rough, cold background can be an efficient way of making the actors the focus, I had some more tricks down my sleeve. For example I gave the characters some darker purple tones here and there to add some temperature to the whole ambient. Then I added lights behind and to the side of the two actors to make them pop even more and these multiple light sources allowed me to use my second trick, "Rim Light". Which is in this case a white/blue-ish border I can paint where the light hits the hardest, without interruptions, such as the hair, or anything that could reduce its intensity. Also One does not see light, we know light exists because as it hits something, it reflects a colour into our eyes. So I added fog around the characters to once again give a sense of temperature but also to show light is hitting the water particles in the air, and once again it implies that there is movement in the scene.
There is then, the making of the background, this was a pretty easy process, because I had such a close view on these characters, there was no need for such a detailed or interesting on any level for that matter. But since it is meant to be a realistic scene, I just added what you see below, which is a very awkward fence blurred out, in low opacity to look distant. the fact that the fence is blurred and has no reflecting highlights(even though is meant to be made of metal) creates the illusion of a flat surface. This is yet another camera trick used by professional cinematographers, (of which I have learnt in the book I mentioned earlier) known as "Depth Occlusion".
Of course, the above explains a lot of the making of, but how exactly did I jump from the first image of the characters to the second one. (seen below)
Well, browsing throw my gallery its possible to see that I have drawn her face many times, this was just a matter of drawing her again and fixing the shadow on her chick, making her eyes darker and her eyebrows and eyelids more defined. He lips are also painted and so is her. This leaves the shirt, which was a
The last two steps are fairly simple, one involves me just refinish the edges and hiding my brush strokes.
While the second and last stage is to double-check my values, which I do by simply adding a white and black filter to the whole image to make sure my light areas are well balanced and that there is an organic variety of values. (As in real life we would have billions of values in every frame we see.
