Poser-Photoshop Test Art, Part 2

This is another test piece I did recently as an experiment in various ways of combining blending layers in Photoshop. As with most things in Photoshop (or Poser, for that matter), the setting variations are virtually endless, so it really ends up being a matter of personal preference much of the time. But in order to decide what those preferences are, you first need to know what options there are to choose from.

I began by reusing elements from the "Poetic Ending" scene I did a while back (the blog post for which I did on it you can view here), since I had them handy as a completed scene that I was never fully satisfied with. Although I love Poser's ability to render stunning detail, it often ends up looking, well... digital... kind of cold and sterile, with no real style or personality. I wanted to achieve something a little more "artsy" in appearance.



An additional difficulty was that from the beginning I had intended to incorporate the associated text from the book into the composition, which in the original version proved problematic at best. The scene is intentionally dark, and while I concentrated the focal point of the scene elements on the left, the only way to insert text over the right half was as light-on-dark type or via a lighter text box, either of which destroyed the shadowy aesthetic altogether. So the dilemma became how to artistically create a dark scene with a light background. And the only way to do that is to imply more darkness in the lighting than actually exists in the image. In essence, I was trying to create a piece of art with two focal points: the character and the text, without either overpowering the other. This has been an ongoing battle for some time now as I've been previsualizing art layouts for The Ring Saga, and thoroughly more difficult than I ever imagined - an endless conflict between light and dark, as it were.

Consequently, this time around I decided to build the scene from the background up, rather than the other way around, from the character in, so to speak. And although I already had all the elements for the scene pre-rendered, in the end I re-did them all from alternate perspectives for the sake of the new composition (I absolutely loathe Photoshop's meagre 3D capabilities, by the way, which I find utterly unhelpful for all but basic layout purposes, paling by comparison to Poser's powerful render engine, nor with the intuitive elegance of Poser's interface).



This is the basic background plate I made, this time using Poser's full-on frontal cam for the render. I retained the lighting I had created for the original scene, consisting of something like eight or nine lights to cast a shadowy candle glow onto the walls and light the windows slightly from behind. In Photoshop I positioned two of these side by side in a two-up 6x9 page layout format, including guides for quarter inch margins with an additional quarter inch press overrun around the outer edges. Normally this would be a half inch margin for standard text books, but as the art runs edge-to-edge, a half inch margin is unnecessary. The center margin will be duplicated on either side when split for print, so as to create a more seamless transition across the page divide.



To create the painted parchment effect for the background I inserted an underlying layer of an aged paper scanned at a high resolution and set the wall layers to "Difference," and then copying them to multiply the result. I then used the burn and dodge tools to lighten and darken the resulting image to my liking. In addition, I created feathered boxed for the text areas using Adjustment Layer Masks to increase the brightness behind the overlaid text. I essentially did the same for the floor element, using Pin Light for the blending style and gradient masks to create a dark-to-light shading, while also exaggerating the perspective lines in order to create a greater sense of depth and draw the viewer's eye in.



To create the "hellfire" burning beneath the floor effect I copied the floor layer and changed the blend setting to Soft Light, filtering it using "Ink Outlines" on the Brush Stokes tab, which gives it a hot red glow that blends with the floor texture, creating fine detailed lines over color washes. I also added a (not-so) subtle alchemy symbol using the Linear Dodge (Add) blend style to burn it into the floor, as well as some slightly more subtle symbols laid over the walls (both at 35% opacity) using Soft Light blending, which I then partially erased. My artistic license here is based on the inherent conflict between the pagan Beowulf subject matter and the Christian monk(s) who penned it, mixed with the historical fact that the first Beowulf scribe died before the book was done (for more on the theories behind the Beowulf scribe's demise see the previous post I linked to above, or the Author's Notes section for The Saga of Beowulf on the Fantasy Castle Books website).



The next element I brought in was the Dead Monk and Lectern, which was rendered all together originally as one piece, but re-rendered in several layers here for artistic reasons which I'll get to in a minute. For one thing, I decided to use the full body of the monk rather than just the upper torso, which is all I had before, so I had to re-pose the lower half and recalculate the dynamic cloth of the monk's robe in Poser. The need for this became obvious with the background all laid out, as there was now much more space and distance in the scene than before, so that a close-up of the monk was no longer possible. And while I lost some nice gruesome facial detail, I gained a better look and balance overall.



The technique used for "painting in" all the props was essentially the same throughout, although I employed different settings and sorting orders for the four to eight layers of each one in order both to try out differences and to match the background style and lighting, as well as creating an overall artistic feel.



The steps are basically these:



1. Render each prop separately with the same lighting as the background plate, and in its final perspective. To do this I imported the background comp into Poser and positioned my remaining props to match.



2. Import the base render layer into Photoshop, scaling and positioning it into its final form.



3. Duplicate the layer and change its blending style to Linear Dodge (Add). This lightens it up and brings out the highlights. Here, of course, I'm starting with a very dark render, so if you render with a fairly bright lighting set you'll have to create a darken layer to offset this (or change your lighting).



4. Duplicate the base render layer again and filter it with the "Ink Outlines" style under Brush Strokes. Here you have a wide range of settings to choose from, depending on the style you're after. In most cases I used a very short stroke to keep the details, such as on the chest and lectern in the foreground, while lengthening it on others, most noticeably on the Vitrine and its contents at the center, which I needed to blend into the back wall more than any other prop. I also cranked the light setting up while keeping the darks fairly low, if not all the way down at 1. However, I erased the center glass portion of this layer to make the shelves contents more visible.



5. Duplicate still one more layer of the base render, this time using the "Find Edges" filter under the Stylize options. This results in a blueprint-looking line drawing which I desaturate to gray, although you don't really have to. Set this layer to "Darken" or "Darker Color" depending on your preference for the layer content. This creates a slight ink or pencil drawing effect, which you can lessen by lowering the opacity, although in some instances I duplicated this layer to strengthen the effect.



Generally this is the layer order I employed, but changing the order alters the resulting effect, since each blending style acts upon the layers beneath it. In addition, further layers were added on some elements:



For the high-backed Medieval chair (to the right of the Vitrine), I added a Soft Light layer to further wash out the color and create a subtle watercolor wash effect to its woodgrain texture, while heavily darkening its outline by doubling up the Find Edges layer. I did this for the Vitrine as well, but added a gradiated layer mask to make the top more abstract and the bottom more detailed, which helped to blend it with both the wall and floor. Initially I made it dark on the bottom and light on the top, but it actually looked and blended better by using a contrasting gradiation. That's just one of the many reasons to always experiment and try new ideas.



For the dead monk (but not the lectern) I pulled back the Ink Outlines layer, but added both Sumi-e and crosshatch layers, each at low opacity, and each of which were painted in only where I wanted them using layer masks. Here my concern was to keep as much facial detail and coloration as possible, while rendering a painterly quality. I had used a deathly white skin texture for the base render, so I avoided as much as possible adding the surrounding golden-browns back into it and losing the deathly pall.



For the book and the lectern I used three Find Edges layers set to Darken, Multiply and Overlay, in that order, erasing candle flame portion from the top two. I also added in the dripping ink, spilled wine and candle smoke layers from the previous version of the scene, all of which (save the wine spill) were created using various versions of Rons Photoshop brushes (as described in the prior post).



Finally, I laid a very low-opacity copy of the aged paper texture over the whole image (except for the smoke and wine stain layers), which leveled out the color and luminosity a bit. I then painted in some blending shadows using the burn tool on the underlying parchment layer. And there you have it. That's basically it. All together I think it took about twenty hours or so to piece together, although, of course, I'd already done a lot of work previously creating the original scene elements and lighting, not to mention the text, which is part of a much, much larger manuscript.



But that's another story.