Learning from Julie Bell and Jamie Chase

 

Thanks to Julie Bell and Jamie Chase, both great Fantasy artists, I can show you how to draw inspiration from masters, to improve your own creativity and skill.

Both Julie Bell and Jamie chase publish their art on Facebook. 

Julie Bell: https://www.facebook.com/julie.bell.589 

Jamie Chase: https://www.facebook.com/jamiechasearts

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Getting Covid-19 in the beginning of April hit me pretty hard. I am recovering though, and I am starting to take interest in things again: Starting a new job on Monday, working on a picture or two, occasionally working on a book, working on getting my photo sessions going again... I am still a bit careful where and when I spend energy though. I expect to recover fully, but it may take quite some time.

The upshot is that I'll probably blog a bit less frequently than usual. In a few months, maybe, I'll pick up speed again.

Fortunately for me, while being sick, and throughout recovery, I've had great support from my family. It has made everything so much easier. Speaking from experience, you really do not want to get Covid-19, and you really, really, do not want to infect relatives and friends, so please be careful out there.

Kyla: The Hunting of the Snake

The title of this piece, The Hunting of the Snake, is a horribly bad pun. I got the idea from Lewis Carrol's poem The hunting of the Snark.

There are many different interpretations of the poem. Lewis Carrol was once asked if it was an allegory for the search for happiness, and he wrote in a letter that it was.

I have always been fascinated by the last two verses:

 They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
   Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
   Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
   In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
   For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Happiness is a Snark. We hunt for it, but when we catch it, it may well turn out to be a Boojum.

Well, unlike the Baker, at least most of the time, we can survive the Boojum, and live to hunt another Snark. Some of us even find it.

In case you wonder, I made the picture first, and came up with the title, and thus also the interpretation, afterwards.

I suppose, it is a case of cause following effect.

Technically, I created the original picture in Daz Studio.

I used three lights for this picture:

• The default DAZ HDRI environment, set at 0.3 strength. This gave me a basic low level ambient lighting. The level you can see in the background.
• A spotlight with 10x10 m area, placed 10 m straight above Kyla and the Constrictor. This gave me a fair amount of light on the trees beyond the large fallen one, and brightened Kyla and the constrictor a bit.
• A smaller spotlight, 5x5 m, 8 m up, with a more narrow beam of light, focused on Kyla and the constrictor.

The end result is that the further away you get from Kyla and the snake, the darker the picture becomes. Some of my recent pictures have had to flat lighting, and I wanted to fix that.

I painted the picture using Dynamic Auto-Painter.

Here is the first version. I wasn't quite happy with it. I think you can see why:

In this version, the background trees are almost obliterated by the muddy, brown underpaint. I had decided to leave reduce the detail in the background, but the DAP default was a bit too much.

Simple solution: I did a bit of post brushwork in DAP. The reason I mention it, is because if you do the same, do set the opacity of the brush down a bit. The postprocessing brushes have higher default opacity than the same brush used while DAP is autopainting. This can trick you into making postprocessing effects too strong.

An Afternoon in Pal-Ul-Don (Aspect Ratios, Stephen Spielberg, and Facebook Click Optimization)

Pal-Ul-Don is a Lost World from Tarzan the Terrible a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs. This scene is not from the book, but loosely inspired by it.

My pictures are inspired by what I read, the movies I see, comics, conversations I have with other people, and of course my own experiences.

Technically, a picture like this is much easier to create than you think. I am a photographer (well, when I am not a systems thinker that help organizations improve their processes and their organizations). When I create a picture like this, I think like a photographer, and to a large extent, work like a photographer.

For example, you may have noticed that this picture has a slightly different aspect ratio from what you are used to. That is because it is 1.85:1, which happens to be the aspect ratio Steven Spielberg chose for Jurassic Park.

Why did he do that? Movies are usually shot in a 2.4:1 aspect ratio, making the pictures very wide. his is great for a lot of things, but it gets cramped for a dinosaur that is very high.

The picture above compares the 1:85 aspect ratio Stephen Spielberg chose for Jurassic Park with the 2:3 ratio common in photography, and the 2.4:1 ratio of most movies.

If you want a T-Rex to look good, go with 1:85!

...except, of course, when something else works better. The Jurassic Park movies have been shot in a variety of different aspect ratios. Jurassic World was shot in a non-standard aspect ratio, 2:1.

If you are working in 3D, don't forget that you may need to adjust the focal length of your camera to get good results. Daz Studio uses 65mm lenses by default. For An Afternoon in Pal-Ul-Don I used a 50mm lens. Jurassic World used mostly 30mm and 60mm.

A bit of trial and error works wonders here. I decided what I wanted in frame first, then set the aspect ratio, and adjusted focal length and camera position until I was happy.

Speaking of happy...

If you value likes on Facebook more than you value creating a good picture, you might want to use the photography portrait aspect ratio, 3:2.

Because Facebook uses a narrow column for posts, using portrait format maximizes screen space.

To really see and experience the impact of a landscape format picture on Facebook, it is necessary to enlarge it by clicking on on it. Most people won't do that, even if you have created a great picture.

Instead, to maximize likes, you will either have to butcher your image and crop it down to portrait format, or design your picture for portrait format from the start.

With 3D, you can create a set of cameras using different aspect ratios, and use them to create different versions of the same scene.

Me, I am bull-headed and tend to go with the aspect ratio I like best on a picture by picture basis, even if it means the pictures won't get as popular on Facebook.

The Tunnel

 

I started working on The Tunnel about a year ago. The photo is a selfie I shot in a tunnel under a railroad a couple of kilometers from where I live.

I set my camera up on a tripod, took a remote triggered hotshoe flash in my hand, set the camera timer for 10 seconds, and ran like crazy to get into the right position in time.

It took several tries, but finally I had a shot that was good enough.

I wnt to a fish store and shot octopus tentacles. However, that did not work out as I had hoped. Dead octopi don't pose well.

After several tries, I finally put the picture aside. I realized I would have to try something else.

Awhile ago, I started using Daz Studio to compose 3D scenes. That got me thinking about using a 3D model of an octopus to create the picture you see. A couple of days ago I gave it a try.

With Daz, it was relatively easy to position the tentacles.

What you see here are the rendered tentacles, right out of Daz Studio.

I composited, added shadows, and relit the picture in Affinity Photo.

At this point, I had a so-so photo composite. It did not quite work as a photo, because the tentacles looked a bit artificial to start with. Also, the photo was a bit too clean. I wanted a dirtier tunnel.

Filters in Affinity Photo, Photoshop, and most other tools, do a mathematical transformation of the image. In many situations, that is exactly what you want.

However, I wanted a more painterly feel. At this point, I had two ways to go:

• Use the Paint Mixer tool in Affinity Photo to paint the whole picture manually. That works very well, but it is also very time consuming.
• Use Dynamic Auto-Painter to paint automatically, with manual input only where necessary. Much faster, nearly as fun, and arguably, better results. (Depending on how good an artist you are.)

I went with Dynamic Auto-Painter, and created the picture at the start of this blog post.

I also created a couple of variations. The very dark one you see here is actually closer to what I had in mind originally.

My son thinks this is the best version because "what you cannot see is scarier than what you can see."

He's got a very good point.

Because the picture is so dark, it can appear almost completely black on some monitors though.

I created an in-between version, darker than the first, but brighter than the second.

Which version you prefer, is of course up to you.

You can find these pictures, and a portfolio I am building, at ArtStation.

How I made the T-Rex battle

My current process for working with 3D images, in a single graphic.

Fine Art Nude: Self-Constraints

It is amazing how we limit our own growth and success by self-imposed constraints: 

• I can't do this. 
• I don't dare do that. 
• I'll never be able to learn. 
• I don't want to learn.

There are ways around it though: 

• Learn and experiment in small steps. 
• Find others who want to learn, and learn with them. 

All the small steps you take will add up. Look back after a year, or two years, and you will see that all the small steps add up to giant strides.

I've had the idea for this picture for a long time. Making it was technically easy. 

I built the scene in DAZ 3D Studio.

I used a Genesis 8 Female 3D model as a base. I positioned the arms and hands, and then duplicated the model. Then I repositioned the arms and hands over the copy.

I bent the neck and tilted the head of the original model. When I did that, the models did not quite match up. Instead of matching the necks and heads precisely, I simply turned the head of the second model invisible.

I created a virtual studio consisting of two planes, a floor, and a back wall. Then I created a rather large third plane, made it a light emitter, and placed it high above, in front of the model, and angled at 45 degrees. This provided ambient lighting for the scene.

Finally, I added a spotlight to put a bit of extra light on the model. I made the spotlight a 2x2 metre square, to soften the shadows.

I rendered the scene with Daz built-in Iray renderer.

I did some post work in Affinity Photo, mostly to hide the intersections between the two 3D models at the shoulders. I used a combination of inpainting and patching.

I increased the contrast a little bit, and turned the picture black and white.

Digital Painting: In the Asylum

In the Asylum is a prestudy for Demogorgon, a piece I haven't done yet. I got the idea while working on the Dinosaur Rider series of pictures, and just had to break off and do something different.

Being a photographer is very different from being a cartoonist or painter. Cartoonists and painters usually create their work from scratch. A photographer finds things that already exist, modify them if necessary, and put them together in interesting ways.

This is a simplification, of course. Painters and cartoonists often work using photo references, or like a photographer, with live models. I sometimes create 3D environments as backdrops for my photographic images. The lines are blurred.

Me, I am interested in the results. If I can find a simple way of accomplishing what I want, then that way is the way I go. I constantly strive to learn more, but as a means to an end.

I created In the Asylum by setting up a scene in Daz 3D Studio. I used a stock model, the Genesis 8 Female as a base, and changed skin color, the shape of the ears, and the proportions of the body. Some of the modifications are easy tweaks using pre-built controls, for others, I changed the mesh directly, using scaling transformations. I experimented with a D-Former, but found that, for what I wanted to do, the scaling transformations gave me better results.

The backdrop is a room from the Daz Asylum package. I threw out the pre-packaged lighting, and replaced it with my own lights.

Notice the shadow on the floor to the left of the woman? That is from the window. I placed a light outside the window to get the shadow, and also to control where the light would fall on the floor.

I also added a point light, for ambience, and gave it volume to soften the shadows.

When I had a render, I opened it into Affinity Photo, and used a paint brush with the Paint Mixer tool.

I also tweaked the contrast, and changed the white balance to give the light in the room a greenish cast. I wanted the light in the scene to match the green skin of the woman.

Storyboard or finished picture? I don't know. I could shoot this using a live model, and even a real environment, but I am actually quite happy with the picture as is.

I'll probably move on to Demogorgon instead, unless something else just pops into my head.

The Pit - Digital Painting Horror

The Pit - Digital Painting Version

I had the idea for The Pit some time ago. The original idea was for a photo composite, but I wanted to try it out as a 3D digital storyboard first. It ended up being a digital painting. There might, or might not, be a photo version in the future.

I'll walk you through the process I followed to create the image, and show you a few of my intermediate versions of the picture.

Be warned: There is some full frontal, albeit digital, nudity ahead. The first versions I created in Daz Studio used default lighting. My intent was to get an overall idea of the picture before I added lighting for mood and modesty.

I began building the scene in Daz 3D using stock 3D models. My first image used the 3Delight renderer, and default lighting.

In hindsight, this was a mistake. I should have used the Iray renderer, that also comes standard with Daz 3D, from the start, because the lights created with 3Delight and Iray are completely different. The 3Delight lighting setups I created became completely useless when I switched to Iray, so I had to relight the whole scene.

Originally, I wanted the whole picture to be done in shades of green. The idea was to associate with the deep, dark sea, deep ones, and Cthulhoid monsters in the depths.

That did not quite work out. The picture above is my 5th render. As you can see, I have changed the lights. There are two spotlights from above, one from below, and one behind the woman, lighting the wall behind her. Originally, I wanted to light the wall with the spotlight from above, but that did not work out very well.

I did briefly experiment with using a sktetch filter in Comic Life on my original base image, but I abandoned the idea. Still, there are things about the image that I do like.

Instead, I blended two of my base images together using Affinity Photo. It looked failry good, but I decided to relight everything so I could use the Iray renderer instead of 3Delight.

Above is a base image rendered using the Iray renderer.

After a few more renders, and a bit of tweaking in Affinity Photo, I had the image above. I thought it did look a bit too stiff and artificial, so I decided to experiment with the painting tools in Affinity Photo.

Here is the final result again. I used a brush from the Paint brush set, and the Paint Mixer tool to paint over the image. I was careful to follow lines in the original image with my brush strokes. That way, I kept as much detail and shadowing as possible.

I used the default 70 pixel brush for most of the picture, but reduced the brush size to 20 pixels to paint the woman, and other parts of the picture that needed to retain small details.

That is it! A small rendering and digital painting experiment, but I learned a lot. Also, I have a storyboard that might be the basis for a composite photo.

Farewell to Earth

I tried out several different formats while working on this picture. In the end, I used anamorphic widescreen, a movie format used for big screens. Try clicking on the picture to see a larger version. It makes a big difference.

Noor Model Noor stood model for the piece. She is always very easy and fun to work with. I do recommend her as a model.

I drew the comet from scratch in Affinity photo. I won't go into details on how to do that here. I plan to do a larger writeup on how to create various kinds of celestial objects. Perhaps even as part of a book.

I used an Earth photo from NASA, and composited the background separately from the foreground. That way, I keep each part of the picture relatively simple, which makes it easier and faster to work in Affinity Photo.

The starship is from a 3D model of a starship lounge I bought from DAZ, and rendered in DAZ 3D.

After quite a bit of testing with various compositions, I ended up using only a small part of the lounge. I needed a close-up of the window in order to show off the asteroid about to smash into Earth.

This is the original shot of Noor Model Noor. Out of frame, to the left of her, there is a shoot-through umbrella, to light her back. As you can see, the original photo is quite different from the finished picture.

That is it for now. Just a quick run-through of how I have built up the picture, layer by layer.

Big!

 Big! is my latest composite. I've had this image in my head for quite some time.

I created the composite in Pixelmator, and toned it with the Vintage Iris effect.

While I was at it, I made a comic version using the Paintoscope filter in Comic Life 3. I like the Paintoscope filter a lot, and am considering using it for a comic project.

I made the composite from three different photos.

The elephants feet are from a photo I took in the Museum of Natural History in Gothenburg.

When I took this shot, I had the finished picture in mind. I did not know exactly what it would look like, but the general idea was clear.

I did a bit of cut and paste to take the foreground and extend it into a background plain.

 The man and the shadow, well, that is a shot I took for another composite some time ago.

It is a selfie. I put my camera in a tree, and used the 10 second timer to delay the shot.

Unfortunately, part of my shadow is blocked from view by a car, so I did a little bit of repair work on the shadow for the final picture.

The third photo is an old environmental shot I took ages ago. I used the mountains and the bleached out sky.

Gateway!

Gateway! (Model: Malin Wennlund, Photographer: Henrik Mårtensson)

The picture above is a composite made of three different photos.

The first picture is the photo of the model Malin Wennlund. Malin is a Steampunk enthusiast, and made the dress herself.

It was easy to mask Malin out in Pixelmator.

The background is a sunset shot from Partille, just outside Gothenburg.

I shot the wall and gate in Halmstad. As you can see, the shot is very bright. I did take a couple of photos at different exposures, but in the end, this was the best to use. 

It looks pretty horrible, but it was pretty easy to darken the whole thing. The initial step was to just reduce the exposure. Then I copied the image, and changed the blend mode of the top image to Hard Light. That gave me the late afternoon, saturated look I wanted.

Sword, Rose, and Hexagram – A Quick Deconstruction

Model: Anita Pecaver, Photographer: Henrik Mårtensson

I shot the model in the picture above, Anita Pecaver, some time ago during a photo meetup in Photo Meetup in Gothenburg. I had arranged an Angels & Demons themed photo & coffee meetup.

There is a distinct shortage of castle ruins and scorched plains in the Gothenburg area, so I had to do a composite. I'll walk you through the parts.

The model: Anita, with a sword and rose

Anita Pecaver

I shot Anita in a café, during a photography event with about 30 people, and chaos everywhere.

These events are fun, but also cramped and chaotic, so the shots are rarely studio quality. The idea is to have fun, meet people, and learn things, not to take perfect photos.

However, we often manage to create quite interesting pictures during these events. The chaos forces everyone to be creative, and to use a minimum of resources in new and unexpected ways.

It was Anita herself, and another model, Peter Markusson, who asked me to take a shot of Anita with a rose and a sword.

Note the angel wings. I removed them from the final picture, because they did not quite fit. I considered replacing them with a much larger set of wings in post, but I'll save that for another day, and another photo.

The Ground: Scorched earth, and a hexagram

The lawn in the photo above is the basic ground in the picture. I masked out the buildings and the sky, and removed the trees and other things.

The ground looked a bit boring. I wanted to make both the color and the texture more interesting, so I added...

A photo of one of my notebooks. I like the color, and also the fake leathery texture.

I removed the pattern, except for the hexagram in the middle. When I composited the images, I changed the perspective, and used various blending techniques to bring out the color and texture.

The Castle: A Ruin Most Sinister

I didn't have a real castle handy, so I went out and bought one! To save a bit of petty cash, I made do with a model. I bought it in a pet shop.

The Mountains of Madness: Hellboy Would Feel Right at Home

I shot the mountains from the third floor of an apartment building in Partille. This shot looks utterly uninspiring, but I did not shoot what it actually looks like. I shot the picture I had in my mind.

Actually, the picture in my mind wasn't exactly crystal clear at this time, but I knew I wanted something in the background, to help me transition from the flat plain, to the sky.

The Sky: Now You See It, but Mostly You don't!

The sky sucks where I live! Most of the time, it is a uniform, grey, 100% cloud cover. It is like living inside a giant softbox! Not only does the sky look boring, it also kills all shadows, because the clouds spread the light. It also mutes the light.

A couple of years ago, when I bought my DSLR, I thought it was broken at first, because the light was so bad. Now, I have learned to live with it, and to always, always, bring a couple of flashes with me.

On the rare occasions when there is a break in the cloud cover, I shoot anything even remotely interesting, just in case I will need it later.

Compositing: Just Do It!

When I had the pieces, I composited them with Pixelmator while sitting in a cafeteria at a local Laserdome. My son was invited to a birthday party, and I decided to bring my own fun.

I finished the picture later the same evening.

One useful little trick:

I match the light in the composite photos by adding a white layer on top of everything, and setting the blend mode to Saturation. This turns the picture black and white.

I can then change the light in each individual part, to roughly match the other parts.

Then, I match colors in a separate step, and add shadows where necessary.

LESS! – From a book design perspective

LESS!, one of the most fun book projects I have ever worked on, is now available on Swedish online book stores, Bokus, Dito, Bokon and Adlibris. The book is also available on Amazon, and in hardcover on Lulu.

I have blogged about the contents of LESS! in my management blog. Here, I'll write a little bit about the design, starting with the cover.

All management books I have published, well, only two so far, use the same basic design with a black field on a white background. I always put something on the cover that has an element of orange.

It is important to me that the cover has some link to the contents, and since this is a book about business transformation, what better symbol than a butterfly?

Also, one of the authors (you'll have to read the book to fin out who,) used the lifecycle of a butterfly as a metaphor for business transformation in the book, so putting a butterfly on the cover felt like the right thing to do.

One thing I was very careful with regarding the interior design, was to start each essay with a large photo of the author. I wanted readers to meet the authors face-to-face, or as close as we could get.

I felt that that would make it easier for readers to trust the authors, and building trust was necessary, because a lot of the things in the book, about budgetless financial systems, short strategy loops, queueing theory, and so on, are controversial.

That is also why each chapter starts with a brief biography, helping to establish the credentials of the author.

Donella Meadow's System Intervention scale. Managers tend to focus on the low leverage interventions to the left, when they ought to focus on the high leverage interventions to the right.

Diagrams were another important feature. We had lots of diagrams! When you set out to explain a lot of complicated stuff, you need to simplify. We used diagrams to do that, and also took care to keep the language simple. I ran all texts through readability index calculators to help ensure that the language itself did not obfuscate the ideas and logical arguments.

LESS! is a thought provoking book, and I do hope it can help kick off real improvements in leadership and management practices, and in how we organize and collaborate at work.

Savage Heroes: Warzone! – How to Create a Superhero Picture

Recently, I did something I have wanted to do for a very long time: I created a full-scale superhero team slugfest picture!

The idea was to create a picture that could work as the centerfold in a Marvel or DC Comics superhero comic book adventure from the 80´s or 90´s: A messy, complicated fight, strong colors, and  heroes and villains that really let loose with their powers.

I wasn't alone. We were 12 people who worked together to create the picture. Here, in comic book format of course, is how we did it.