CG艺术实验室

Main Dish of the Week#

Recently, there have been many directions in my work related to painting, which is also due to my instinctive love for painting, leading to a lot of contemplation.

In this article, let's talk about brushes and strokes.

Brushes are essential tools for CG art creation and concept design. There are countless brushes available for download and purchase on the internet. In addition, with the popularity of iPads and Apple Pencils in recent years, the threshold for CG painting has been lowered to the minimum, making the choice of brushes an unavoidable question for beginners in CG painting, rather than asking how a certain part of a good painting was created. Many beginners tend to ask the experts what brushes they use and where they can download them, just like eating a delicious dish and asking the chef about the type of fire used or the source of water.

Some brushes I have collected, and I am also trying to create a set recently.

Brushes#

Three basic attributes of brushes:

• Shape

  The shape of a brush can be understood as the shape of the tip, for example, a pencil is generally round, while an oil brush is generally square.

• Texture

  Texture is actually a collection of shapes, and in the computer, it can also be set as the texture of paper to simulate the texture of painting on different papers.

• Opacity

  As the name suggests, it is the intensity of the above two attributes, usually used to create new textures by overlaying multiple strokes.

There are also many other properties in different software, such as smudging, random colors, jitter, etc., but these are all derived from these three basic attributes through program parameters, and their purpose is only to improve efficiency.

I have saved about 7-8 sets of brushes myself, totaling thousands of them. But they all follow the same principle. The essence of each brush is the arrangement and combination of a unit of shape and texture.

Photoshop brush settings interface

In my CG painting process, a single painting actually rarely uses more than 5 brushes. If we divide them by shape, there are even fewer, only square and round. Why is this? There are two reasons:

• First, the shape of any object can be summarized and generalized using these two shapes. For example, a human head is round, a house is square, and a tree trunk and leaves are a combination of round and square. In most cases, these two shapes are sufficient.

• Second, having fewer brushes allows me to focus more on composition, contrast, design, and other more important aspects of the artwork, rather than getting caught up in which brush will produce the best effect for a particular object.

Therefore, once you understand these, brushes are basically covered. However, there is another term related to brushes, which is strokes.

A detail from one of my recent works

Strokes#

Brushes are tools for replicating shapes, while strokes are the traces left by the brush, representing the technique of conveying emotions and textures.

Beginners pay more attention to brushes, while experts focus on strokes. If you want to become an expert, you should spend more time exploring and experimenting with strokes. Playing with strokes is what makes a master.

The attributes of strokes are very simple: large, small, long, and short.

Large strokes are stable and coarse, while small strokes are delicate and smooth. Long strokes are flowing and natural, while short strokes are mottled and rapid.

It can be seen that strokes can carry unique emotions in painting and also convey the texture of the artwork.

By combining the attributes of size and length with the subject you are painting, you can achieve endless variations. For example, when painting a girl's long hair, the conventional approach is to use long strokes to depict the flowing and elegant nature of the hair. On the other hand, when painting male hair, short strokes are generally used to create a neat and sharp look. But what if we reverse it? What effect would it have if we use short strokes to depict long hair, or even use circular strokes to convey a certain emotion? This is what art should explore.

Some artists also hide their strokes using certain techniques, aiming to prevent viewers from perceiving their subjective emotions and instead focus on the object they are painting. This is most commonly seen in classical oil paintings and church murals, and the extreme example in modern art is Mondrian. On the other hand, some artists pay more attention to strokes in order to capture and express their emotions, such as Van Gogh, and the pinnacle of this approach can be seen in Chinese ink paintings.

Therefore, mastering strokes is truly challenging.

Creative Fragments#

• Last week, I encountered some internal issues at work, so I had to pause the updates. I apologize for that. Recently, I have finished storyboarding and am preparing to work on some character concept designs (which is why I talked about brushes and strokes).

• From a director's perspective, I have already taken the most important first step in terms of creative ideas for the story. The upcoming challenges are mostly technical issues that will be encountered in the process. For example, how to transition the workflow from offline rendering to Unreal Engine 5. Oh, just this topic alone could fill several blog posts.

• Another issue is that my sleep schedule has been disrupted again, but I have just fixed it today.

• The main reason for encountering these problems is poor time management on my part. I always feel compelled to respond to messages during the day, even though they may not be urgent. I didn't realize this and it has left me mentally and physically exhausted.

• In reality, many things are not as urgent as they seem. If a task cannot be completed within 2 minutes, it is better to set aside a specific time to respond to it. Otherwise, it's best to resolve it quickly.

Weekly Highlight#

• This week, I would like to recommend an artist I have admired for many years, Android Jones.

• He is probably one of the most skilled artists I know when it comes to using various brushes for creation. But this is not a counterexample. One of the most talked-about experiences he had was that before using these brushes for his artwork, he insisted on drawing a self-portrait every day, and he drew a thousand of them...

• By carefully analyzing his paintings, you can see that brushes and patterns are mostly used for decoration. Don't be deceived by the surface.