Manuel Rodriguez
Email: manuel.loryen@hotmail.com
The Making of
Mind Share
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Mind Share is my personal favourite piece in the gallery, as is the one piece that allowed me to per trait both of my original characters in a realistic style.
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When ever I am working on an illustration I keep 3 key things in mind.
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1) Stick with the original general idea (don't give up on something just because I don't know how to fix it in the moment).
2) Keep the quality consistent or better than in my previous illustration.
3)Time is precious, don't waste it with little things and work fast.
I had a fairly clear idea in my head of how I wanted the piece to look, but for the sake of argument I'll show you what went through my head at the time.
Based on novel I started writing 2 years ago, I knew that the two characters were mentally linked. Meaning that their brains had been technologically merged into each others', and now they shared thoughts, memories, physical and emotional feelings etc. as if they were one person. Their relationship begins in many ways similar to the one seen in the Daredevil TV series, with Karen Page and Frank Castle, also known as "The Punisher". (Seen below)
Another very similar pair is seen in the 2009 "Push" movie. Where the man takes care of the younger girl as family even though their encounter was forced to them.
I needed to find a way of portraying this sort of connection in a cinematographic way that a viewer could sympathise with. I then recalled the over used line "I got lost in your eyes", and thought of using it as part of the piece. I then needed actors and a setting, would it be an interior or and exterior scene?
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I decided to make it outside, because rain and the colour blue are associated with sadness and crying but it also sets a cold feel that works well with a contrasting warm couple of actors.
To make the male character I decided to combine the 3 actors seen above (Colin Farrell, Gurett Hedlung, Zachary Quinto).
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And the girl is the Instagram Idol, Kristina Pimenova, known as the prettiest girl in the world and youngest supermodel.
I then tried to look for clothing that could do justice to the original design. Because of the fact I had designed this characters at the beginning of my learning path, their clothes had the right colours but didn't look very real.
This time, I tried to maintain the same colours but be more specific with textures, tone and reflectivity.
I painted this image 3 months after i started drawing to illustrate the way both characters now looked.
And bellow are the reference images I decided to use for the texture and folds.
Enough explaining my thought process and research, let me show you how I made it:
I decided to start this work on Daz Studio Pro, as it allows me to manipulate 3D human models, that are already rigged.
The program offers a default woman and male model with rigging and a standard white skin texture.
It also provides a very basic ambient lighting.
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The reason I start my illustration in 3d instead of painting it myself on Photoshop, is because these models have been patched an re-patched by industry professionals for years who have fixed the proportions to a very average level.
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This allows me to pose the characters and view them from any angle I please, knowing that the proportions will remain consistent. The basic ambient light also creates basic shadows and highlights all around the models based on the positions in relation to the light source.
Notice how I changed settings such as their expressions very early in the production line, as well as making the male character bulkier and the woman very thin, almost anorexic. That is because Kristina Primenova is a 10 year old actress & model, therefore she is shorter and thinner than the average mid-20s western woman. This may look very weird and even creepy at first but as long as I had hidden the rest of the body no one would notice the trick.
I finally chose to pose them into the position shown above. The piece is called "Mind Share", therefore I imagined them trying to reach for each other's head as if they were able to see further than the flesh.
Two things i made sure to make obvious and ad impact to the piece, are the fact they are looking into each other's eyes and that he is grabbing her head in a way it looks like he is almost pressing down, just to emphasise that craving for the other's mind. I tried to make their expression to look relaxed as if
The Rendering
Daz Studio offers all sort of options to effectively manipulate lighting in the scene, but not for free. So in order to make realistic lighting I build a virtual recording studio.
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No, for real, I literally built a virtual replica of recording studio, with spot lights, green screens, white panels, mirrors, and small coloured panels to reflect different hues from different angles and create a nice, realistic and warm atmosphere.
From reading the "The Visual Story Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media" book, I had learnt that warm colours appear closer and so do light tones.
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Meaning at this point in time, I was already planning to have a non distracting, cold dark background, to make the characters so much more popping. Lastly I thought of how people are generally attracted to warmth and not the cold so keeping my values near the red and sub-hues would contribute to this function.
