Well, it's some trial and error of course. But what I see consistently among those photos is the contrasting areas of warms and cools and I would separate those areas and treat them on separate layers. That way you can keep things sorted. So maybe do the black and blue gray stuff on a base layer and then on a layer above I would then paint in the hot oranges and reds and white yellows.
And so you would be able to keep hiding and revealing the warms to see how they play against the greys. And naturally, you wouldn't screw up one group when painting the other.
There are a few reasons why I would work separately.
1. you wouldn't bleed one color into the other to create mud. There's a patterning to the flow -- sort of ringlets or like free flowing rings in a crosscut of a tree, and there are bulbous areas -- each kind of shape can be handled separately and fitted if necessary. It's all very directional and varied that way and that gives it much of its character. So you could drag it around into the pattern and then erase back what you don't want that has spread out to the opposite colored area.
2. you could then duplicate the reds and blur it out so it could create that hot glow -- that would be behind the sharper focused one that you duplicated. And you can mess with the color (I think you can do that in ArtRage) to get the glow working with the non-blurred area.
3. You can also, just for fun, take the source pic and smear it so that you just make it look more painterly and less photographic -- a sort of retro fitting. That technique has its place, but it's a wee bit like having training wheels on a bicycle. Sooner or later once you get your balance, you no longer need to do that.
4. You can also sample the colors right off the photo for when you paint. So that solves mixing your colors and values. Again, you may grow past that, but its a sure fire way to not err. The only pitfall might be selecting an adjacent pixel that isn't what you think it is. But you can putter with the selections and there's always the [Undo] button, which I myself use liberally.
Anyway, that's a starter. Hope this helps you get off and running. Have some fun! You may be surprised how well you do after you chunk it down to small tasks. It's not unlike learning to play a song on a new instrument. You take it down to learning a few basic things, and learn a few riffs and ultimately you just increase your bag of tricks.
BTW, anybody wanting to see the photos he's referring to here's a link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3950497.html
I don't know how many posts one needs before they can post URLs but it's not that many.
Last edited by D Akey; 08-21-2016 at 12:33 AM.
"Not a bit is wasted and the best is yet to come. . ." -- remembered from a dream
Maybe some links to demos that use similar techniques?
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Originally Posted by Enug
