Blizzcon Digital Art Panel Notes

azriah:

Just took some notes from this panel to use as a reference for myself and others if they need them!

Drawing a character

• Start with values, e.g. if a material is dark or light then that affects the shade of grey you use to put down the value
• Face has to be good because humans instinctively look toward faces
• Changing brush sizes depending on area
• Start hair in one dark mass with only a couple slight highlights – it’s really easy to over complicate things by jumping into little strands too fast
• When you put too much detail in a lot of places it gets too hard to focus on the piece as a whole because there’s too much going on, so leave the detail for some sections and other times rely on tricking the audience’s eye to see an idea of something
• After you get the values in, add a couple ‘Color’ layers to help establish a base tone for the piece 
• e.g. Cole used a purple overlay and then went over on a color layer with blue to bring out the colors; he said that digital art has a problem with making colors look pretty flat

Drawing an environment

• Drawing an environment – started smacking down colors in the horizon and vague building shades, something that happens with experience and comfort
• Using complementary colors like orange and blue, orange closer to the ground where blue is higher up in the sky
• Cloud shapes loosely circular but in reality they almost act like arrows drawing the eye to the focal point of the picture