Speedpainting - by Goro Fujita

from http://chapter-56.blogspot.com/2006/11/speedpainting.html

 

 

 

1. Backgroundcolor
I rarely start with a white canvas. Cause white is the brightest color. If white is already your backgroundcolor, it's often times hard to handle the values in your painting. You can only go darker but you have no option to go into the highlight areas cause you already have the brightest color as your background. So a good thing is to start with a midtone. The color or value of your background is also dependent on your environment. So when I would like to paint something like a forest by daylight I would tend to use a brownish or greenish midtone as a background color. When I paint something dark and cool I start out with a dark blue or gray background.

2. Values
In the foreground you have usually the highest contrast. The darkest darks and the brightest brights. The farther things are away from your viewpoint the lower is the contrast. When you are in the stage where you block in your shapes, keep that in mind.
You will see in the tutorial that the rocks in the background have almost the same value as the sky and the color is only slightly different form each other.
Then again the foreground has a strong contrast with the dark rocks. They pop forward.
Here is an example I just did in 5min.


The decreasing contrast and the decreasing size of the objects gives you a sense of depth in the image. Using grayscales is a great way to study values.

3. Highlights
When you have no experience in using colors, you will notice that you tend to use white for the highlights. But when you observe highlights you will see that they are rarely white. In sunlight for example the highlights are very saturated. That doesn't mean that you aren't allowed to use white highlights, cause metallic objects often have bright white highlights. Just remember that dependent on the material and the lighting highlight colors can vary a lot.
The wooden beam below shows what I mean. The highlight area is a saturated light brown.

4. Start Rough and Fast end Detailed and Slow
When you are painting it is important to keep it rough at the beginning. Work on the whole painting all the time. Don't struggle with details.
In this example I did a painting using a reference photo in about 30min.

 

Reference Image



Speed Painting

So try to be fast and loose at the beginning. It's harder than it sounds ^^

5. Painting from reference images
As I said in the post before, it helped me a lot painting from reference to understand values, colors and light. I think it is a pretty good way to learn how colors and light work together. An important thing when you paint from reference images is not to pick the colors with the eyedropper tool. Try to see the colors with your own eyes and pick the colors by yourself.
When you pick the colors always ask yourself why you decide to pick this certain color. 'why do you use this dark gray for the skin tone in the shadow' or 'why do you use a saturated orange for the forest ground' etc.
Paint with a time limit around 30min up to one hour. If the painting looks ugly even after an hour don't worry about it, save your work and try to be better next time. The more mistakes you do the more you learn out of them. Number your images so you can always look back and see your progress.

For example:
sp_0001_image title
sp_0002_image title
etc.

I did around 30 paintings from reference back in the days. And did some paintings of my own in between using the experience I gained through the reference images. And suddenly I could create moods without using reference images. That was an awesome moment ^^
As long as you practice you will get better and better. Just keep that in mind.

The points I mentioned above helped me improve my painting skills very quickly.
Hope it might help some people out there as well!

And here is the painting I did today. As I said, I did a screen caputre of this one but the capture file was corrupt so no video...sorry T.T


over and out ^^