Concept Art Landscapes || From miniatures to final concept!

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Ayime

Ayime

Hi all!

My name is Ayime and I am a concept artist from Spain, with experience in the world of comics, animation and video games!

 

Today I'm going to show you briefly how to move from our ideas or "thumbnails" (miniatures in Spanish) to a final concept.

 

The first thing to say is that this tutorial focuses on the process, not on painting things concretely! Here I show you my way of moving from an idea to a final art.

 

Well, we started!

1. Creation of our drawing base

1: We create a file in horizontal format. In my case I chose the measurements of an A3 paper (3508 px · 4961 px) and a high resolution of 300 dpi. I also like to put the "Ilustracion" format so that we can create a file with a background called "papel".

2. We choose from our colors, a color with little saturation. We have to imagine that the colors are divided into 4, like a window. We will call this window the "TONALITIES OF A COLOR".

 

The colors in zone 1 are light colors (for example they are the sun, the moon, a light bulb ...), the colors in zone 2 are colors NEAR to light but they are NOT light (that is, they are not light bulb) and are more colored, these are called SATURATED colors, that is, they have less amount of grays. Those in zone 3 are UNSATURATED colors (those that have more amount of gray, those that we will use as a base) and those in zone 4 are colors for SHADOWS (the ones opposed to light).

Then we choose any color that is in zone 3, that has little saturation.

3. With our color selected, in the menu on the paper where it says "layer color", we click on it and it automatically paints our layer "paper" of the color that we had chosen.

4. With a tone of the area number 4 of the same color as our background, we paint a rectangle. You can paint as many as you want but I recommend you to be between a minimum of 3 to 9 maximum.

The square we have to do with filling, that is, it is not just a line, since it will help us as background of our "thumbnails".

It is necessary that there are more than 2 squares that will help us to have more options when deciding our design.

5. Copy and paste or make as many rectangles as we want to make images. In my case they are 9 images so I made 9 rectangles.

6. Now we will block the alpha of our layer of rectangles in order to start painting. By blocking the alpha, we can not get out of line and it helps us keep the rectangles! To block the alpha or unlock the alpha of a layer we simply have to give the symbol with a white padlock.

 

We also choose our brushes and start to draw using internet references. It is VERY important to always have REFERENCES of what we want to do !!!!!

 

In my case I chose to make a forest with mountains. (I can not upload the image of the references because they are photos that I ONLY used to guide me, to see how to make mountains, trees, rivers, etc. !!)

 

 

I have also chosen my favorite brush, predetermined in Clip Studio, because I like the effect similar to watercolor and it helps us a lot to mix colors!

2. Start painting

1. Before starting to paint, it is advisable to use only ONE color but with different shades (the shades are explained in part 2 above).

 

For this, Clip Studio allows you to choose a color palette in which there is only one COLOR and its TONALITIES. We will work with this color palette to make work faster.

 

We can click on the colors or modify the parameters of the lateral bars (marked in blue in the image) and vertical (marked in green in the image).

The vertical bar with an S (the blue one) shows us the amount of WHITE the colors have.

The horizontal bar with a V (the green one) marks the amount of BLACK the colors have.

 

We can modify their values to get the tones we want!

2. When starting to paint it is advisable to put a light bulb of a lighter color to that of our square. In my case I have imagined that it is the sun.

 

So we can adjust the shadows and lights of our landscapes much more quickly and easily!

3. Now is when we start painting !!

 

It is important for each artist to have MANY reference images on which to base our art!

 

Taking into account your references, create different landscapes WITHOUT copying the references, thinking of a unique landscape!

 

Once this is done, we select 1 of our landscapes only.

 

ATTENTION: This is a thumbnail or thumbnail, that is, it is an image that will serve as a REFERENCE to make our final image or to present it as a basic concept art work. That is, our miniature does not have to have much detail, it is better to try to visualize our image to general features.

 

A good trick to not go crazy with the final finish of our thumbnails is to look at them from far away or with half-closed eyes. So our view will only see the general spots. If you can understand the image from afar, we have made a good landscape !!

4. Once we have our chosen thumbnail, we select it and copy it into a new layer.

To select, we can take the triangle selection tool and surround the image.

 

To duplicate or copy our image, just press CTRL + C and then CTRL + V to paste the image as a new layer. (the + symbol means that you have to press the keys at the same time!)

If your keyboard shortcuts do not work you can go to Edit> COPY and again Edit> PASTE.

 

 

Once we have our layer doubled so as not to damage the thumbnails, we scale it.

We can scale the layer with CTRL + T or in Edit> Transform> Scale + / Scale - / Rotate.

3. Retouch the final image

1. We are already in the final part. Now it's time to touch up the image. We can give you more detail now. Once finished, we have to pass it to black and white to apply color.

 

To pass it to black and white there are two options:

 

OPTION A- With the keyboard shortcut of CTRL + U we access a menu where we can touch the saturation of color, tone and brightness. To pass our image to black and white we must put the saturation to -100, so it will automatically go to gray tones.

 

 

OPTION B- The second option we have is to go to:

Edit> Tonal Correction> Hue / Saturation / Luminosity

And we will get the same window as before, where we should put Saturation -100

2. Once we have our image in black and white (gray tones) we can begin to paint it. We select colors in my case a blue for the sky and a green for the mountain. And we paint in a new layer on our image, following the silhouette. To follow the silhouette we can play with layer opacity.

 

Remember NOT to paint the original layer !!!!

3. Now to apply those colors, we must put both layers in "light clear" mode so that the colors are applied correctly.

4. We only have to give details!

 

From now on you can do whatever you want! Now you can start painting over layers or merge yours to give details! The limit is your imagination!

 

In my case I put a sun and retouched the color to make it more natural. The sun I did with yellow tones and the layer I put it in SOBREEXPONER (BRIGHTNESS) mode.

5. It only remains that you take hours and imagination until you get the results that you like the most!

 

THANK YOU for reading this tutorial !! And I hope it has helped you learn a little bit about how to easily make landscape concepts !!

 

See you!

 

@ayimeart

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