Color Studies and Spooky Demons

It's about time that I start experimenting with visual ideas for my Film Opening, so I sat down for a bit and created a lighting and color study following the inspiration from one of my previous blog posts. 

First, I used a program called PureRef to put together a reference board with all of the inspiration I gathered. PureRef is great since it will always stay over your program while working so you will be able to reference it at all times.

Reference Board 

I wanted to go for a color palette consisting of a very violent red as a Primary color and a more subdued yellowish green as a secondary. My idea for the piece consisted of a figure looking towards the audience semi-menacingly. While my goal for this piece is to develop color and lighting, and this figure doesn't necessarily have to relate to my film opening in the end a friend talked to me about how I could have this figure be revealed at the end of my opening to be hanging over the entire environment and have it be some form of foreshadowing or world-building. 

I started out by blocking out the figure. I thought it would be interesting if I used skeleton pieces from different animals and humans to make up the figure, so I got a few models of whale and bear skeletons and started to kitbash from them, placing them together to make something interesting. 

Beginning sketch of the piece.

I continued by adding the arms, some horns, and a thorn sticking through its head. Then I started to mess around with materials, adding a semi-transparent subsurface scattering effect. Subsurface scattering is an effect you see when light scatters through a semi-transparent object (you can notice this effect when light hits lighter tones of skin.)

More Developed Lighting and Materials.

While I liked the Subsurface effect, there was not enough contrast for you to be able to determine what you are looking at, so I started to tone down the effect and played around with other settings.

Clearer Contrast

I added a background and a foreground element to help with leading the viewers eyes to the subject. Not only that, I brought back the Subsurface Scattering  but this time not so heavily. I also added some glows to the horns to give a more dramatic effect. 

At this point, I was pretty happy with where I was headed, but I felt there were some changes that I wanted to make that were more simple to do as a paintover in photoshop, so I jumped into the program and started to give the piece a more stylized look. I added additional shadows to the eye sockets and started to give the piece a softer painterly look.

Photoshop Paintover

I finished off the piece by adding some outlines for that stylized look and gave it some glowing eyes and an upside-down cross to make it look even creepier (Somewhere along the line this turned into a horror piece and honestly I kinda love it hahaha). Now here is the finished piece!

I learned a lot about color and lighting throughout this experience and even got some inspiration for possible story elements for my film opening.