Katie Scott :: Digital Artist

Model a Working Threaded Screw Tutorial

2009-04-14T10:26:00.000-07:00

How often do you need to model a working threaded screw? "Not very often"- you might say. And while I agree with you, I'd like to show you how to model one anyway because I think there are some really important modeling concepts to be learned here.
This tutorial assumes you know at least basic modeling techniques in Maya.

Create a polygon helix using the default settings. To make sure it is on default, open the Create Helix option box, then select Edit>Reset Settings. This will create a helix with a lot of polygons.

Too much, right? Yeah, most of the time this is way too many tris. Reduce the number of Subdivisions Coil to any number of your choosing, but I would recommend a number that creates a perfect '+' sign when looking down on the object (such as 16).

You might notice the coils are crashing into eachother. That's ok. You'll end up with something like this:

Now we need it to be 'screw-like'. Right now is it like a spring, but we're looking for something that is threaded. First go to the Inputs section of the helix's Attribute Editor. Change the Height to 1.7. Now the coils have lined up almost perfectly and we can start to see the makings of a threaded screw.

There's a bunch of geometry we don't need in the middle that we're going to get rid of. The easiest way is to go to the top view and use Lasso Select tool to select the faces we don't want which is all of the face except the outer ring like this:

Delete! Now all we need to do is merge the points were each thread meets the one below it. Select all the vertices. The select Edit Mesh> Merge option box. Set the threshold to .009; that should merge all the points you want and ignore the ones you don't.

Now you're done! Well, not really. To make it a real screw, you have to scale it down vertically and also duplicate and merge it a few times.

I quickly finished this one off like this:

And I made one like this last year:

I hope you found this tutorial helpful, thank-you for reading.

Wasabi Playground Digital Painting

2009-03-31T12:33:00.000-07:00

I had the idea for this concept last year and I made an image using vectors that I thought was pretty good (at the time). Looking back on it, well, it wasn't that good. I still loved the concept, but I knew the execution needed a lot of work. I really enjoyed making my Monster painting, so I decided to re-do the piece using some of the same techniques.

Hope you like it!

New Digital Painting, Little Golden Book

2009-03-24T19:06:00.000-07:00

So I've got a new digital painting today:

This is a completely different style from what I normally do. In this piece, I was looking for a storybook look- bright colours, bold sharp shapes and small simple details. I went for this look because of the 'story' that was being told in the piece.

This idea came to me, as many of my ideas do, in my sleep. I awoke with an image of a child inadvertently waking a monster by mistakenly pulling on its tail. I didn't know what the monster or the child would look like. After a few sketches, I came up with this concept. I chose a little boy instead of a girl to add a little more interest (a girl picking a flower is more obvious).
I made this in Photoshop, but I used the pen tool for all of the shapes. The gradient shading was done with a soft round brush and selections from the pen shapes.

If you're a child of the 80's like me, you are very familiar with Little Golden Books. While I was creating this piece, I kept thinking about these books and I was trying to bring in some of these elements, but with a modern 'me' twist. One element I desperately wanted to incorporate was the gold and black pattern binding on every Little Golden Book. So I chose a gold colour and then used the colour picking site kuler to choose the rest of the colours. To echo the black pattern in the gold binding, I added a subtle pattern to the sky and grass.

I think I'll call it "A Nap and a Snack." ;-P

Emo Kid Character Design- "Drew"

2009-03-16T13:08:00.000-07:00

"Drew" is a bit of a departure from the other kids. He's not a geek or nerd, but still he is an outcast. Drew hangs with the nerdy kids because they're the only ones who don't judge him. If these kids were in a real cartoon, I envision Drew popping in with a depressing quip here and there. Drew is your typical emo kid- brooding, moody, quiet and creative. He comes from a good family, and really has no reason to be as unhappy as he his. Don't worry, Drew will grow out of it...

Drew's design again demostrates how posture conveys emotion and the general tone of the character. When I am designing a character, I first think about his/her confidence level. This helps me determine posture. I then think of other traits the character possesses and refine the posture a little more. I draw out some basic shapes (triangles, circles and rectangles only) and then form them to a 'posture line'. These steps produce a 'pose' that very much conveys the characters feelings. The image below shows this process:

Again, I did a bunch of research on what 'emo' kids where, so Drew is wearing skinny jeans, boots, a wristband and a 'zero' t-shirt. He has a classic 'emo' haircut.

Here are the kids together. What character is coming next?..

More Character Development- Wesley

2009-03-14T10:19:00.000-07:00

I have been having so much fun creating these characters- designing them and developing background stories and characteristics. I keep having ideas for more and more characters, and thus, Wesley came to be:

Wesley is a super computer-geek. He's a computer genius. However, Wesley lacks confidence and he is introverted, choosing to shy away from conflict rather than confront it. He's incredibly awkward as he hasn't grown into his height yet.

For Wesley's design, I really focused on posture and pose. Wesley's design features very few circles, as he is a very slim boy; triangles and thin rectangles are featured more heavily in his design. His eyes and head are tilted downward and I think this conveys his low confidence and shyness. I gave Wesley a polo rather than a t-shirt and dress shoes rather than sneakers, as I think Wesley would try to 'dress up' a little more than his peers. Buck teeth, glasses and a classic haircut complete the design.

The image below demonstrates my process with Welsey. First I started with basics shapes and then 'bent' them to follow the posture line (yellow) that I drew in. I worked with some differnet facial features and I have a shown a few below.

I think it's important to make sure you do not become 'married' to work; that is, you have to be willing to make changes. I felt some of Aaron's features weren't working, namely his face and shoes. I made a few changes to Aaron's design:

I expect a few more characters will come to mind. In the meantime I hope you enjoy these three.

Thanks for reading!

Stacey Needs a Friend- "Aaron"

2009-03-12T16:50:00.000-07:00

So I decided Stacey needed a play-mate. Introducing Aaron:

Aaron is a geek. His 'likes' include: D&D, computers, video games and junk food. He's a little bit of an airhead; he does well in school but is lacking street sense. Aaron has lots of loyal friends and he's an all-round happy guy.

Again, I used basic shapes in this piece, but featured the circle as well as the triangle. With Aaron being overweight, the circle is the perfect shape to start with. Here are some of my initial sketches:

The initial sketch features only circles and triangles and you can see how these shapes become the final product.

Aarons facial features were difficult. In the initial sketches I did (see above), he was appearing more monster-ish and he looked a little like an ogre (especially when coupled with his posture). I turned to the 'net to find a face I liked. I used this a a reference for Aaron's face:

I used the same execution as in the 'Stacey' piece- tapered lines, straight against curve and shading.

If Stacey and Aaron were to ever be animated, I envision the backgrounds to be simple pastel colours and outlines that aren't quite straight, similar to the cartoon Clone High. Incidentally, Clone High is an amazing cartoon, especially design-wise. Check it out.

Stacey and Aaron together:

Hope you like them, I had tonnes of fun making 'em!

"Stacey" Character Design

2009-03-12T10:17:00.001-07:00

I had a dream, well, it wasn't so much of a dream as a vision. I woke up with a vision of a character and I decided to design it!

Her name is Stacey and she is a geek. She's 12-13, and really into computers, science and math. Here she is:

For this design, I spent a lot of time thinking about the qualities a girl like her would possess. She would be skinny, and certainly not curvy and shapely. And she wouldn't be 'in shape', or have any visible muscles. Her pose would need to reflect her awkwardness and well as poor posture (from sitting in front of the computer). I imagine she has an inherent confidence; she is smart and she knows it. She's popular with her other geeky friends and has fun with them, and enjoys her geeky endeavours.

As for the design, I wanted to utilize basic shapes such as the triangle, which I featured heavily. To add even more interest to the design, I used a lot of stick straight lines against rounded curves for a contrasting look. Here are some of the working sketches and designs that show my process.

As for the execution, I used tapered lines on the entire design for more visual appeal and it also alludes to the triangle shapes featured in the piece. The shading features the same 'straight against curve' idea, and adds to the depth and liveliness of the piece.

Hope you like her, and thanks for reading!

Digital Painting: Alchemy

2009-03-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

I've got a brand new digital painting today:

This was painted entirely in Photoshop and the only filter used was Lens Blur. I used a few brushes from brusheezy such as 'markerlines' and some of the 'energy' effects are from this set. I used the font Chitown from 1001freefonts.com.

"Alchemy" is the name of the character I created for this piece. He is a villain. I wanted to do a modern villain and a character who acquired powers in his early twenties. To establish these characteristics, I gave him a low-key, ordinary outfit rather than a flamboyant traditional villain outfit. If there really were heroes and villains, I think they would look more like Alchemy.

Alchemy's powers are somewhat magical. He can levitate and he can control energy of all kinds: electrical, solar, heat, and even the 'energy' in people. He then concentrates this energy into a ball and throws it, resulting in a powerful blast. In this piece, he is levitating collecting the energy around him.

Alchemy is very introverted, shy and unhappy. He wants the rest of the world to feel his pain and likes to cause anarchy. He is a loner.

Hope you like it!

My Digital Painting Technique

2009-03-09T16:19:00.000-07:00

Well, it's not really 'my' technique, so much as the technique and learned and now use to create my digital paintings. It is involves five main steps: 1)block in 2)highlight and shadow addition 3)gradient blend 4)detail 5)contrast. This will create a black and white image; I'll show you how I colourize paintings another time.

First thing you need (as always) is reference. I have said this before, never paint anything without reference. Even if you are doing a stylized painting (such as a cartoon), use real reference. The best artists of all time used references, you should do no different. You will be a better artist when you use reference and frankly, it's pretty arrogant if you think you don't need it.

Here is the reference I am using today.
Yes, this photo is too small and pixelated. But that is ok. We can clearly see the contours of the hand, the highlights the shadows and quite a few details. Also, I am considering how small the hand will be in my completed painting. I don't plan on giving this hand lots of finite details because of this and also because it is not the focus of this painting. In this tutorial, I will show you how to paint a hand with a reasonable level of detail.

The first step is blocking in the hand. Make a new layer and set your paint brush to %100 and make the hardness quite high. Block in the basic forms. Use 2-5 tones but no more than that. Here is my block in:

Next, add the basic highlights and shadows. Make a new layer and set your brush to %70. Paint on the highlights and shadows from the reference.

Merge the block in layer and the highlight/shadow layer. The next step is gradient blending. Right now, the painting is very blocky and sharp. We want all of the tones to be more blended, similar to a gradient. The way I do this is to set my brush to %30. Pick and area you want to blend and sample the colour. Paint over the 'seam' of the two colours. Sample the new colour you just painted on and paint over the 'seam' again. Continue this method intil the two colours gradually blend together. I have used this technique here in the web between the thumb and pointer finger.Continue to use gradient blending to smooth out the colours. Keep checking against your reference; it's very easy to become focused on gradient blending causing you to eliminate the key details you have already blocked in. Keep making your brush smaller and smaller to create and maintain details. Change your brush opacity and hardness as appropriate. You can also use the smudge tool to blend tones.This is looking pretty good, but I think that I have lost some of the contrast I had before. A good way to increase the shadows and highlights is to use the dodge and burn tools. To increase the highlights set the dodge tool to 'highlight' and the exposure to %15-%30. Brush over the highlights with the dodge tool. Do the same thing with the burn tool, but set it's exposure to shadows. Match your reference!This is as far as I am going to take the hand detail-wise. When you see my completed piece (it will be completed in a few days), you will see this is the appropraite level of detail. You need more detail? Then you will need better reference. Use the same techniques described above. Start with big blocky strokes and work your way down to the small details. Make sure you are constantly checking your reference and you just can't fail!

I hope you found this tutorial helpful, thanks for reading!

Free Stuff for Digital Artists

2009-03-01T15:14:00.000-08:00

There are tonnes of great resources on the internet for us digital artists. From Photoshop brushes and fonts, to vector art and high resolution textures- you can get just about anything for free!
If you're like me, a poor artist, you can't pay for the aforementioned resources. So here is a list of sites I use regularly:

brusheezy.com
A really great site with hundreds of free brushes for Photoshop. The brushes vary in quality and some are designed a little too small for my taste (a brush that is designed to be less than 100pixels square??!). but for the most part, there are some really amazing brushes here. You probably won't find a single piece created by me that hasn't used a brush from brusheezy. Check out their patterns, vector and flash sections too!

1001freefonts.com
Maybe this is snobby, but I don't believe you should ever use a font that came with your computer on your projects, professional or not. Imagine the paint store only had 100 colours of paint- you'd see seafoam green everywhere! Well, it's the same thing with fonts. This is where 1001freefonts comes in- tonnes of free amazing fonts.
One side note: my most-hated font of all time is Papyrus. I see it everywhere, on signs, logos, commercials... everytime I see it, I think "This was not designed by a professional..." Comic Sans is another widely used font that is a piece of crap. Here is a site dedicated to eradicating the world of Comic Sans.

kuler.adobe.com
If you've never heard of kuler, you are missing out! This is a great flash site designed by Adobe to help you pick colours based on common colour relationships (analogous, complimentary, etc). You can make your own swatches (click 'create') or view other peoples creations. If you have Adobe air, you can also get the kuler desktop so you can import colours swatches right into other Adobe products. I use this site all the time- just looking at a set of colours can inpsire my newest creations. Check out this amazing set.

cgtextures.com
This is a huge database of high resolution images, perfect for use in 3d texturing. These images are also great references for your digital paintings. You can download up to 15mb in any 24 hour period and you can use these images completely royalty-free even for your professional pieces. Great site!

creativecow.net
Need some tutorials? Need to learn After Effects or Premiere really quick? Creativecow is the answer. They have litterally hundreds of great video tutorials on many software titles. It's mainly geared towards compositing and video editing, even the Photoshop tutorial sections is mainly focused on video. But I'm sure most 3d artists will agree, you need to know how to composite!

k10k.net
1000 pixel-style patterns. While I don't usually use pixel style images, you might have a use here and there...

turbosquid.com
The place to get the 3d models you don't want to make yourself. This site has lots of free 3d models that vary greatly in quality. But it's worth a try if it will save you some time. They also have textures, scripts and more. By the way, if you are going to buy models, I would make sure you can view a wireframe first. Many modelers are self taught and the quality of their geometry can suffer from it.

yourfonts.com
I haven't used this site myself, but it looks super cool. You can use it to create fonts from your own handwriting or drawings. I love this idea for comic writers who want to switch to digital and keep their own style. Or what about creating a font from your childs' writing? So many possibilities.
Update: I ended up trying this site today. It works like a dream! Definitely check it out.

visualblast.com
I hope you use Actions when you work in Photoshop. Not only can it improve your productivity, it can increase your creativty with lots of neat special effects. When you use a pre-made Action, make sure you check out the 'guts' of it. Learn what it does and how and you will greatly increase your understanding of Photoshop. Here is a cool effect created using one the Actions on this site:

That's all for now. I'll keep you posted with other sites I'm using here and there. I hope you found this list helpful. Always remember to check out the guidelines before using any free resources- we're all friends here and we don't want to steal!

Painting Hair in Photoshop

2009-02-27T16:59:00.000-08:00

A lot of people wonder how you can quickly and easily paint realistic hair in Photoshop. I'm going to show you my technique for painting hair, and even give you the brushes I created for this technique.

Download my hair brushes here. To install them, simply unzip the file and place the brushes in the Adobe Photoshop brushes folder. You can usually find that folder in programfiles/adobe/adobephotoshop/presets/brushes. Add the brushes to the folder before starting Photoshop.

There are two main concepts to learn here: colour sampling and building detail slowly.
The first step is choosing a hair style. I always work from reference. Always. Seriously, this will be the single greatest contributor to the amount of realism in your work. I can't tell you the number of times I have told someone their work 'doesn't quite look right'. More often then not, they do not have a references and are working off their memory. Bad idea. Google 'hairstyle' and find one you like.
I'm going to use this hairstyle:
It's time to block in the main shapes. Use the brush "hairblock" from my set and size it up or down based on your needs. You will need at least five different tones for this, and you can sample the colours from your reference photo to maximize the range of the tones.
Try to emulate the highlights and low lights and always paint in long flowing chunks. You should end up with something like this:Make sure to keep the part of the hair very dark. As you can see, I have painted a strip of dark brown right down the part. Also notice the pieces on the left side. One chunk of hair sweeps off horizontally, and I have pieces underneath it that start at the part and flow all the way down like this:Next we want to start breaking up these chunks and adding more variation. Use the brush "hair1" from my set and size it up or down to fill your needs. You're looking for the brush to be approximately the size of the chunks you've already laid down. Set your brushes opacity to %70 and make a new layer. Start brushing over the chunks you've already made while constantly sampling the colours for great variation (to sample colours, press 'alt' and click down on the canvas to sample a colour using the eye dropper). Every time you paint on your canvas with a semi-opaque brush, you will create a new colour. Keep sampling from these new colours and will get a lot of variation. You will still want to maintain the general tone of each chunk. You will end up with something like this:

I should mention from this point on, I'm only going to paint this one chunk (top left), to save time as I create this tutorial.
Make a new layer now and paint on the horizontal sweeping piece. This one sweeping piece should have its own layer as this will ensure your hair flows from root to tip.
Now switch to the brush 'hair2' which will create finer details. Make two new layers, one for the hair under the sweeping piece and one for the sweeping piece itself. Again, keep the brush on about %70 opacity and keep sampling colours while maintaining the general tone on the chunks. Make sure the chunks underneath the sweeping piece are a little darker to create the illusion of depth.
To add more detail, keep adding new layers and decreasing the size of the 'hair2' brush.

Now we're done painting the hair in clumps and we're literally going to start painting single strands. Switch to one of the single strand brushes from the set I provided. Decrease the brush size to very small, usually a size of 1. You may have noticed that these brushes contain three dots each. Real hair is actually semi-translucent. I find that a brush made from three dots spaced out creates that translucent look and creates a nice amount of variation in the stroke.
Make a new layer and pick a very light colour. Depending on the colour of your hair, you may even need to use pure white. Make the opacity of your brush %100 and litterally scribble a bunch of strokes on. Switch to a very dark colour and scribble all over the hair again. Duplicate this layer if your strokes aren't noticeable enough. Now we have:
Clean up the edges of the hair by erasing using the brush 'hair2'. Set the opacity of the eraser to %30 and go over the edges and tips of the hair.

The last thing we need to add is shadows and highlights. Hair is made up of millions of strands, but when it comes to highlights and shadow, we can treat it as one single object. If you check out some references, you will see that hair usually has a strip of lightness across it. This is the specular highlight. If we look at our reference photo, we can see it right here:
To create this light strip, first merge all of the hair layers (make sure you do not merge the background layer, we want the hair to be on a transparent background). You may or may not want to include the blocked in layer here; I have decided to throw it away. Switch to the dodge tool and use the 'hairblock' brush provided with the hardness turned all the way down. Set the dodge brush's range to 'midtones' and the exposure to %30. Brush on the light strip. To make some shadows, use the burn tool with the same settings. Burn the hair under the sweeping piece and accentuate some of the dark pieces you have already painted. Burn the area where the hair is parted. We now have:
I think this looks really good. Also, I want to mention it only took me half an hour to paint. If thats not quick, I don't know what is! Knowing the techniques and having the right brushes are the key to success here. Remember to constantly sample colours to maximize variations. Remember to build the details slowly; start with big chunks and work your way to single strands. Use your reference!
Here is how the hair looks when placed on the photo:
Pretty good. There are a few things I would change, but for the purposes of this tutorial, I think we're done!

Thanks for reading. I hope you found this helpful and will use these techniques in your next painting. If you've never tried painting hair before, try it!

Old Postcard Tutorial

2009-02-26T11:12:00.000-08:00

Old Postcard Look
Hi Everyone,
I just finished a new digital painting. I love the look of those old style pin-up girl paintings, so I wanted to do a pin-up of my own. Here is the finished painting:

This is painted entirely in Photoshop and the only special brushes I used are called 'markerlines' and they can be found on brusheezy.com. I like to use these brushes instead of the usual 'drop shadow' brushes, because they have some texture to them, so the result looks more like a painting.
To create the 'postcard' look, I took the following steps:
Make sure the piece is on an unlocked layer, with another white layer behind it.
Use the rounded rectangle tool to create a path around the edges of the piece. You will have to figure out the appropriate radius, I used 80 but it could be as low as 20 depending on the resolution and size of your piece. Make a selection from the path, inverse the selection, then clear the selected area. You will end up like this:
Now we want to add the illusion of thickness to the card. If you look at some images of postcards, they usually have a bright white line right on the edge. This is from the thickness of the card, where there is no ink.

A really easy way to create this is to open up the blending options on the card layer and add an outer glow. We want the line to be quite sharp, so turn the spread up and the size down. I used a spread of %95 and a size of 2. Choose an off-white colour, and the default blend mode of screen will be fine here.
Next add a drop shadow in the blend options. Play with the settings until you like what you see.
Now were going to add the distressing. Distressing means adding a worn, weathered look. An old post card would have some wrinkles, scratches and areas where the ink has worn off. The ink would also be suffering with time, as inks tend to fade or change when exposed to the sun. Make a new layer on top of the card layer. You can find lots of good distressing brushes all over the internet. My favourite are 'typo-grunge' and 'ultimate grunge set3' from brusheezy.com. Using an off white colour, paint on some random distress and use different brushes and opacity.
When you're done, try playing with the blend mode of the distress layer. I used 'colour dodge' on mine, but there are other that work well too. Blend modes are incredibly useful, but sometimes it's difficult to know what they all do. My advice is to cycle through all of them and expirement and over time you will come to learn what they do. Now you'll have something like this:

Next, I want to add a paper stock texture to the piece, so it will look like it really was printed on paper. To do this, make a new layer and fill it with a paper texture. Photoshop comes with a nice paper texture already called Buff that you can find in the texture set, Color Paper. Again, we're going to use a blend mode to merge the card layer and the paper texture layer. Multiply will work well as it won't affect the colours on the card layer, but I still feel like the colours of the card piece don't look right. We are missing that faded, sun damaged look. Some of the inks will become more saturated over time; some will become faded. Happily, there is a blend mode that will fill both of our needs- overlay. Change the blend mode to overlay, and we have:
Play with the opacity of the distress and paper texture layer.
Now we need to add the text layer. I used Lucida Handwriting here and it comes with Photoshop. Then all we need to do is merge all the layers except the background and rotate them slightly.
Here is the finished product:
I added a little wrinkle at the bottom right corner for more realism. I think it looks pretty sweet. That's it!

Thanks for reading and I hope you found this helpful. You can use these techniques any time you want to distress something, not only for print but for 3d textures too. Everything in life is a little worn, and using a few of these distressing techniques will add a lot of realism to your work.

Welcome!

2009-02-25T20:05:00.001-08:00

Welcome to my blog, where I will be discussing 3d stuff, digital art, art in general and anything else that catches my fancy. I'll share some of my tips and tricks with you and even feature tutorials from time to time.

You can connect with me in a bunch of ways:

Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/katie_e_scott
Join me on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/pub/11/560/b5a katie@katiescott.ca
Make friends with me on Facebook
Check out my flickr.com page http://flickr.com/photos/32677399@N06/
Email me at katie@katiescott.ca

Come back often!