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.

Illustration o f the Week

Seems illustration challenges are flavour of the month! This one done instead for conceptart.org's new weekly illustration challenge, the brief being to simply create a banner for upcoming challenges, with no set theme. Had been looking at Rackham's work prior to this, and had done the very rough sketch inspired by a friend's dragon and maiden piece, so thought the two would make for a cool banner, if a little out of my usual style! Here's the final piece, a couple of wips and an animated work in progress gif.





And interestingly, here's a shot of the piece without the lines, mid way through colouring - a technique I think I might try on another piece in the future, as I really like the traditional look it has.

Behold! The Nightmare

This piece was done for CGHub's Illustrated challenge, the topic this time being 'song lyrics. So I chose the Smashing punmpkin's song of the same name, after hearing the song while at work and being struck by a visual.

I've faced the fathoms in your deep
Withstood the suitors quiet siege
Pulled down the heavens just to please you
Appease you
The wind blows and I know

I can't go on, digging roses from your grave
To linger on, beyond the beyond
Where the willows weep
And whirlpools sleep, you'll find me
The coarse tide reflects sky

And the night mare rides on, and the night mare rides on
With a december black psalm
And the night mare rides on
What I fear is lost here
The wind blows and I know


The initial sketch - done with a little ref but mostly out of the head!


Here you can see some of the many refs I had up while painting, including old master paintings that captured the right kind of feeling, or that had cool fabric folds and colours. The girl on the left is from the stock gallery Iardicil on deviantart. I also used an image from Ulvar's stock account for the horse on the left.


From this point on it's just rendering out bit by bit.