Making Of 'Why your Birthday Card is late'

Idea

My initial intention is merely to do a quick pencil sketch for a belated birthday card to a friend. Since the target audience is a lady, what comes into my mind is something lighthearted, maybe in the style of cute Japanese cartoon characters like Relaxuma & their clean cut line drawing style. As i thought of giving some excuses for being late in the card, it came to me that maybe the card itself should be the explanation (factual or not). i had a brief brainstorm for the most ridiculous reason for a birthday card would be delayed & picked this one to draw. i ended up liking the idea so much that I decided to paint it.

Composition

The sketch employed a reverse triangular composition, which emphasized how the bears dominate over the postman, and would lead the eye from point to point without escape. In the final painting, this basic composition is enhanced with additional lines & forms flowing from both sides of the image into the distant. This would give more depth, which is clearly lacking in the sketch. i also switched to a wide screen format & tilted the whole composition to create more dynamism & dramatic effect.

Colour Scheme

Making effective color choices is a vast subject for study, of which i still have much to learn. For this painting, i kept the lighthearted subject matter in mind while choosing a tetrad scheme of 2 pairs of complementary colors, i.e. red & green plus violet & yellow. A tetrad uses 2 or more pairs of complementary colors on the color wheel. The main reason for the choice is simply because I feel that violet & pink would make good colors for cute teddy bears. As usual, i consulted my color wheel for a harmonious scheme for the 2 colors, which can at the same time, gives me more colors to use in creating a bright colorful scene.

Very quickly i laid in shades of solid colors to the whole scene. Notice a lot of elements in the final painting are not inside yet, some of the ideas came only during the course of painting. At this stage, i was still considering an anime cell shaded look, & thus kept the outlines intact.

Painting in Photoshop

Stage 1: First of all, to give more depth & complexity to the ruined city, i added in electrical post & wires from photos of my previous Tokyo trip. At this point, i also started to look for reference images of ruined buildings, scooters, clouds, etc, which can be easily found in the Total3D texture collections as well.

Stage 2: I blended the shadows with the light areas for the bears, & hand painted more details in the ruins. i tilted the postman & the scooter to suggest him swerving to stop. i also added in the trail of smoke to emphasize the scooter coming to a skidding stop. Later on in the final widescreen format composition, I had to tilt him even more in order to convey that idea better.

Stage 3: All this while, i have been considering using a blue sky instead. & i finally did it. Actually, i would have adhered to the color scheme with a green sky, if I have not had enough of it from an animated short film I did before.
The 2 clouds did not work for me either & I painted the new cloud for a better effect. Using dodge brush, i also painted the effects of the fire on the surrounding & the characters, which creates a 'ring of attention' around the center. Unfortunately, this idea was lost in the final. Lastly, it is strange that it only occurred to me at this stage that mails should be flying out of the opened box. Besides being the logical thing to happen, it is also in line with the subject matter. I took great care to position each flying mail to create the sense of movement.

Stage 4: When the painting came to the following stage, it had been almost a year since I started on it (i put it on hiatus quite a few times), i was already dying to get done with it. Yet i went on to make a major change to a 16:9 wide format. i felt that it is a necessary change for the cinematic feel I always like. Luckily i worked in layers, so the process to rearrange things is slightly less painful. i am basically extending both sides of the image and it involves much repainting & moving things around. While i was at it, i thought i may as well tilt the whole image & throw things a little off balance for more interest in the composition. I also revealed the legs of the bears to strengthen their poses. On hindsight, more should have been done on their legs stances, especially removing the piece of ruin blocking the violet bear's legs.

Stage 5: No matter how good one can be, when you are deep into your artwork, there will always be something you miss out. i had been collecting comments from trusted artist friends throughout the work progress. One such simple yet useful suggestion is to remove the smoke covering the bottom part of postman on scooter. This makes him stands out so much better in the foreground & thus enhanced the sense of depth in the image. Initially i had added the smoke trail to emphasize a skidding stop, which is still valid, so I only toned it down below the scooter. You can see the difference of this simple deed comparing the images. On the other hand, although all the inputs i have received are sound, good judgment is essential on my part to determine what is appropriate to the artwork.

As mentioned earlier, i tilted the postman to a greater extend & showed more of his left side towards the camera. His swerving halt to the left reads better this way, & conveys his surprise reaction more effectively, even without showing his face.

I also added in details on the left building which defines the background as an Asian cityscape. This adds more believability despite the incredible scenario, and gives better sense of scale & dimension of the different elements in relation to one another.

Stage 6: More details like wear & tear, dirt & cracks are added by hand & photographic elements, with loads of useful Total3D textures. There are some key things I pay attention to while detailing the ruins. First is to make sure there is never a totally straight edge. Next all the tile lines on the surface should have varying thickness & intensity, and may even be broken. Last thing is that the surface should be evenly colored. As to the fur, i did not use any complex techniques. It is merely a meticulous & repetitive process of laying strokes & strokes of color on top one another while always bearing in mind the surface lighting. Later, i made sure the fur has enough dirt on it to show that the bears have indeed been fighting fiercely in that environment for a while.

Final Artwork

To conclude, I would like to thanks 3Dtotal for featuring my artwork, and also Ray Toh ( http://torei.deviantart.com/ ), Chungee Ooi & Jerome Moo ( http://www.jeromoo.com/ ) for their valuable inputs to make this piece of work better.

To see all the work-in-progress images, go to http://www.23hq.com/gatchaman/album/1004406

All questions are welcomed at . Thank you very much for reading!

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