Poser-Photoshop Test Art

I've been working a lot lately on fine-tuning an illustrative style for my render art that suits the tone and mode of my current project, so I thought I'd start posting some of the results here, both so that you can see what I've been working on, and as a sort of mini tutorial series for how it was done. First up, this Viking Meadhorn test, which was intended to look something like a pen and ink with watercolor wash, which is a style I've loved for years, from the children's illustrations of Arthur Rackham to Quinton Hoover's card art for Magic: The Gathering (neither of whom this piece resembles in the least, by the way).



The basic piece began with a fairly straightforward render using Poser's default lights and camera settings. The prop is from the recently released Drinking Horns set by Valandar (available at DAZ 3D), to which I added only an edge-blend node to add more dark shading to its curvature. I also toned down the displacement on the horn engraving, though not on the rim detail, which I left alone.



I then did two additional renders in Poser using the Sketch Designer, one on the default Pencil & Ink setting and another in a stipple style by altering the line lengths to their shortest settings. These were then combined in Photoshop to create this black and white line drawing which captures the shape and shading in a nice stark black.



A second pencil sketch variation was created using Photoshop's "Find Edges" filter (under the Stylize category) on a copy of the basic texture render. This gives a more linear, outline drawing result with a high degree of detail. This is one of the things that distinguishes an illustrative style from most other art, aside from comics, with which it is closely related. However, I didn't want a comic book look for this style, with dark black ink outlines, but rather something a bit more more stark and bold to suit the Viking world.

The next step was to bring in color, and to do this I used a trick I stumbled on by mistake one day, and for which the preceding steps are necessary. Start by creating a new layer with a copy of the basic texture render and then process it using the Brush Strokes-Ink Outlines filter. For this one I used a short stroke length of 1, with dark set low on 7 and light cranked up to 50. This creates a highlighted color tone with sharpened edges.

This is then blended with the pencil-stipple render set on Soft Light to create the bleached out blood red effect. Two copies of this are layered over the basic render, one set to Lighten and the other on Darken Color (I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but it creates the stark lights and darks that brings out the texture and the other colors). An additional layer of 25% Noise is added at 14% opacity, the Found Edges layer is blended in at 50% to bring out the "hand-drawn" details further, while the shadows are erased from the outline layers to tone them down a bit, since they multiply with each new layer added.

The final effect is kind of a dirty, well-used drinking vessel both darkened and bleached by age, with a nice metallic shine to the trim details that resembles reflected firelight. The highlights are crisp and clean with plenty of subtle texture and color, so that it layers well on any background - and all without ever touching a pen or brush.