under the glow of the tv light

2Rua: TRACE THE COMP! I literally dont give a crap. For me, this series was more about my colour work, so I did not want to spend more than an hour on sketching and figuring out stuff. You want your sketch to be as clean as possible bc it makes your life so much easier. I then do an underpainting, usually an orange!

3Toru: FLATS Then you do your flats! (this section is more of. tips of tricks then anything else) Now for me, environments has always been one of my strengths and I've had years of practice!! However if you're starting up with this type of illustration just start with colourpicking from your reference. I've always enjoyed doing small photostudies of my own landscape photos and also photos of. anything. Can be people, can be club lighting, can be a sunset, can be my friends. You do an INSANE amount of passive learning just by watching the colour wheel change as you plop the eyedropper tool somewhere. you learn a lot of great colour relativity through it as well (that is where your grey orange looks blue when you put it next to a bright orange. colour relativity!)

In your flats, you want it to be loose and broad. I keep in mind traditional techniques, although digital is much more forgiving compared to it. For me I like seeing my colours mix with the underpainting, so the brush i use is semi opaque depending on my pen pressure. The pops of underpainting are super cool to me and make my colours overall more cohesive. I attatched some examples of my flats below!

flats are the most important part of the process, in oldies station + the craving (single version) you can see that it already looks like the finished version colour wise. here are some of the things I consider when doing them! I wish i could say that I just put colours and hope they look good. but NO i am quite meticulous with my colour choices and there are always like 5 billion thoughts behind every single colour, the quantity of it and its place in the piece. sometimes i just have happy mistakes though!

- COMPOSITION: In environment, I can count on things in the background being more blurry and also more (usually)blue because of haze in the blue sky. thus I can use larger shapes to portray this, and I don't let myself get sucked up by the background. Foreground should become more detailed, and depending on the composition it is also where the focal point is. so for oldies station, foreground should become detailed, as it is closer to the camera. but that means tyler should be extra detailed due to his importance in the composition. Look at the reference photo and see what the camera focuses on and what it doesn't.

- general: Break things up with either colour, shape or texture. a. COLOUR : this can look like adding a slightly different hue (look at midwest indigo (flats) + sky in lavish + background of both cravings) to mimic the natural colour variation that comes with photos. It's just fun as well haha. Try to use the same colours in more than one place! it supports cohesion! complimentary colours are also VERY fun, (see ATROFD close up + oldies station flats) they add so much life and I particularly like using blues and purplse in my shadows. This is more relevant in my outdoor pieces, because blue sky blue shadows blah blah blah I used the same purple/blue in tyler's jacket in the shadows of the trees, relating back to the point before. As a rule of thumb, you want an imbalanced ratio of complimentary, likee 70/30,, when theres equal amounts it looks kinda weird.

b. TEXTURE : texture is also so so important. The trees in midwest indigo are broken up by some scribbles in the pale grey ones, adding some noise to the overall solid trees, which is important because midwest indigo comp is fairly simple , which means more detail can be added! the oldies station has that flaky orange tree that is while part of the og photo, seperates the mid ground and background, it also brings some focus to josh as the secondary focal point.

While the pushing and pulling of texture usually comes in the rendering stage, I always think about which sections of texture is most important to lay down, which I usually tell by squinting at my reference photo. idk if that part makes sense. i swear I'm not making stuff up. Large swathes of texture is also super cool! (look at midwest indigo close up, i used lasso tool and watercolour brush for that) have fun! texture is yummy

c. SHAPE : depending on the comp, I usually keep 'big, medium, small' shape in mind. Like in the pockets of sky I always have a big, medium and small pocket. I don't think about this section as in depth compared to the other two. In general you want a good balance between organic shapes and regular shapes, but at the start you definitely wanna start big and then carve away at them when you render. Make interesting shapes!! Interesting irregular shapes bring joy!!

Don't get bugged up in your references ^_^ You are an artist and you have creative freedom to make it look however the hell you want!! A lot of this is just putting colours and textures and shapes in the moment and just playing around. shrugs. I say meticulous because i KNOW the reason why i want to do any of the strokes i'm putting down, but it's not that serious in my mind when I'm doing it. It's like. I know purple look good with green. I put purple in shadow. yayyyy colour theory. I always make my pieces much more colourful compared to the video, which is one of the great pleasures of being an artist. compare and contrast and you will see!

4Whā: RENDERING

just become a freebird with this one LOL Honestly a lot of this is just clean up for me (remember, good base and good flats means less adjustment when cleaning up, you're just colourpicking the colours you already put down in flats) . I use 4-7 layers for rendering. the most was like 12 when doing the craving (single vers) For this specific style, I was very inspired by environment concept art from movies and shows, which is usually quite reliant on digital tools such as lasso, alpha lock, clipping mask, the use of texture brushes . I really adore how 'low effort' yet effective these techniques are, and it also cuts down my rendering time by a LOT. this also means you have to control your layers a bit more carefully, esp when using alphalock. I used a LOT of alphalock in the craving (single) for the brushes and pens in the tins and on the table. midwest indigo was a couple carefully placed strokes of a big texture brush and it created a super cool snow-on-ice texture, then I just filled in gaps according to my liking. I do think as the series progressed it became more stylised to my process and tastes, but those were where my roots were! Being inspired by other artists is always the best ^_^

TEXTURE: A lot of this series was me wanting to see human touch that hasn't been altered or fineturned into oblivion in order to make it photorealistic. which is also what I love seeing in environment concept art. I like seeing the scribbles, I like seeing that streak of colour. Sometimes I really like seeing just a big solid block of colour (tyler's pants in the craving (jennas ver.) ) because it looks natural, but also still looks human. definitely a lot of scribbling, esp in the trees LOL.

I also had a lot of fun with the airbrush and lasso tool in the craving (jenna's version) because I really liked the cotton/linen texture on tyler's shirt and I was wondering how to recreate it without drawing each thread one by one. A lot of the rendering process is setting yourself loose, Navigating is by far my most rigid piece and it shows, because that was the very first mv i started with. I still think the fire can be more flowy than it is!! It always comes back to practice walallala.

To push the human touch a lot of it is doing it once and then not touching it again, I do think the more I fine tuned things the less happy I was with the final illustration, (this is more applicable to my outdoor environments, for more controlled environments/scenes such as the craving (single) and next semester, detail and precision was more of a focus) I do think this comes with practice and your own style but it's definitely something to keep in mind.

-be okay with less detail!! I can assure you that even though these illustrations look complex and full, I spent an average of 8 hours on each one, which is quite short! Midwest indigo only took 3 hours. I think when it comes to environments it so easy to be lost in the details and while its so cool ot be able to look back and go!! wow!! #mydetails, it also can become inredibly overwhelming.

I almost ragequit paladin and the craving (single) from the amount of unnecessary work I put myself under. I don't regret any of the effort I put in, but also it does in fact mess up the visual depth when you put effort into the wrong places, and you have to get rid of it and start again. (stares at ATROFD)

-have a good balance of soft and hard edges!! having things melt into the background looks cool and idk it just looks cool!! You want to have enough structure where things make sense when you look at it, but if everthing was cleanly cut, it'd look a bit offputting. Looking at your reference photo is a great way to see which parts are softer and which parts have more contrast. the best example i have in here is navigating final and the lavish close up (altho that one isn't as clear)

5Whetu : FINAL DETAILS I carry great pride in my colour picking skills so the overlay I put on top is usually either just to brighten things up or to colour correct some areas, when doing these i try not to use any blending mode. my only exception was next semester ^_^ This is purely personal though, because this series was also for me to see how far I can get with my own brain and eyes.

I also usually use the default/spray droplet brush and then motion blur it to create a sense of movement. Pieces like paladin and the craving (jennas vers.) don't need it, becuase I wanted it to feel calm ^_^ but it worked very well for pieces like midwest indigo and navigating, as snow and smoke particles

tbh motion blur and gaussian blur were such good friends, they create good movement, and it adds back to my whole deal of trying to make it look like a photo.