Month / April 2022

How to measure values accurately ?

— 6 minutes read —

Digital painting grammar is fascinating. There are many rule-sets that function together to produce believable images. We could talk length about perspective and the mathematics behind it that make it possible to create the illusion of depth on a 2D surface. We could talk about the rules governing how lighting impact colors of the illuminated objects. But today what I want to talk about is values, and how to properly measure them.

Measuring values

Values in a nutshell is a term used to designate how light or dark a color is. After drawing and structure, values is the most important component in the recipe for a realistic painting. Colors could be all wrong, the image would still be perfectly readable if the values were accurate. Twist it backwards and the equation falls apart : colors cannot create the illusion of life on their own. In fact Craig Mullins said it best ; drawing is usually off 80% of the time, values are off 19%, and the other 1%, we should not worry too much about.

Now that we’ve established how important values are, let’s dive in. The way to start thinking about them is to use a value-scale ranging from 0 to 10, with 0 being pitch dark, and 10 being pure white.

Switching to a number system allows for accurate measurements which is a prerequisite in our effort to later intuitively paint good values ourselves. The heart of science is measurements. We can’t manipulate what we can’t properly measure and we cannot at the beginner stage rely on our eyes to do so. Therefore, we need a tool. Fortunately, as digital painters, we dispose of a really convenient tool to study values : the color picker.

HSB sliders limitation

There is a caveat though. You might have noticed that in your favorite painting software, each color can be expressed as HSB sliders. That B in HSB stands for brightness, and you would be forgiven to think that it closely resemble our idea of values. I would stop you there however and vouch against using this slider for measurements.

Let me demonstrate by first picking a yellow hue, and then a blue hue. For both those hues, let’s crank up the Brightness parameter up to a hundred. Let’s then place both those colors next to each other and pause for a second.

Do you see it the same way I do ? Do those two colors look like they are equally bright to you ?
To make this even more obvious, we can grayscale the whole thing using the shortcut ctrl+Y in Photoshop after setting it to Gamma Grey 2.2 in Proof setup.

I hope we can all agree that this blue color is way darker than the yellow one. Yet if we listen to the sliders, they are both equally light.
This is because that Brigthness slider represents how much power needs to go to the led that constitute your screen to produce that color, it does not tell anything about how that color is perceived by human eyes.

HSL sliders work-around

So in order to properly measure values, we are going to need an other set of sliders. This set would ideally be HSL, which stands for Hue, Saturation, Luminosity. In HSL, a L parameter set to 100 would give you pure white as you would expect, and that same parameter would output a pitch black color, as you would expect. And most importantly, all colors for a same Luminosity parameter, would indeed be very close in value. The other two sliders, we know already ; we would get our familiar hue and saturation sliders. See the difference for yourself.

Unfortunately Photoshop does not have HSL sliders, but it does have LAB sliders. LAB stands for Luminosity, and then you’ve got an A channel and a B channel. The A channel is a scale ranging from green to magenta with gray in the middle, and the B channel is a scale ranging from a blue to a yellow hue with gray in the middle. As you would have understood by now, the interesting part for us is that Luminosity slider. It will translate very well to value painting.

I would strongly encourage you to set your sliders to Lab and then spend time color picking everything you can looking for patterns and useful pieces of logic. Once again ; measurement is the heart of science. I know however that those Hue and Saturation sliders where very convenient and equally important parameters to have access to and that the Lab sliders are not optimal for that specific reason. Here is a bit of a workaround I use. I simply use a second picker. In that case it is Colorwheel by Christian Dulson

With this layout I can easily set-up my hues and saturation on the top picker which is perfect for that purpose with its circular layout, and then set-up my measure and set my values with precision using the built-in picker set on LAB mode.

That’s it, start picking

On a future post, I’ll start discussing the sort of rules that can be discovered once the measuring tools are all set-up and we dare walking into that playground. There’s a lot to be learned.

How does direct light impact values ? What is a value range ? How does various lighting scenarios impact the value range of a subject ? How does atmospheric perspective impact the value range of a subject ? How do materials impact the value range of an object ?

I promise, there are all sorts of fascinating questions that deserve answers. But, I’ll stop there for today.

Learning a language : where to start ?

— 6 minutes read —

I’m currently neck-deep in the process of trying to learn the Russian language and I believe the best time to teach anything is often while we are still learning it oneself. In today’s article, I’m going to discuss how to best learn a language in the initial stages. But first, I need to answer why even bother.

Kick-starting the practice

I believe English is the single most useful thing I’ve learned at school. It is a key skill in that it allowed me to learn a lot of the other stuff I’ve learned across the years. It gave me access to the global brain. English represents around 54% of the internet content, which is quite a lot more than the 4% or so of the french language. Russian comes in second with 6%. Many East-European people frequently write and talk in Russian on and off the internet. It is not just about Russian people, which makes the ground it can unlock quite large.

I must say although the reasons expressed above make sense on a logical level, they were insufficient for the practice to stick with me for quite a while. More personal reasons needed to be there to really kick-start the learning process. In my case I have a couple of Russian speakers in my immediate surroundings. There is one young soul in particular who cannot yet speak french, which meant I had to learn some very basic Russian quite fast in order to communicate at least a little with him.
Those circumstances opened the door for learning this language for me. When such doors are opened, I believe we should go and learn while it lasts. I’m currently 26. Fluid intelligence is maximal at that age, there is never going to be an easier time to pick on new knowledge. Learning now is better than later.

Fast and loose first, vocabulary is king.

Jumping in ; one thing I realized really rapidly is that grammar is not that important in the beginning stages of learning a language. We want to go fast and loose first.
Learning vocabulary is essential. Without grammar, one can still be understood even though the sentences will likely be all wrong, ugly and unproper. Without vocabulary, we are kinda stuck however and are left hitting a hard stop.

It follows that vocabulary is an essential parameter in how easy or hard it is going to be to learn a new language. French and Spanish are very closely related for instance. I found that even though I have not practiced any Spanish in years since I was out of school, I can still pick-up on it quite easily for the simple fact that we share a plethora of word radicals. Knowing this many words already without even trying is a huge head start. Russian on the other hand is quite alien from any of the language I am familiar with. There is thus a gigantic memorizing job to be done before I can move on to the subtleties of the language.

So how to go about that ? It makes sense to learn the most common words of a language first. In fact, it takes about 1000 to 3000 words to reach a casual conversation level. Depending on how many new words you are able to reliably absorb in any given day, this word-count can be reached relatively quickly. Adverbs are going to cover ground quite fast, verbs are very important to be able to express oneself, adjectives are nice, and nouns are the most contextual of the list.
It is very worthwhile to push hard in the beginning to acquire those most common words. Once a certain threshold is reached ; it becomes possible to continue learning in a more passive way through simple reading and listening. To propel a rocket into space, most of the energy is burned on takeoff.

This means some hard drilling is going to be necessary. ANKI is a very useful tool for that.
Spaced repetition is a technique that leverages what we know about how memory works. Retrieval is the action that really solidifies memories. Each time a memory is recalled, it gets reinforced. What follows from that is that forgetting should in fact be an integral part of the learning process. Rather than trying to learn all in a single sitting session and then never recalling the knowledge ever again, it is in fact more appropriate to space out our learning over time so that it gets recalled more.

In-context learning, well rounded practice

But beyond that, what really will solidify the knowledge is to witness the vocabulary used in context and then try to reuse it oneself. For that reason, I would highly recommend installing an extension called “Dualsub” on your browser. It allows to watch YouTube videos with 2 subtitles tracks on at the same time. For example, you could watch a guy speak Russian, have subtitles for that, and then be able to read the English translation right below. This is obviously really useful for absorbing the language, but then comes the next step which would be recreating the language. You need to write in the destination language, and try and talk with it also. Expression of any kind is what will really solidify the grammar part of the language.

In fact it is useful to think about a quadrant comprised of oral comprehension, written comprehension, oral expression and written expression and find ways to practice each. Most often than not at least one of those gets neglected. In my case, English was learned through written and oral exposure and then I have a habit of writing in English often enough. However, one thing I do not do on the regular is to speak the language. I am a indeed a french person in France and thus speak french on the daily rather than English. To combat that lack, you might have noticed that I started to record readings of my written blog posts and pinning them at the top of the articles. The reasons I do so is to practice my oral expression skills in English, specifically I’m trying to get my tongue used to English pronunciation. In the case of Russian, in the beginning stage, one shouldn’t neglect to learn how to type with a Cyrillic alphabet for example. Paying attention to those sorts of things should ensure a well rounded and ultimately very usable acquisition of the language.

Arts and languages are one and the same

There is one more thing I want to talk about.
The process of learning a language has many carry over with the arts practices.
In fact I use the terms “Grammar” and “Vocabulary” all the time to distinguish between what constitute rules and articulations from what are idioms and specifics in all domains. In digital painting, grammar would be things such as perspective and solid drawing, light and color theory, understanding of reflections and material properties. Vocabulary would be specific pieces of information such as the structure of a face, pieces of anatomy, how to draw a motorcycle, a sword or an helmet.

On a side note regarding vocabulary, it is funny to think that even in digital painting, the idea of etymology makes sense. For example, although mammals differ in proportions, they are in fact very similar in structure. Learning to draw a specific mammal can therefore carry over easily into drawing all others. It can even teach you to draw made-up creatures, or neologisms, which is particularly relevant to concept art.

The thing is, learning languages is what I do. Although I didn’t understand it at first, Arts are just as much languages as Russian is, and like the all languages they are a pillar of culture. Arts are special in that they are especially apt at communicating feelings and experiences in vivid and poignant ways. But at the end of the day, they are all about exchanging with our fellow humans and are thus inherently interesting for us social creatures.

Let’s keep this short and wrap-up ! Until next time.

New blog format, 3D/2D pros and cons

— 5 minutes read —

New blog format

I can’t help but notice that I have not updated this blog in quite a while despite my initial enthusiasm for it. How is that ? The content I posted so far have been mainly long-form articles. They covered topics relevant to the arts quest in the departments of psychology, productivity, and a pinch of philosophy. These posts neighbored the 15 minutes mark for reading time and as you might imagine, they required some dedication to produce, especially considering the density of information I was aiming at. Now, I, personally, love long-form writing. I surely enjoy the feeling of not having left any stone unturned. That being said, it is possible that this format was not appropriate for the amount of time I can reasonably dedicate to writing. I am after-all not predominantly a writer, and as much as I like to research and reflect, I also need to do. I therefore feel like in order to achieve and maintain consistency on that front, I might benefit from a shorter format. I will thus aim at a 5 minutes reading time for my next posts, which is around a thousand words per post, no more. This length should make it possible to write a post in a single sitting session. I found that this sort of immediacy is really beneficial to get into a flow state and should be aimed at in any discipline. An other shift that might occur in the coming posts is that I might rather discuss what I’m currently working on and tinkering with at the moment. This should reduce the friction between doing and writing and both would end-up co-existing in the present tense. Of course, I will not prevent myself from writing longer post should I feel like it, but “getting going” is a preliminary step to “getting good” or in this case writing longer and deeper content, that I should not forego.

3D strengths

Jumping right in ; I am busy integrating all my skills into an unified expression. At the moment, my focus is on merging my 3D skills with my illustration skills. I am currently figuring out a workflow that will work for me. Truth is, it has become quite common to use 3D especially for environment art and complex pieces. Some say it has become indispensable even. Fortunately I have such knowledge and for sure there are a couple of things 3D is very good at. I am willing to exploit those in my road towards the next quality leap.

The first one is re-usability. Producing 3D assets is often time consuming, however it tends to pay dividends the more the asset gets used. Let’s pretend you know for sure that you are going to need to produce images with guitars in the future ; you could either redraw a new guitar for each and every new image produced, or, if you have an existing 3D model of said guitar, you could output as many iterations on that guitar as you need for truly cheap. 3D is thus useful when producing series of illustration taking place in similar setting, or using similar props. I want to develop a personal mini-world, which will make for a strong visual identity and could absolutely benefit from that re-usability advantage.

The second one is composition. This one might not be obvious right away but I believe those who spent time toying in a 3D software would agree ; the benefit of being able to freely move a camera within a scene is priceless. You are able to visualize your subjects from limitless viewpoints and just pick the one that works best among the myriad of possibilities. 3D generously gives you options. With drawing, to test a new angle you would have to redraw all from scratch and that in itself can be an humbling test of your perspective skills. It ends up being extremely costly as far as time goes and still you might not end up with as strong a composition as could have been discovered using 3D. I should say, composition is very high on the list of what makes for a good image.

The third one is perspective. 3D software are very good at perspective. That is kind of what they are there for. As someone who have spent time studying perspective, my opinion is that good perspective can definitely be hand drawn, but it is also really time-consuming. Solid drawing, is probably #1 on the list for what makes a good image, before values and colors. A 3D software essentially ensures that part is legit before you can move on. All that brain power that is saved there can then be mobilized for other tasks and thus push the overall quality of the produced art piece.

3D weaknesses

That is not to say 3D is exempt of defaults. For one, it tends to subdue the art component in “artwork”. Lighting for example is best left for the painter I believe. Indeed, contrary to 3D software, painters do not exactly paint accurate lights. They paint believable lights, yes, but first and foremost, they paint engaging lights, even when that means pushing colors past where they should be or forcing values where they would better serve the image.

3D will also not produce any sort of brushwork for you, which is a huge part of what makes painting so visually appealing. Artworks heavily reliant on 3D can inadvertently look flat for that reason alone, which is why time is usually spent hiding the 3D layer under a coat of fresh paint.

Finally, some things are just not worth modeling as far as time efficiency goes. Characters for example are way way faster to draw than they would be to model and rig, especially for single use cases. Mannequins can be used for simple posing but anything else is probably counter-productive. Knowing when to switch from 3D to 2D as to not over-model is a difficult question that probably needs some experimenting to properly solve.

‘Till next time

That’s it for today, it is indeed quite a bit shorter than usual. Hopefully I will make this up by posting more frequently. Next time, I will likely discuss in more details what kind of 3D/2D workflow I’m envisioning and how it’s moving forward (or not). So stay tuned I guess. And yeah, I’m back. It feels good to write again !