Over the long weekend, I started my first painting on canvas in about 5 years. I had forgotten how great it is to feel the bristles of your brush on the canvas. While you can usually achieve almost the same image with software, there is a level of tactile feeling that is lost using a Wacom tablet.
On the other hand, there are advantages to digital media. The one that I appreciate most is ease of editing. There is no undo key in real life.
That brings me to the point of this post. I tried a different approach to this painting. Almost every drawing or painting I do, I try to find some sort of visual reference of the subject matter. I don’t try to copy the image, but usually I can get more information about shapes, textures, etc. that might not be immediately accessible in my head.
For this piece in particular, I know there would be a lot of geometric objects, seen through a very wide angle lens. While there are ways to figure out the fish-eye effect with traditional drawn perspective, I thought that it would be just as easy to build the primitive scene in Maya, and be able to experiment with different camera angles and focal lengths until I found the right one for the piece.
So I created my own visual reference image in Maya. It took around 2-3 hours, about the same amount of time that it would take to measure everything out in perspective.
However, there was a huge advantage to using Maya for the reference once everything was built. I was able to easily move things around in frame to get the composition that I wanted. I experimented with different focal lengths and camera heights. Seeing the scene from a different angle would only take a matter of minutes, rather than having to completely redraw a sketch.
After rendering a contour pass for a perspective reference, it was quick and easy to drop some lights in and render a rough value reference as well.
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