The LINRAN Method

For those who've not heard of LINRAN, he's an exceptionally talented, self taught chinese artist, whose works can often be seen gracing the front of CGHub and sites like that. Over on Conceptart.org, there is a translated tutorial he did on how he uses colour and light to get the painting effects he does. His works always mesmerises me, so I took the conceptart.org 'paint what everyone looks like' thread as an excuse to give his techniques a try. It's an unusual way or working, and using the RGB sliders is quite counter intuitive for someone who pretty much exclusively uses the colour picker, and the palette in the tool window. I still found myself picking from within the painting a lot, just for speed, but when I did get used to using the rgb sliders for each new colour i put down, the result was often a lot more vivid - more akin to the reuslts I get with colour pencil or watercolour. Definitely a technique that I'll try to incorporate into my own styles, and use whenever i do studies - if nothing else it makes me realise that I control my values a lot better with this method. And understanding the geometrics of the RGB slider positions is handy for getting an idea of colour within photos I might be using for ref... something I can use to help me decide what colour I'll eventually pick myself. So below are the finished article and an animated gif of the wips I saved out.