Robots Under Lighting

Well, I certainly missed a couple of weeks there.  One of them was the July 4th weekend, so of course nothing happened that weekend except alcohol, grilled meat and small sparkly explosives (a winning combination!).  Last weekend... I have no clue - obviously last weekend occurred, but I could not with any certainty tell you what occurrences happened during it.  Possibly I did some art, I'm really not sure.

So, anyway, hopefully today I'll get some catching up done.  I think this will be done by just saying less stuff - most of what follows is basically stuff you've read before about other pieces anyway, so this one will focus on things that were slightly different.

A picture of a Robot.  Done for the DeviantArt Artrage monthly competition in May, which was themed 'Robots'.   It's one of the Robots I initially sketched for those pieces I do for my son, but it didn't get done for that, so I painted it for this in Artrage instead.

The initial sketch, blown up, just like the previous ones.  Unlike the previous ones I did a cleaned up sketch of it to work from (just sketched over the original scan).  This was done in artrage using the Ink Pen tool.  In the end it didn't prove terribly useful, but I later used the original sketch.

Adding flat color, and then reducing the opacity of the ink layer and starting to fill in some of the lighting information.  I was tempted to do a very polished piece, using airbrush and such, but then decided (by this point) that having it look more like a children's book illustration would work better with the style of the robot itself.  The red tone of the shadow was because I knew the heart would be glowing red, and the light would probably bounce around because this robot is metal.

More lighting basically, including the first pass at the background.  As reference for that I pulled out an old render I'd done of a car sitting on a 'backcloth' in a spotlight.  Gave me a pretty reasonable idea of what angle the light cone would be at, and then I modified it to suit.  I also added some reflection of the ball, and some bounce light from it.  I have no idea if those are accurate - it just looked good.

Incidentally, since metal is a surface made up entirely of reflections, for this to look like this in reality it would require something like a white drop cloth behind the camera, that was itself illuminated, but that would then add more fill light than shown here.  So yes, I know that, and I don't particularly care as I wasn't going for realism.

These are basically the final stages.  I added the lights, and the lighting for the ball, as well as his antenna.  I wanted the smile to look like an old LCD display (like you'd get on a digital watch).  To do that I drew the mouth as pixels, added the grid to look like pixel cells, and then painted a very slight shadow under the mouth pixels.  After that I just lit the screen to hide most of the grid.  It worked quite well I think.  At this point I also pulled the original sketch back in and blurred it slightly.  This worked quite well to simulate a little ambient occlusion and give the little guy some solidity.

To reach the final result I made the background a bit choppier and added some noise overall, as well as the border.  The majority of the piece was done using the Oil Paint tool. Some of the stages, such as the glow around the lights, were done using a very drippy Airbrush, or sketched over with the Pastel brush.  the background was softened with the Palette Knife, and the overall noise once again added with a low intensity drippy Airbrush.

The picture won the competition by the way, so I'm glad I did it even if it's very different from my usual fair.

Oh, and I thought I'd posted this before, but I guess not.  I did another Robot picture for my Son's birthday, which is now framed and hung on his wall.  We'd noticed during the year that one of the pencils I'd used to do one of the previous ones fluoresces under blacklight (my son thinks UV lights are amazing, so we'd had one in his bedroom briefly to see how different surfaces reacted).  With that in mind this particular Robot was done specifically with pencils that had the same effect, so the whole thing is also a blacklight picture.  Might come in handy when he's a teen and has the obligatory Blacklight around all the time.  Might mean he'll keep his old man's cute robot pictures around a little longer than he otherwise would.

This is a scan of the actual picture, and a simulated blacklight version (the colors pulled off a photograph of the actual picture under blacklight, which was otherwise too blurry to show).  The process for creating this was basically the same as the previous set, other than ensuring the pencils would all fluoresce.