Designing with Shape

-By Scott Fischer

I often say, 'Draw dumb.' (At least in the beginnings of a piece.) And what I mean by that is to turn off the part of your brain that thinks about detail, in order to leave your mind open to bold graphic choices and the all important 'flow' of a composition. It is the forest vs. the tree right? If I obsess details too soon, I lose sight of the entire painting, and it winds up looking like separate elements bashed together on one surface.



As soon as I start thinking about detail and hitting the reference hard, that is when things will start stiffening up. It is the nature of reality intruding on imagination. And in my work, the final result is (hopefully) a solid compromise between the two. That isn't to say I am not glancing at a variety of ref here and there in the beginning, but no more than a glimpse. I want to be consumed with what is happening in my comp and not what is happening in the corner of my eye.



One way I do this is by NOT starting with line when conceptualizing a piece. Instead, I start with shape (Which I often add some chicken scratch too). My chief tools for this are the Photoshop lasso tool, and a wonderful, though often forgotten, little program called Alchemy. (Which, by the way, is FREE!)



What follows are my original shape-comps and the final pieces. In the early stages I am concerned with flow, attitude, composition and value more than how well a hand is drawn or how much detail a costume has. We can ALWAYS refine. It is much harder to get back to the essence of a thing once it is frosted, has lit candles, and everyone is standing around singing Happy Birthday.

Here is a slide show of me building one of these shape-comps in photoshop, using nothing but the lasso tool, fill, gradients, brightness/contrast, and the all important Transform.









And here I build up a face in Alchemy to give an idea of how I use the program. I usually have my 'Create' tool set to 'Shapes'. And as I get into it, I switch on 'Gradient' under the 'Affects' drop down. So essentially it is like drawing with a lasso tool that auto fills with value and gradients. (And I use the 'Transparency' slider to adjust opacity, which lets me build up.) It is the speed with which I can create, and the lack of an un-do (by design) that attracts me to the program. Forces you to commit and make your marks count.

Dragon Attack!

Shivan Dragon   Donato Giancola  2001  copyright Wizards of the Coast

by Donato

Having a little fun today with this post, tracing back the years and my various approaches to dragons.  If there is anything to be learned from this, it is that your first drawings and paintings of dragons will never come out the way you see them in your mind's eye, you need to revisit the theme again, again, and again....and again. And again. Did I mentioned revisiting the theme?



With each interpretation, I find a new quality or characteristic I wish to emphasis about my particular relationship with dragon mythology - Are they an adversary? Companion? Recluse? Beast? Threat? Weapon? Mystic?

Hidden Kingdom   Donato Giancola  2012, private commission

As the years pass, I am more interested in portraying a dragon as an intelligent, mindful individual, representing tremendous potential energy, withheld, but ready to be released.  I think this expression of power in reserve, rather than power outwardly amplified is what I love best about dragons.  I also find these qualities of checked power a theme running through many of my other works.



Keep an eye out for me and my dragons this summer as I return to GenCon for their 50th Anniversary convention and my appearance as the Artist Guest of Honor!  I am honored, and thrilled to be attending!

http://www.gencon.com/experience/gc50artistgoh

Green Dragon   Donato Giancola  1981 Inspired by, and copied from, the D&D Monster Manual drawing by David C. Sutherland

Dragonrider   Donato Giancola  1989, first dragon painting in oils

Dragon Warrior   Donato Giancola  1990, personal project while attending Syracuse University

Dracologist   Donato Giancola  199, personal project

 Dragon Egg   Donato Giancola  1991, personal project

Dragon Hunter  Donato Giancola  1991, personal project while attending Syracuse University

St. George and the Dragon    Donato Giancola  1991, portfolio project

The Pen and the Sword   Donato Giancola  1992  One of my first samples to land book cover illustration work after college

The Road Home   Donato Giancola  1994   First published dragon novel cover illustration 

Sacred Seven    Donato Giancola  1996, book cover for novel by Amy Stout

DragonSight   Donato Giancola  1998  Cover for a Science Fiction Book Club Edition

Ebon Dragon   Donato Giancola  1998,  Portal Expansion for Wizards of the Coast

Wyvern Hunting   Donato Giancola   1999  Cover for David Drake's novel The Mirror of Worlds

Cromat  Donato Giancola   2000   Magic: the Gathering card for Wizards of the Coast

Dracopaleontology   Donato Giancola   2000  cover art

DragonFlight   Donato Giancola   1999 cover art

DragonShadow   Donato Giancola   1998 cover art

Smaug the Golden    Donato Giancola, 2000, cover for Science Fiction Book Club edition of The Hobbit

St. George and the Dragon    Donato Giancola  2010,  DragonCon promotional image

Vanguard - Saga of Heroes  Donato Giancola  2008   Kieth Parkinson makes a guest appearance in the group of adventurers on the left side.

Adventurers  Donato Giancola  2008, private commission

Silk Road  Donato Giancola  2010, private commission

Fall of Gondolin    Donato Giancola  2011, Middle-earth book project

Daenerys in Meereen   Donato Giancola   2016,  inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire

Road to Meereen   Donato Giancola   2015,  personal project inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire

Mother of Dragons    Donato Giancola  2014, cover to the 2015 A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar

Sack of Nargothrond   Donato Giancola  2016, Middle-earth book project & personal piece

Nienor and Glaurung    Donato Giancola  1991, personal piece 

Shivan Dragon   Donato Giancola  2016  Copyright Wizards of the Coast 

Voyager    Donato Giancola  2016, private commission

St George and the Dragon - Fear    Donato Giancola   2016

Color Constancy or is it the Power of Gray?

by Howard Lyon

There as an article that I recently came across (you can read it here) that was really fascinating.  Dan Dos Santos sent it to me as well and I thought I would write a quick post about it.  It shows a plate of strawberries (keep reading, that isn't the fascinating part :)).

The contrast has been reduced and the shadow color is shifted to green.  The strawberries look, as you would expect, red.  But when you examine the image closer with the eye dropper tool, you soon see that there is no red.  It seems impossible.  The entire image is in fact made of greens of various saturations.



The article concludes that the reason we see the strawberries as red is due to "color constancy".  The article quotes Bevel Conway, and expert on visual perception from the National Eye Institute:

Conway said this illusion is also helped out by the fact that we recognize the objects as strawberries, which we very strongly associate with the color red, so our brain is already wired to be looking for those pigments

I think that color constancy is legitimate, and it might add to our perception in this image, but I don't think it fully explains what is happening.  I believe it is because of a different phenomenon. That is that when a gray is placed next to a color of higher saturation and similar hue and value, that gray will take on the appearance of the complementary color.



The reason the strawberries look red is because they are actually less saturated greens next to higher saturated greens and so they start to look like the complement of green.  Let's take a closer look at the image and the palette.



I reduced the image down to 256 colors to simplify the colors and get cleaner color samples.  It looks the same at this point:

Here is what the palette (below) looks like for the above image.  It is arranged according to hue.  The top rows being a little cooler and warming as it gets to the bottom rows.  Look at how the grays fluctuate in color temperature according to how much saturation there is.



*if you take the palette in to photoshop, there are a couple pixels in the palette that are outliers

Here is a crop of the image with colors swatches picked out.  Note how in the close up the "red" is still perceived even though you can't really tell that strawberries are the subject.

The swatches across the top of the image correspond to the pixel at the center of the circle.  Look at how the colors that are more blue or green are higher in saturation.  As the color starts to appear more red, the hue shifts a tiny amount (still blue/green), but the saturation drops off significantly and the gray looks more and more red.  The most "red" color, the one 4th from the left is actually the least saturated color in the crop with a saturation of just 13%.







If we shift the colors more yellow/green, the strawberries start to look purple/magenta:

Here is the 256 color palette for the image above.

This corresponds to the traditional color wheel showing complements across from each other

Here is the image shifted more towards blue.  The strawberries now look distinctly orange.  If color constancy were the only principle in effect, we should still see red strawberries, because we know they are red, but in fact they look orange, reflecting the complement of blue.

I have written about this in a previous post if you want to see this in action with some paintings:



Feeling Grey Today



I look forward to hearing your thoughts.  Thanks!



**update



I created a new image to remove some of the recognizable elements and just focus on the effect.  Here the image has been run through the mosaic filter, rotated and cropped.  I did this to remove any perception of strawberries.  If you take the image into PS and check the value range of the "strawberries" you will see that there is very little change in value, just saturation.  This is important to get the effect.