The zen of collecting reference material
Added 2021-11-21 11:50:03 +0000 UTCHello guys!
In this week's video I briefly talked about the reference material I used to create my astronaut bust but despite my first impulse while editing, I didn’t include any pictures because, well, they are simply too many and not very specific…
A lot of painters have the idea that using reference material for a paintjob means that I have a single perfect picture that I use to copy and transfer colours, lights, shadows, textures… on the model but it is never ever a single image!
It's almost impossible to find that kind of perfect match, even when you have access to official artworks and concept art that maybe ended up becoming a real commercial model and usually that kind of drawings are set in generic studio lights without any real built-in drama or storytelling (plus in this particular case you probably want to do something different anyway, just to avoid painting the rip off the boxart!).
Before start looking for images you should identify the main elements for which you feel the need of supporting visual material and that can mean, literally everything:
a particular environment or environmental light, the face of a celebrity (I have an archive of dozens of Danny Trejo’s pictures for every time I need to paint wrinkly/scarred faces lol), make-up, close-ups of different kinds of fabric and materials, rust, dust, rain marks, the reflections on Mando’s armour…
Thanks to experience and exposure I have a good mental library of details and effects so in this case all my efforts have been spent reinforcing my weak spot: the complex light setting.
These pictures are about one third of what I’ve collected for this job but they are the ones that gave me the larger and most significant amount of input:
as you can see none of them has the same light setting of my final piece but It’s pretty easy to understand what I stole!
The vectors and intensity of the yellow light inside the helmet come mostly from The Martian (as well as the orange elements of the scheme and their behaviour inside those lights) but the colder greenish tone and its diffusion come from Prometheus and even if they all have some kind of extra cold lateral light, mine comes from Alien and that big rectangular central light on top of the visors.
There isn’t any technical reasoning behind these choices, I just took the elements I like the most and fit my scene!
My job at this point is to find a way to make them work together in an harmonious way but the pictures are still useful to understand the limits of realism and plausibility inside of which I’m playing and even if the setting is always different there are a lot of clues about how these elements could interact.
From here is all about colour theory and how all this light behaviour can be translated in pigments and paints but this is a story for another time ;)
The point here is, don’t be stingy with your reference material because no image is perfect, but all are useful!
Ten pictures of a face could be useful maybe to paint a single wrinkle (again Denny Trejo helps a lot to speed up the work lol), but that wrinkle will be the most realistic thing you have ever painted and next time you must do something even only similar, all that information will be already well set in your brain and ready to be used!
Have a great week!!!
Marco NJM
