Frank Hong: January 2009

1) Rough Sketch, a simple quick sketching stage to find composition and color palette. in this case it's no different from a base speedpainting, where everything is being decided on the fly starting from a blank canvas. Working without a sketch means that you have to be loose when starting off a image, don't be afraid to make big changes or sometimes paint over a entire area. never get caught up on details at this stage or you'll hate yourself later.

2) Color Correction, a clean up stage to tighten up silhouettes and define the mood and atmosphere with the use of colors in the image. pay strong attention to light direction and depth of field, colors from afar is filter by air and appear softer and less intense than the colors in the foreground.

3)Overlaying details, when the buildings are in shape, we can take advantage of some matte painting technique of painting from real photographs. 6 photos where used on the building to the left. they need to be edited and most of the times looped seamlessly for use on buildings. Matte painting started as early as 1907, it's used in movies to extend and create scenery that's too expensive or impossible to build. See the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, or Star wars.

4) Details pass, This is the stage to define most of details. a common mistake is to zoom in into pixels and over work the tiniest spots, what could happen is that, first you are not looking at the full image and might be taking a part of the painting completely out of the palette range, or making that part of the painting stand out so much from the rest that it draws unnecessary attention. most of the times such small details won't show when you publish the painting into a websize presentation. people can only see it if they like it enough to push their nose up aginst the monitor. So by any case, overall feel of the piece should be consistent, allowing the viewer's eyes to travel around the image. there are parts of the painting that's less important and less interesting, it's ok to leave those parts relatively sketchy in stead of super polished. there's no need to super polish every pixel of the painting.

5) Ship Design, this is the part where practice rendering that sphere comes to show, planes and forms needs to read solidly for the object to look right. the light direction has to be consistent with the already established scene. in this process, i'm literaly sculpting out the shapes and form of the ship design, without a sketch it could be a process of trial and error. the initial soap shaped ship looks awful, so that has to be recreated.

6) Finishing touch, a final pass to tie the piece together, some color corrections, smoke and lights to add atmophere, hightened contrast on the silluette of the ship by reversing the tonals (see top of the ship). finally, some special effects like dusts and blurs.

:)

Frank Hong

Concept Artist, Illustrator

A New Colony

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