digital painting | Tien Chiu's Blog

July 4, 2015 by Tien Chiu

Of bathtubs, books, and battle maidens

My digital painting class progresses, and our latest project is to paint a fantasy personal transport vehicle. We had to brainstorm ten ideas, then pick one to develop. Since then we’ve been working on developing the ideas into sketches, then creating value sketches to test out lighting, and are now working on the final painting.

Since I missed posting all this to you earlier, here are some of the early concept sketches. (Yes, they are crude. Still working on those drawing skills!) Click for the larger version.

Sketch #1 is a “green” car. It’s a Volkswagen minibus with a “radiator” on the back full of green algae. The algae process the carbon dioxide in the exhaust, transforming it to oxygen and rendering the car carbon-neutral. The remaining CO2 emissions are piped into the top of the car, where they “feed” a small greenhouse of herbs and flowers.

Sketch #2 is a flying carpet, but since everyone knows flying carpets are unrealistic, here’s one with a rigid frame, jet packs, and a glass windshield. Alakazam!

A flying carpet (with jet packs and windshield)

And here’s the concept I finally decided to use, the flying bathtub. I came up with this idea from the phrase “It flies like a bathtub,” used to describe a clumsy plane. And really, what could be more pleasant than soaking peacefully in a nice warm bubble bath, 500 feet off the ground?

After reviewing those and my other seven concept sketches, I decided to go with the flying bathtub. Partly because I liked it better, partly because it would be much easier to paint than my other favorite, the “green” car.

So the next step was to do some more sketches to work out the details. I messed around and eventually came up with three types of flying bathtubs:

floating bathtub with four hot air balloons

flying bathtub -with a single hot air balloon

I decided that the multiple balloons (as in the movie “Up”) looked far more interesting than the others, so decided to develop it further. The next step was to do a slightly more detailed sketch, including the background. It was supposed to be black and white, but I couldn’t resist throwing in some color:

flying bathtub value sketch - general light — flying bathtub value sketch – general light

After that we were supposed to do value sketches, to test out different lighting ideas. I had no idea what a value study was or how to do one, so I asked the instructor. She suggested using black and white brushes to give an idea of light and shadow in the piece, and trying out different times of day – noon, sunset, late afternoon. While still super-clumsy about it, I did manage to come up with a few sketches. I liked this one, taken at sunset, the best:

A value study of the flying bathtub - sunset lighting — A value study of the flying bathtub – sunset lighting

Here the lighting is coming mostly from below, for a much more dramatic effect than the much more diffuse light of my original sketch.

The next and final step will be the actual painting. I haven’t gotten very far with that yet, mostly because I’ve been focused on the book, but I did manage to paint some balloons earlier this week:

flying bathtub - rough sketch with balloons added — flying bathtub – rough sketch with balloons added

I still need to rotate, resize, rearrange, and warp the balloons, and correct the lighting (they’re far too bright for sunset lighting), but it’s a good start. The painting isn’t due until Thursday, so I’m not panicking…at least, not yet. I’m planning to work on it next week – this weekend is reserved for the book.

Ah yes, the book. We’re now exactly four weeks away from the final publisher deadline, and how is our heroine doing? Very well, thank you. Thanks to the Independence Day holiday and an exceptionally generous employer, I had a four-day weekend and I made the most of it. I’ve now added all the photos and artist bios to the manuscript, ballooning it from 122 pages to 187. I’ve redone all the illustrations in the Visual Design chapter, written the Preface and the Acknowledgements sections, and drafted a few more artist bios.

Tomorrow I’ll sit down and start working on photo captions – tedious work, since it requires looking up the release form for every photo to make sure it is credited properly in the caption, and emailing artists for any missing information. Thoroughly boring administrative work. They didn’t tell me about this when I signed up for the dashing, romantic life of a writer! But, as with most things, romance requires a fair amount of drudgery to make the magic happen, so it’s time to buckle down and do it.

And the loom? I haven’t gotten confirmation yet, but I’m pretty sure it shipped on Friday! It should be here in mid to late August. Woo hoo!!

And I may have a new name for the loom. I’ve been saying for years I’d name her Ada, after Lady Ada, Countess of Lovelace, who is generally recognized as having written the very first computer program. However, a few days ago it occurred to me…this is a Scandinavian loom setting sail over the seven seas to land on my doorstep. Doesn’t that make it a Viking loom? So I’m seriously considering naming it “Valkyrie”. You know, divine battle maidens swooping down on the battlefield to bring fallen heroes to Valhalla, Wagnerian opera, heroic deeds, Norse battle epics. And Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” is a tradition at Caltech, my alma mater – played at 7am every day during finals week in each of the dorms, at super high volume, to wake everyone up. So it’s also a bold tradition. I rather like it. Still meditating on it, but I’m leaning towards “Valkyrie”.

And, finally, the long-promised video: Tigress under the influence of her very first catnip. (Wait for the “Ow!”)

June 16, 2015 by Tien Chiu

Digital painting success!

My digital painting class is going really well! It’s been a real challenge to keep up with it, since I have way less artistic experience than most of the students. But I’ve been plugging away at the exercises, and my first major project turned out fantastic! Here it is:

Final version of the sonic salamanders — Final version of the sonic salamander project

A brief bit of salamander biology: The sonic salamander is a giant salamander (about the size of a medium to large dog) that lives primarily in muddy pools, though it can venture out on land as well. Because it lives in muddy water most of the time, it doesn’t have eyes; instead, it “sees” by sonar. It has four tentacles around its mouth that (like a catfish’s barbs) help it sense prey swimming in the water. The tentacles also help it grasp slippery prey animals such as worms and small fish.

Because the muddy waters are frequently anoxic, the sonic salamander has a frill around its neck that helps absorb oxygen from the water. Normally the frill lies flat around the neck, but when the salamander feels threatened, it erects the frill with a rush of blood, turning the frill brilliant red and also splaying out the yellow-green, venomous spines that protect the salamander from predators.

This is where I was on June 6, the last time I blogged about this project:

rough composition for the sonic salamander

I had no idea how to get from here to a finished painting, however. I spent four long days in a state of continuous panic. I couldn’t possibly do this! because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But there is a wonderfully focusing thing about a deadline: it gets you up off your ass. You have to do something, whether or not you have any clue. So I jumped off the cliff, and here’s where I was on Friday night, four days before the painting was due:

sketching out the shading for the sonic salamander

As you can see, it’s basically the rough sketch, but with the outlines eliminated and with a bit of shading. A little bit of progress, but not much.

On Saturday morning I was starting to despair completely, especially after realizing that I would have to throw away the entire background. But I worked at it for several hours, and finally managed to colorize the salamander and lay out the basic structure of the piece.

After that I got stuck. I had no idea what to do with the salamander. But I had to do something – the project was due in three days! So I decided to work on something easier. We’d learned some techniques for making rocks seem three-dimensional, so I applied those techniques on the log. To my utter surprise, it worked! Behold the magic log:

This gave me some hope that I might be able to salvage the project. So I sat down and thought about the salamander. Eventually I came up with some custom Photoshop brushes for the skin and the spines, and added some shading to make it three-dimensional. Hot dawg! It was working.

sonic salamander - with skin and shading — sonic salamander – with skin and shading

Next up was adding dirt, grass, and muddy water. The tricky part turned out to be the mud. I had to put in ripples in the water, and reflections of the sky. Many agonizingly unsuccessful experiments as the clock ticked on. More custom Photoshop brushes, more Undo commands, more Smudge and Blur tools to smear things around. Much banging of head against the wall. But I finally arrived at some mud I liked:

semi-final version of the sonic salamander

Today was the critique session for the finished project. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my salamanders were actually about the middle of the pack in sophistication of design and execution. I had been feeling somewhat intimidated by my lack of experience, but it seems I can keep up! I got some suggestions from the professor and some of my fellow students, and applied them in the final piece, as shown at the start of this post:

I’m feeling really encouraged about this, and am looking forward to the rest of the class.

And outside of class? Well, I’ve spun some more yarn:

And I’ve made twenty-four pints (three gallons!) of jam and marmalade, in five varieties:

aprium jam - from our aprium tree! — aprium jam – from our aprium tree!

So I’m pretty pleased with my productivity.

How pleased? As happy as Fritz in the throes of a belly rub. (Ain’t no happier than that.)

June 6, 2015 by Tien Chiu

The eyes have it

My digital painting class is fantastic! Lesson #4 was painting eyes. And after an hour or two of work, I managed to turn out a pretty good one!

This astonished me because I’ve never thought of myself as having any talent for art. I’m a scientist by training, my parents are scientists, and pretty much all of my relatives are scientists or engineers. Fine arts skills, particularly, aren’t part of my repertoire and (as you can see in my prior blog post) my drawing skills, while improving with practice, are still pretty primitive.

And yet I managed to turn out a pretty darn realistic eye. Dang! That’s amazing.

Now, obviously, a lot of my success stems from having had good guidance. I wish I could post the class handout here, because it is just perfect. It provides enough detail to guide you to success, while giving enough leeway to allow you to experiment a bit. I wish I had more time to explore the exercise – it would have been fun to do it with darker skin tones and different colored eyes, just to see what happens. (And to get some more practice!) But this pesky full-time job gets in the way, and there are more exercises ahead…

Speaking of which, I’ve made progress on the fantasy-animal project. Since my drawing and rendering skills are still pretty shaky, I created two models of the “sonic salamander” and posed them for photos. Here’s one of the photos I decided to use:

I figured that would enable me to get the overall composition, and the lighting/shadows, correct. All I’d have to do was trace the photo, then copy the shading.

After some fiddling, I realized that I really wanted the back salamander a little more distant. Easy to do in Photoshop!

Then all I had to do was trace it for my composition sketch:

compositional sketch of the sonic salamander

Now I had to add the background. I had no idea how to even get started, but the instructor suggested that I add a new Photoshop layer and just play around. So I chose a simple brush style and just started drawing. To my complete astonishment, it worked! The screen didn’t explode (always a danger if you’re a beginner 😉 ), and, after about two hours, I had a fairly passable composition:

It’s not bad for a rough sketch. I need to remove the gratuitous log at the top left, which doesn’t work at all, and I will probably remove the grass at lower left, which distracts from the big salamander. I still need to do two more compositional sketches and add in some shading, but this one isn’t bad to work with.

One thing I’ve learned along the way is that digital painting is much more forgiving than physical media. The “Undo” button has become my fast friend, and I’m making liberal use of layers. “Undo,” of course, eliminates all your mistakes and false starts with a single click, and layers allow you to isolate sets of changes. If you don’t like what’s happened, you can blow away that layer and start over – the rest of the image is totally intact. In the compositional sketch above, the salamanders each have their own layer, the ground, the grass is another layer, and so forth. So if I’m not sure I like the grass, I can make that layer invisible and try something else, without affecting anything else in the image. Then I can switch the grass layer on/off to see which look I prefer. This gives me much more freedom than in drawing with physical media. I am in pig heaven. No fear! 🙂

In fiber-land, I finished spinning the singles for my socks. I haven’t set them up for plying yet – too busy with painting homework – but will try to do that this week. I also dyed the fiber for my next spinning project, which is the skein of yarn I’m trading for having someone else knit up my socks. It’s another color gradient:

I’m spinning it up considerably finer than the sock yarn, so it will take longer. Because of this, I’ve decided to alternate spinning this yarn with spinning the Lincoln fleece – I want to get started! So I am making progress on that as well.

I am now out of time (need to get out of the house for a busy day ahead), so no videos of Tigress on heavy drugs (catnip), but here is a photo of our intrepid adventurer, trying to figure out how to get onto a shelf just a little higher than she can reach. She didn’t manage it this time, but she’s a very clever kitty, so I imagine she’ll figure it out soon. Go Tigress!

June 1, 2015 by Tien Chiu

Fantasy creatures

I’m really short on time right now, but I just had to share some of my digital painting class homework with you. Part of this week’s assignment was to sketch five fantasy creatures that are plausible for their environment. While I still can’t draw very well, my sense of humor seems to be as twisted as ever. So, may I introduce you to a few new creatures you might not have heard of?

(I am particularly fond of the saber-toothed jackalope and the sonic salamander, though the armored jelly-pus has its moments, too.)

I’m pleased to say that, with much hard work and after braving many hazards, I managed to obtain a sonic salamander! Here is my first specimen:

Alas, the cats found and killed the first one, but I am certain that there are others lurking in the house. Perhaps I can find a few in that pound and a half of polymer clay that mysteriously appeared on my doorstep a few days ago…

And now, back to my homework! I need to pick one of the animals and make three detailed sketches of it (one of those sketches will eventually turn into the actual painting). I’ll probably do the sonic salamander, since I have a (somewhat-mangled, but probably fixable) model of one already.

Of course, the sketches are due tomorrow afternoon…so I better get cracking! You’ll have to wait for the next blog post, which (if I have time) will include a video of Tigress “under the influence”…yes, more catnip!

May 29, 2015 by Tien Chiu

Sketches and spinning

I started my digital painting class earlier this week, and it’s been quite enlightening. The first exercise was “basic” brushwork – a review for many students, but not for me! I learned more about Photoshop brushes in those three hours than in five years of using Photoshop for weave design. Hurray!

Aside from the exercises, we’re also expected to turn in a more creative project in three weeks. This one is designing a fantasy animal that is appropriate for its environment – the more creative, the better. For next week, we’re just handing in preliminary sketches.

This was a great opportunity to play Design Poker, a game I cobbled up for my book. It’s an adaptation of “The Design Game,” from Ideas in Weaving, by Ann Sutton and Diane Sheehan. Basically, you take a deck of ideas, draw at random, and generate a bunch of designs from those ideas. In this case, I used a deck with four types of ideas: weight of the creature (lightweight/heavyweight), number of limbs, terrain where it lives, and its covering (skin, scales, feathers, etc.).

Here’s the result of the first round, which was more about generating ideas than sketches (click to read the larger version). The ideas I drew were “heavy”, “four-limbed”, “marsh”, “membranous covering” (e.g. salamander skin).

brainstorming results for fantasy creature, page 1

brainstorming results for fantasy creature, page 2

If you look closely you can see that not everything fits 100% into those ideas. That’s fine – the idea is to brainstorm designs with help from constraints, not to follow the rules of Design Poker. But the general thrust is creatures that could live in a marsh and have four limbs.

Of these ideas, my favorites are mostly the later ones, which is not surprising since the last 1/3 of the results of a brainstorming session are usually the most interesting ones. (At first, you come up with obvious ideas – it’s only once you start running out of easy ideas and are grasping at straws that really creative stuff comes to light.) I’m particularly fond of the lamprey with legs (now there’s a frightening idea!), the four armed worm that lives in water mostly but can emerge if needed, and the snake with tentacles. I also kinda like the idea of the jellyfish that can walk on its tentacles – another of those creepy concepts.

I’m in the middle of another round of Design Poker, but with a simplified set of ideas. The concepts for this round are “six limbs” and “grassland”. So far I’ve got a six-armed snake with a lamprey head (think “sandworm with arms”) and a few cliches (centaur, pegasus, harpy, etc.), but I’ve only just started. I’m sure better ideas will come later on, when I’ve exhausted the obvious possibilities.

You’ll notice that my sketches are basically stick figures. I anticipate some trouble when it comes time to do the actual sketches – most notably that I’ve never tried sketching an imaginary object in any detail before – but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. The first step is to find ten ideas that I like, and then start developing them into sketches.

Meanwhile, I have completed my first skein of handspun yarn in over a decade! Behold my creation:

It’s not obvious from the skein, but the yarn is a smooth color gradation starting at yellow and ending at navy blue. It’s destined to be a sock – hopefully a beautiful one!

I’m quite pleased with my skein. The yarn is pretty consistent in diameter, and the skein hangs straight, which means the spinning and plying twist are balanced. That is relatively easy to manage on a wheel, where you can count revolutions of the wheel to track the amount of twist, but is a bit harder on a spindle since you basically have to work by feel.

Anyway, I think it’s great for a “returning-to-spinning” skein, especially for one done on a drop spindle while walking about. I’m very pleased with it and can’t wait to spin the other sock!

Meanwhile, two spindles arrived yesterday. Here’s the current herd:

That is not quite complete – I also have a KCL spindle and another small Golding ring spindle, but they were off partying somewhere and didn’t make it for the photo shoot.

The veteran spinners amongst us may note that four of the five spindles are Golding ring spindles. That is not a coincidence; they make the best spindles I’ve ever encountered. Perfectly balanced, and rim-weighted so they spin for a very long time. And they’re beautiful!

And in cat-land? Mike, dastardly being that he is, is trying to get them hooked on the heavy stuff. Here they are, investigating fresh catnip for the first time.

Fritz was fascinated but largely unaffected; Tigress, on the other hand, was sniffing at it, rolling on it, and rubbing her head against the floor. I wish I’d gotten a video of that!

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