Case Study : The Importance Of The Silhouette And How To Use It

Hello Steemians !

Kind of a surprise tutorial today I didn't expect to have time to do one but... Here it is !
Today will be about a topic I was willing to talk about since a few months : Silhouetting (Not sure if I made up the name or not sorry).

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Silhouetting is focusing first on the silhouette of the subject, to communicate and better emphasize your message to the viewer. It will help you to design strong, easy to remember and recognizable character from a first glance. It is basically the first information you will give out and an important part in game art as to communicate the right information to the audience properly.

Let's take a proper look at it :

Do you recognize these shapes ? Pretty iconic ones.
Now, what can you say about these forms ? What information can you read ?

If you see the same thing as me (which I suppose, hopefully haha), only with this shape can you decypher a lot about the character : a strong and brave warrior, a cute weird thing, maybe electrical, a fantasy confident young man, a modern cartoony dude.

You can say a lot through this shapes only. One common mistake while thumbnailing with shapes and silhouettes is to focus too much on the "Cool & badass" side of it. By looking for great shape design, we tend to forget about the storytelling and art sensitive part of it and end up with bland soulless characters.

Is it something you want ?

So how can you make the most out of your silhouette ? Do your researchs ! And put down a few keywords telling what your character is about ? No need for a whole backstory but a few keynotes about him will give you direction. Is he bad ? good ? In-between ? Cute or cruel ? Write it.

Research about your character, what are his poses ? Which one describes him the most ? Look at Link above, the silhouette is deeply planted on his two feets, he stands strong, telling a lot about his backstory already.

Take your time to really find that pose, to calmly design your silhouette in order to communicate the maximum information to your viewer.

A strong shape is a big chunk of the job done already.

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Now that we covered that, here is a quick tutorial about my first dwarf based on a silhouette exercise. To give some context to it, I used Concept Art Session; this website gives up to 3 tags as guidelines for your drawing, then you setup a time limit and must upload your art within that frame.
I used it as 30min silhouette drawing which theme was : Dwarf-Legendary-Sniper.

And here we go. The first line was too bland and not interesting. The two at the bottom on the other side were done by adding a bit more background to them : Crazy, old, the kind of legend no one believes or takes seriously for the left one and for the right one : Strong, Fierce, Proud and trustworthy. A real hero.

The Left one being a funny one, it will be my go-to for the day.

From there I begin to fill the shape with what I have in mind using grey values. As it is still part of my practice, I can then check more easily the greys and try to see what I can give as information with the bare minimum of each painting pass. Also I wanted to test a colorization process from Black and White.

Once the Grey values are done, I begin to add the colors. For this piece the colors were not done by painting them on top of the grey layer. Instead, I used a mix of Solid Color layers, Gradient maps and Adjustment masks (Curves and Hue/Saturation mostly) in order to get them right.

This technique allows me to be quicker to change a concept in values or in colors in the future while enabling a wider range of freedom in color choices. To be honest I wasn't expecting such vibrant colors while using this technique. Second note, be sure that your values are on point, otherwise your colors will look all messed up.





Now that I have my colors, I used the Curves and different fusion effects such as Color Dodge in order to correct as far as I can the values as I think they were too dark (need more practice).

At this point I feel my dwarf is looking pretty good and so I give some final touches, painted this time. These are minor changes though.





Adding a background and some quick effects and that's it people !

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If you made it until here, thank you so much ! Each vote and support from you is a blessing and I am really really grateful for each one of you here. Have a wonderful day !

As usual, please feel free to correct me or comment, I am looking forward your thinking !
Cheers !

Links :
Concept Art Sessions (my old page, with my old art) : http://conceptartsessions.com/gallery/633/Tien