Making of The Warehouse

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Software Used:
Adobe Photoshop CS5 („PS“), Corel Painter 11 („Painter“)

Intro:

Administrators of the 3DTotal.com asked me to write a making of the „Warehouse“ image that recently won their Excellence Award of the Concept Art category. So, here it is. This image is not a commercial job but more of a concept sketch I made as a practice in a single day. I just wanted to try a composition of taken photography and painted element. I had known from the begining that I wanted to mix real enviroment with painted humanoid creature.

Tutorial:

I took the warehouse image made by Miles Pfefferle as the base since I like the mood of industrial enviroments. Searching for the best reference I took this one out of many more because of nice lighting and interesting „through the window“ point of view.

(Fig.01)

Another thing I knew since the begining was the use of cinematographic 2,39:1 aspect ratio (often wrongly interpreted as 2,35:1). This choice would give me a film screen capture look I was going for and which I will use in my future film project as a reference. So I comped Miles's photography to the appropriate format in Photoshop and made some light corrections with Image Adjustments > Levels. I emphasized the mysterious atmosphere of the view by covering some of the side windows with black layer. This way I got the isolated space for future character but we still feel the black areas to be a part of building although they have no visual information.

(Fig.02)

I am moving the image to Corel Painter at this stage. It's purely subjective reason that I prefer to paint in Painter since I have traditional painting background and I found worklflow in this software to be more intuitive. On the other hand, the work with layers and various masking effects is more comfortable and clear in PS. I am just taking the best of both. After several rough tryouts the final lineart of the creature is made. I didn´t care too much about details and thought-out anatomy since it meant to be fast practice only.

(Fig.03)

I splitted the character in two parts. First one behind the pure glass and the second behind structured glass. Body was formed with the oil brush at the begining. With a help of the Dropper I am sampling the whole enviroment to get the base color palette for the creature while making sure that some original structure of the glass plates and light is kept. The job on this part is finished with a touch of warm tones to the skin and rim light created by Screen mode layer with 20% opacity.

(Fig.04)

The part behind structured glass was also formed with the oil brush and the Dropper used for color sampling. Good reference to observe light behaviour in this area is a piece of textile hanging on the frame. It shows that the most dark are the areas with the closest touch between the glass plate and the object. It's because of absence of external light source, or foreground light if you want, and shadows created by interior lights. To capture the illusion of distorted image that is created by textured glass in real life I used effects brushes. First – the Diffuse Blur from a Photo brushes group and next the Texturize Brush from the same category. The Texturize brush uses texture images from the collection of Papers to reveal the effect. The original Fine Hard Grain paper was ideal for the purpose so there was no need to find or create my own texture.

(Fig.05)

I moved image back to PS at this point for final touches. Effective thing about PS are automatic updates for openend images in case there are some changes written to the source file on the disk. So, in my workflow, I let the image opened in PS at the begining and saved painting from Painter to the same file. This let me continue to work with just single switch of the applications. Next step – final touches. I made an effect „behind structured glass“ even more pronounced with duplicated crop of the texture glass from the source photography layered over in PinLight mode.

(Fig. 06)

Extra glowing coming from the neon lights is painted with smooth basic brush as a subtle halo effect. Part of the antlers wrongly appeared to be in front of the window. Hence, I covered it with duplicated crop of an original image with gradient transparency applied to it.

(Fig.07)

The very final stage is Uniform Noise used on flattened image to emphasize the look of the film frame.

(Fig.08)

Voila – the image is done.

I am glad the image got some great feedback even though it was speed painting and its production was fast. Hope this tutorial helps with some workflow ideas for beginners.

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