Digitigrade leg designs from the past

William Bouguereau, Nymphs and a satyr, 1873

Bouguereau cared for composition above all else. This satyr’s legs here are like transplanted chamois legs and look kind of believable in the still image, even though they would probably look unnatural in motion. The fur coat starting halfway down the thigh also feels contrived to me (nice excuse to show the satyr's fully human buttocks!) but aesthetically it certainly works.

Elihu Vedder, Marsyas Enchanting the Hares, 1899

The legs portrayed in this picture are easy to the eye and give a good outline and balance to the satyr’s figure, but they don’t make sense from the anatomical point of view. The calves look like they have no volume and are somehow fused with the thigh. The shaggy fur isn’t enough to conceal the inconsistency, but the legs aren’t really a focal point of the picture so it’s the overall impression that matters. The figure’s outline is very similar to a common hieroglyph depicting a sitting woman, I suspect it is an actual quotation:

I run into the above problem all the time - I have a nice pose in mind but it would force the legs to bend in impossible ways. I used to try all sort of weird leg designs to keep the anatomy as consistent as I could but ultimately I decided it wasn’t worth the effort. In most cases I’d rather use a leg design which feels balanced and has a good outline even if it’s anatomically impossible.

Even though I study my fair share of anatomy I'm not veterinarian and designing a truly consistent model would require also require the kind of 3D simulations used for big budget games and movies. In fact there are some cool digitigrade designs in games and movies (the minotaurs of Narnia come to mind) but I can't remember any instance of them exploring the full extent of the mobility which an anthro body with digitigrade legs could have, probably beacuse it's not required by the media. For them creating believable walk/run cycles is the most important thing. On the other hand a lot of anthro art is still pictures of nudes and sex scenes in which the nuances of what a limb can or cannot do are more relevant.

Carlos Schwabe, The Afternoon of a Faun, 1923

Same leg design as Bouguereau. Here the weird leg anatomy is exploited well for dramatic effect, they are supposed to look uncanny. A human in the same pose would look awkward rather than impressive.

Unknown artist, Pan and Daphnis, III-II century BC

This is one of the most believable designs I could find in ancient art and it’s similar to what is expected of realistic anthro art today. The thighs actually look like they are part human and part animal, and the legs seem to bend just like goat legs. They are also shorter than human legs compared to the torso, which would give Pan a low center of mass helping with balance (balance being the biggest issue with the idea of bipedal digitigrade legs).

Some thoughts on portraiture of anthro characters

A small oil portrait of the character Tedros, done for Anbessa on Furaffinity.

There used to be a lot of rules on how to do official people's portraits before impressionism and the modern art era. One rule which stuck me as odd is that smiling was strongly discouraged because it could distort facial features and would make the painting tiresome to look at for a long time. It is true that smiling expressions can be annoying to look at unless the smile is very subtle (e.g. the Mona Lisa) or the whole painting is very stylized (e.g. portraits by Boldini, the impressionists, caricatures, etc.). Also telling the model to keep a neutral expression allowed him or her to relax and display their most natural attitude.

I have no idea whether this concept may apply to anthro characters. After all there is no real model to copy from and many animal muzzles don't look very expressive to untrained eyes, especially when they sport a neutral expression. But it's an interesting challenge because neutral expressions are always hard to draw convincingly, it's easy to make them look dull or silly.

Even if you draw a realistic anthro muzzle, the most straightforward way of making it expressive is to map cartoon expressions like these onto its features:

This kind of "standard" expressions can actually be applied to anything (animals, objects, etc.) as long as it has the equivalent of a mouth, two eyes with visible white and a discernible pupil (so we can understand where the gaze is pointing) and very mobile eyebrows. A lot of RL animals look like they have no expression just because the white of their eyes is not visible and they have no facial features similar to eyebrows, while animals like cats and blue-eyed huskies feel very expressive because they have both.

I often abuse eyebrows to exaggerate expressions in my pictures and I know sometimes I'm guilty of stepping into the 'TUDE eyebrows minefield. So in this picture I downplayed eyebrows a lot (though the dark patterns around the eyes work fine as proxies) and I tried to keep a neutral expression. I'm quite pleased with the result. Now I have a few other ideas to test in small portraits like this one...

Next painting: Puffins!

I think I found a good pipeline for working in oils but I posted about that in the NSFW side of the blog.

The next painting will be my anthro puffin character Angelica posing in the acquarium where she works along with some non-anthro puffins. It's supposed to be part of a classy advertising campaign she does for the Genoa Aquarium of the future where she works. I guess I have weird ideas about the future of marketing. :-)

I'll use strong colors for this one. In the last year I've been focusing obsessively on desaturated colors so I could better understand and learn color temperature, but I actually prefer bright, sunny and weird colors in paintings.

A proper model sheet of Angelica is on its way too.

Fur rendering in oils

After the avatar painting and a few other tests I have a viable pipeline for working with oils. It's quite simple actually:

1) Pencil sketch
2) Underpainting in acrylics
3) Final color in oils

I used to do digital value studies for all pictures before coloring them in acrylics but that's no longer necessary now, I can design the values directly in the underpainting layer and the oil layer will mask any small mistake or change of mind. I guess I also developed a better intuition for values so I need less preliminary studies, but breaking up the work by doing some steps in digital and some steps in traditional media doesn't help concentration. For simple pictures where there is no background I'd rather do as much as possible on the canvas/sheet, it also saves a lot of time.

Rendering soft-looking fur is always one of my top priorities. Because of that I leave figure borders a bit blurred unless a neat border is necessary to make the picture readable, as in the detail picture above under the chin. Many anthro characters have complex patterns of stripes, spots and brighter/darker areas of fur which make it really difficult to keep the figure readable at a glance. Complementary underpainting is of great use here: even if the colors painted over it are quite different from each other (in this case they ranged from dark brown to dark blue to cool gray and white) the same color is visible in trasparency in all parts of the figure, so there is a nice color unity.

Crosshatching is also very useful to suggest softness. Many anthro artists who want to paint relistic fur resort to painting the individual hairs, but that creates a lot of regular detail all over the figure and looking at so much regularity quickly becomes tiresome for the eye. I prefer the slight randomness of crosshatching, which makes the surface look soft but also relatively smooth.

Also crosshatching doesn't need to follow the expected direction of hairs in every spot of the fur coat, so the strokes may follow any direction which is useful to enhance the volumes and the lines of action in the image. In the details above I directed the brush strokes on the shoulder, arm and torso so that they would enhance the muscle volumes and the arm's line of action.

*Purr*

Finished! It was quite an ordeal but I'm glad I set the idea aside until I developed better painting skills, I could never had painted this picture decently one year ago.


I changed a bit some of the items since the sketch version I posted a long time ago, see the description on DeviantArt for a full explaination of how I reworked the traditional symbolism:
http://rangifer.deviantart.com/art/Fourier-Age-Avatar-WIP-292023186


One last WIP shot took some days before. The main figure was more prominent without the rosettes (fur spots), it gave the picture a simpler design but I prefer the final version with colorful rosettes since the cold colors of the fur already contrasts a lot with the scenery colors. I painted the rosettes in yellow/orange and violet to give them a slightly iridescent look.

Panic signs

 

I just learned that the looks of oil paint varies a lot more than I expected depending on the kind of surface, the kind thinner used to rinse brushes, and even the size of brushes and brush strokes. In spite of all coloring tests I still tend to panic about some details, especially in the early stages of painting when a color mix looks different from what I expected.


Here I panicked a bit while painting the first layer of green behind the throne because it looked much more opaque and saturated compared to the miniature test, and as a result the brushwork looks dull. Around the lamp the color looked OK and the brushwork is much more natural:

When using acrylics a mistake in the underpainting is a big deal, but luckily with oils it is much easier to blend further layers of paint with the first ones even after a few days. So there is no point in worrying about subtle nuances of color in the early stages.

This is a later stage where the green area is still too flat but the colors are beginning to fall into place. I haven't used any black: all the dark areas are a very dark violet which I'm also using to darken the other colors where needed. When painted thick this violet becomes almost black, but it remains translucent so it sends nice violet reflections when light hits the surface. Being complementary to the green and yellow of the throne's outline it should make for a more interesting color scheme in the end.

Reboot

Time to restart the blogs. Ill luck struck me during 2011 as I had to face several health issues which drove me away from large projects like paintings, and it took a while to find the will to react to them. Now things are going well enough I guess. I revised my life priorities making more room for drawing and painting and I'm working steadily towards a more professional approach now. During most of 2011 I chose to focus on small commissions so I could learn the basics of art business and time management and also do a lot more exercise on coloring. Now I'm actually beginning to feel confident with palette choices, at least for smaller pictures.

I've tried oil painting too and I'm switching to it immediately for paintings, I'll keep acrylics ust for illustrations on paper. I always though oils were the most difficult media to handle but it turns out that most of the effects I failed to achieve with acrylics are easier to achieve with oils. Finally complementary underpainting which WORKS! Painting wet-in-wet with oils is just more fit for my mindset, I like to have time to think between brush strokes. It's also much easier to fix small mistakes.

My first large oil painting will be the Hindu-like avatar picture which has been patiently waiting for over two years. I've already made a small color test in oils. Still a few details to add or correct but this time it's a reasoned and thorough color test, unlike the improvised crap which was the previous test with acrylics.



Full version already started, with underpainting in acrylics to spare some time. This one along with the following 1-2 paintings will be my first exhibited painting in a collective exhibition in May.

Cinder maiden

No odd symbolism here, just a cinder/blackboard colored unicorness. :-)

Since I keep losing control of color saturation I'll be working for a while with a restricted palette based on earths: titanium white, ivory black, natural sienna, burnt sienna, yellow ochre and ultramarine. This painting is done using with this palette. It's a very simple palette which forces to pull the most out of each color and to think of color temperatures rather than hues, which is the key to controlling saturation.

Incredibly cheesy bunny

What can I say, I like bunnies and everybody feels like painting something cheesy from time to time. :-)

They are actually Irish hares, and the soil slice is based on a photo of soil from a place in Ireland, and I used the palette of the Irish flag as a base. I was tempted to put a celtic symbol on the tree or on a rock but that would have pushed the cheesyness to really dangerous levels.

This was mainly a speed test, it was done from scratch in 4-5 evenings including several corrections along the way (like redrawing the smaller bunny about 4 times and the girl's muzzle several times). Also looking to put more texture in my paintings. The brush strokes here are even too small, I'll try larger ones later, though with acrylics laying down broad strokes is a real pain... acrylic paint just doesn't have the right density, viscosity and ease of mixing to allow good broad strokes. I need to try oils as soon as I get the chance.

The purring avatar

Partial sketch for the avatar picture - this was especially inspired. I'm doing a lot of research on Hindu symbolism and other Indian lore to make this painting, building a symbolic meaning for each element of the picture just as in traditional icons; some are modified versions of traditional Hindu symbols. I'll make a detailed list later as a few important items are still missing around the base of the throne.

Meanwhile I'm painting the Alex picture, this is a crude approximation of the palette. For the actual picture I've picked a blue underpainting for the parrot and the items in the foreground to enrich the colors a bit. Using saturated/complementary underpainting is really hard to learn but I have a gut feeling that it is an ideal technique for me.

"Epona Harnessed" WIP 2

I wanted this picture to be a hard exercise at controlling saturation, so I'm keep it very low except for the most exposed areas of moss-skin. Most of the picture at this point is Van Dyck brown and Payne's gray, with the reddish part being burnt sienna. I'm now covering that with the layers of green and green/yellow, though it will require adjusting later to make the transition from shadow to light smoother, for example on the visible leg.

The thing on her butt is going to be a still smoking fire brand. Horses are branded all the time so it's logical whoever is keeping her tied also wants to mark her as his property.

Phtalo green I find to be the hardest hue to handle along with ultramarine. They are the hardest to mix, due to green overwhelming any other color even when added in small quantities and ultramarine causing sudden hus shifts and losing its hue and turning muddy very easily. But green is also terribly hard to glaze as it tends to turn opaque and lose a lot of strength when dried. Altough it might be due to traces of titanium white or some other pigment in my brand of choice - the great guide to paints by Bruce MacEvoy explains similar issues but it's often hard to tell whether the paint's brand has a quality issue or the pigment is just limited in that way.

Speed paintings are excellent way to test palettes and paints, so I'm doing more of them as warm-ups. Not yet doing one a day but that's what I'm aiming for now.

Beksinski and monumental buildings

What exactly makes the buildings in Beksinski's paintings feel so imposing?

The masterful perspective, the point of view from below and the composition are surely part of the reason, but there's more. He could make buildings look imposing even when seen from above and even when they are tiny in the background.

In the last picture above there is the clever detail of the window light, which is very small, suggesting the tower is very large. But in all the picture I think the illumination plays a major role. His most impressive buildings are stuck by light and better defined in the top part, while the building's base is often blurred, hidden in shadows or smoke. In the real world such an effect is most visible on mountains and huge buildings like skyscrapers when they cast shadows over each other.

To some extent we have an innate perception of natural facts like these, as part of our ability to keep orientation and recognize landmarks. As a consequence, I think that the fuzzyness in the lower part of his buildings suggests they are as imposing as mountains because they are stuck by light in a similar way. But because the shadows are also large and imposing, it also suggest the presence of other structures of similar size in the vicinity, right outside of the visible area. These paintings create the feeling that the viewer is surrounded by immense building and huge masses of clouds, even thought most of them are implied and not part of the scene.

Vertical structures surrounded by clouds, symbols of death, weird lights, desaturated colors etc. also remind of a very specific icon of the XX century... but this connection (of which I think Beksinski was well aware) is mostly symbolic and not as obvious as that with the behavior of light on mountains.

A small Gauguin parody and study

Still studying color theory and making color tests like crazy. I did a small painting for the friends of  the FurryMania forum based on Gauguin's "Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao tupapau)". The colors are based on a photo which is probably quite different from the original (most other photos are not so green and less saturated), but I liked the photo's green/sienna contrast so I used that. The hoopoe Greta is a character by Sans Souci (take a look at her cool sketch blog!).

Studying the details of Gauguin's painting was interesting. Here he curved the border of the sheets to make the foot almost tangent with it, softening the contrast between the foot and the sheet border. The foot would have broken the border too strongly without the little curve I marked here. The fold under the feet adds variety in the middle of the fruits/flowers pattern below, and adds detail to the area to balance the detailed cushions area.

On the girl's head the bed's border becomes very thin, shifting the viewer's attentio to the figure's face. I tired to keep this effect along the hoopoe's crest.

In the original the shape of the bed sheet is broken by the orange cushion. This is a detail I omitted but it was a mistake because it was very important: it connected the girl's dark shape with the dark background by breaking the bed's border and this adds a lot of depth to the bed, balancing the effects of the loose perspective and shading. In my version the sheet is too striking and the hoopoe looks almost floating in the void. I realized it before finishing but the cushion area was already cluttered because of the boar and there was little room to fix the mistake. A lesson learned.

As seen in the grayscale version the orange cushion is an intermediate value between the light and the dark shapes around it, resulting in a very harmonious values map.

The animal on the background of the original is probably an ox with an oxpecker on top of it - I couldn't find any information about it - but at first glance it looked like a boar with a long ear, and since the forum has a boar mascotte too I turned it into a boar. The curves on the far right of the original may also be the backs of other oxes grazing.

"Harvest Moon" WIP 5

I'll keep the number of color tubes used low for a few more pictures - with this one I'm learning a lot on how to control saturation and hues but I'm still not very comfortable with mixing desaturated colors from more than two colors (plus white). Most of the gray areas area a mix of phtalo blue 15:3 and cadmium red with a small addition of yellow ochre.  Working with two main colors to get the grays and a third one for fine tuning seems to work well.

I'm keeping the owls on the trees slightly out of focus to suggest distance too.

On a side note, how cool is this incoming movie?? It's about time for owls to get more love from the media. :-) Don't forget to give a caress to your garden's owl today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsAErYNyRuE

"Shadows" WIP 2

Gave priority to this smaller picture while I meditate about the hues needed by the owls and the horse goddess.

I started with a thin underpainting of ultramarine and burnt sienna, but the hues didn't look quite right on the background, so I started covering it with a rather thick layer of paint and I think it will hide it completely. In the end the palette is just phtalo blue 15:3, burnt sienna, titanium white and little bits of cadmium yellow light. The range of hues and values which can be done with just phtalo + sienna is amazing, it looks like many more colors are being used rather than just two.


I need to give more sense of volume and depth in my pictures, so I experimented with a few technique which improve the illusion of depth. In this case I'm painting the background forest slightly blurred while the fox will be mostly well focused. It's a very basic technique for adding depth, and needs to be done with care because it's very very easy to overdo it and make the background look messy and fake. In this case though I think it should work fine along with the scattered light through the leaves coming from the background plane itself. The blur should add to the light effect to create the impression of a slightly hazy atmosphere.

"Harvest Moon" WIP 4 + sketches

I'm still scared to screw up the picture with every stroke, but things are actually beginning to feel easier. Now I know that if I screw up volumes is only because I'm not visualizing them correctly, and not because I lack the understanding of some tool. It was really frustrating to try drawing lights and shadows without knowing values theory and paying attention to things like value contrast.

I designed this picture so that the darker sides of the owls are seen on the background of bright areas while the highlighted sides have the dark sky as background. The sky also gets lighter towards the bottom, so the dark part of the girl is contrasted against a lighter red behind it. At the bottom of the picture there will be ripe grain painted in a relatively light ochre.

This photo is a bit too red, the shading on the girl is actually dark blue in places (phtalo with a little bit of red) and looks definitely darker. I really need to figure out a better camera setup.

Working on several ideas for the next painting in the meanwhile. One of them involves a tied and badly beaten Epona (the horse deity, not the Zelda one!) giving the finger to her human aggressor, showing that her spirit is not yet tamed...

The first version was, uh, kinda like a dinosaur. Added the antlers too because they seemed appropriate, but they'll probably be gone as they don't really make sense. Epona is the deity of horses, not of all ungulates.
After some tinkering... that's better. Without the antlers and with a better drawn leg she might be ready for painting.
Not it has three distinct sheets attached one on top of the other, it's not exactly the way sketches are supposed to work. :-) I guess barbaric corrections like this one look quite weird to people who have a proper art training.

Portrait of Bluefire

A portrait of chakasa Bluefire done as a present for my good friend leonardo. Bluefire works as an Environmental Restorer, a rather difficult job which is basically fixing/cleaning up the mess left by the late industrial age, back when earthlings deluded themselves that the planet's resources could be exploited without limits.

Most of hir job revolves around slowly restroing soil fertility and biodiversity into barren areas, so that in a few centuries they can produce something again. Here however shi is just taking a pause into a recently burned down wood, where new saplings are beginning to grow back.

Acrylics on board. Unluckily no WIPs for this as I was very unsure while painting it and thought I'd have to restart any time, so I didn't make photos of the various stages... I really need to get past this stupid worrying. Also because now I'm able to correct most mistakes along the way.

For the palette I used many colors but the main components for the background are violet and phtalo green, the rest is various shades of gray done with combinations of blacks (Mars and ivory, the latter has the lowest value), titanium white, ultramarine, Van Dyck brown and yellow ochre.

"Harvest Moon" WIP 3

Currently the way I do the first stages of paintings has been influenced a lot by the excellent Foundation Painting DVD by Shawn Barber. Basically he describes starting with a rough pencil sketch on the canvas and thinking of painting as refining the drawing, just like one would do with pencil. I like sketching and drawing much more than painting loosely, so this approach immediately felt natural to me.

The first step was the phtalo blue underpainting, pencil sketch and some light washes of white to figure out the brighter areas. Then I started with the sky since its color and lightness are very dominating and thus it's better to have it in place before starting with the owls, which will have a lot of white and would easily come out too bright without the background as a reference. (Owls on the trees need to be less bright than the main girl, because they are further away and making them full white would distract the eye from the main girl too soon, which would make the scene look too crowded and confusing.)

With the sky in place it is safe to start with the owls. I started from shadows because in general it's easier to paint with bright colors over dark colors (it's much easier to keep the color under control and get subtle shades of gray). But this time I will really leave the lightest and darkest colors last. Having them in the painting since the beginning is very distracting - I end up with a distorted perception of the intermediate colors and I end up painting more abrupt changes of value instead of subtle variations, like it happened in the crucified owl painting...

30 minutes studies

In 2009 I've been doing exercises jumping round-robin from one kind of exercise to the other, but now I think I need to focus on certain exercises for a few weeks in a row in order to learn the difficult stuff. Now for daily exercises I'll focus for 1-2 months on quick paintings, with two main goals:

- Learning more about lightness and about color temperature of low saturation colors (i.e. how to use effectively warm and cool grays in the same picture, to suggest light of a certain hue etc.);
- Applying to actual pictures the things I learned about landscapes with the ink exercises.

I'll work mostly with limited palettes and low saturation colors so I can concentrate just on lightness and temperature. A good palette for this kind of studies (as suggested on ConcpetArt.org) is:

- yellow ochre
- titanium white
- burnt sienna
- a very dark black

Most blacks mixed with titanium white result in cool grays, so this palette allows to experiment with both warm and cool grays. It is optimized for human skin tones but ochre and sienna are very flexible colors and it's fine for studying values. In some cases (like the camel picture below) I replace burnt sienna with Van Dyck brown to keep the saturation lower.


I'll try different styles but I also want to focus on wide brush strokes, on the track of Sargent and digital speed painting, because they look awesome and they seem a good way to render complex movements as those of birds in flight.