wckedsunny: [color=DimGray]Thank you for the contribution. I am glad you found the Spell Dancer technique helpful. Keep in mind though, that my renders are painted-over in that technique.
yfchild: Thank you for sharing your image! Interesting world.
My painting tutorial is still pending, but I have another workflow. This painting took me 3 1/2 hours to create.
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](javascript:zb_insimg(‘51562’,‘Hunter4.jpg’,1,0))
I don’t dare to post any of my results yet as they lack a lot… But I must thank you a lot as your work flow made a lot of things ‘click’ in my mind.
Using the ‘rough’ 2.5 geometry to create shadow and light just has shortened my learning curve significantly. I also use the layers to simply drop a few geometry items on one layer just to see how shadow falls, then switch it off, and back to the original layer to paint/correct the image I am working on.
It actually made me draw things I would not have attempted before. Your work flow is a great asset and should be considered as an teaching aid by many.
Have a great weekend!
Lemo
Hey Mytholon!
You got a beautiful piece of art here. I really love the colors you picked, the lighting and the composition of the girl siting on the tree. Very nice!
One question! Do you use PS or Painter?
Ok keep the good work! Have a good one!
Javier Loredo.
Mytholon,
Again, can’t say thanks enough for the things you share to help give others more food for thought. I’m just getting started in 3d and as more of a traditional artist it helps to see various workflows which help merge both genre’s. Brings me insight and workable knowledge!! Can’t put a price tag on that if you could you’d be extremely wealthly i’d imagine. Perhaps you’ll do a instructional dvd and that could come to pass 
.
At any rate keep it up… your contributions speak for themselves but many thanks my friend!!
Mytholon, I’ve been following this thread now for a while but still have not commented so thought now was the time. Just wanted to say I think this is a excellent way to produce quality concept art in an efficient way. I think I’ll certainly give this a try for my next character design.
Thanks for showing us the ropes 
Lemmonado: I am looking forward to the results of your experiments.
javierloredo: I use PS.
Painter is excellent for illustrations and digital paintings, and it has the unique ability to paint and blend at the same time.
However, I find it too slow for concept art. There are ways and techniques to work faster in it, but when I use them, it seems to me that the end result and especially the colors tend to have a copycut look, immitating GrandMaster concept artist Ryan Church (bow in deep respect).
So its just ZBrush, PS and Modo for me.
AngelJ & eboy: You are very welcome. If this thread has helped you become more creative, then that is a great reward to me.
Here is another image, created using the same techniques. 2 hours.
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There is no exclamation hard enough to describe my opinion about your work :o
You are just amazing :o
Keep walking…
Hey that looks realy cool. looks like its missing some torches and piles of bones or something.
Mytholon, if I were a director/producer with a budget, I’d let you design my films without a question! small_orange_diamond
Time for me to study your images again. Isn’t it funny how we bow in respect to the ppl ‘above’ us? I’ll bow to you for now: I hardly dare look at Ryan Church’s work… 
Ok, I tried to follow some of Mytholon’s workflow again, trying to make a landscape like the first posts and the last few. Three hours in the process yet, but I’m not going for speed at this point: something that would look like a painted landscape would already make me verry happy. :rolleyes:
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The first steps were fun and easy. But now I get to the paintover part, and I’m a bit at a loss as how to proceed. Just using the smudge brush doesn’t feel very satisfying and I loose much of the nice details in the rock. What would be the best tools to use while painting so I can get that painted look and still have a lot of detail? I guess the already shown alpha’s come into play but how to make those and with what settings to use them is a bit confusing to me.
Guess I need a bit of advise right now, and ofcourse: crit’s are always welcome. 
That looks already very well!. Try and use a 4096 texture on that model, and AUV or GUV tiles. hat would eliminate the distortions. Or use the stencil and do not use the projection master at all. In that case, use the largest canvas size you can manage and paint in aahalf. That also gives more detail and no jaggies.
Lemo
Thanks Lemo! I used Bcast for this canvas format. small_orange_diamond
This image ís done in AAhalf. I thought the distortions were caused by the way I blew up my plane object. There isn’t any texture involved so far, as my goal is a 2D painting and not a 3D textured object. I just placed my un-textured and un-UVed object in a fancy position and started using the deco brush. Is it better to UV and Texture anyhow?
I didn’t mind the distortions so much as I was planning to paint it over anyway. But: a nicer reference picture will make my painting nicer too I guess, so I’m eager to learn…
Hey Plakkie, I have been working with this technique too and the bet advice I can give you is- you have to just let go of what you have now and dig in ant start painting. Don’t wory about loosing your details, just use what you have there as a base to create something new , and hope for happy accidents. I know how you feel, because what you have there already looks good and at first you are going to feel like you are messing it up. But after I make a mess of things for a bit it usually starts to come together. As far as what brushes to use I use them all, the simple brush, smudge with color bleed, MRGBZ grabber with directional brush and drag and drop, deco, are my favorites.
Thanks for the advice Harmonic! Indeed I felt like I was making a mess of it. I’ll try and go on messing it up, untill maybe something new happens.
I ám curious how you are using “MRGBZ grabber with directional brush” while overpainting. Can you show an exemple?
Hey Plakkie I am glad you asked, it is one of my favorite Painting methods in zbrush. It’s is especially god for adding allot of texture. Sometimes while I paint I will start to get a pattern some color variations that I really like, I grab that piece of the canvas, well usually many different pieces, so you can keep it from getting to repeated. Then paint those textures on using various alphas and opacities. You can get some really great abstract results. I use it allot for backgrounds but it could just as easily be used for texturing anything.
I used it a lot in painting the background for this piece that I am working on here. I think The ability to paint textures in this way unique to Zbrush and it some thing I miss when using PS or Painter.
Ah, I see. Very cool!
Well, I followed Harmonic’s advice and started messing up my image with the smudge tool, loaded with regularly picked colors from my original image. After the first scary moments the simple mindless fun of painting kicked in and after an hour my I took a step back (zoomed out) from my foreground rocks and…
they still looked a bit like rocks! 
[attach=52209]landscaping2.jpg[/attach]
I will do the background too, to see where this will go. Crit’s and tips are again welcome.
I have one problem. I baked the layer before the start of the paintover. But now I can’t paint in the part where the sky should be. There is nog geometry there, so Zbrush won’t color it? How do I make this empty bit act as a blanc piece of paper?
One lonely person working through the night in the ergonomics lab…
And having fun!
Done the background and the rocks to the left. I’d like to make a dense forest in de valley below if I only knew how…
I found out that I could still place a plane behind my mountains, so, I baked again and I could paint a sky (kinda). 2.5D rocks!
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](javascript:zb_insimg(‘52211’,‘landschap5.jpg’,1,0))
It’s weird… in the left part of the background a small plateau formed itself in the painting while it wasn’t in the rendered object. It’s probably one of those happy accidents?
Hey that’s looken good, I personally don, like the mount of fog, I would paint some of that out. Instead of baking the layer I covert it to a flat image with the MRGBZ grabber ( make shore you turn auto crop off) or by exporting it as a pds and then importing it. And for painting trees and such check out the first page of this thread again, mython does a great job of suggesting grass and trees with a custom brush, without allot of detail.
Thanks Harmonic! Ofcourse, MRGBZ grabber, that would work too. Do I understand correct that you loose you’re depth info after that?
“I personally don’t like the mount of fog”. Do you mean the amount of fog? I used it to get a suggestion of depth in the image. I do think it’s just a bit to gray at the moment, but I’m planning to add a bit of contrast in PS when I’m finished with it.
![[attach=52209]landscaping2.jpg[/attach]](http://javascript%3Cb%3E%3C/b%3E:zb_insimg('52209','landscaping2.jpg',1,0)){kind=link}