N.C.WYETH'S "THE INDIAN LANCE"

Music: "Horse to Water" by Tall Heights

#Mastercopymonday!

Traditionally, artists will do 'mastercopies' to learn the techniques and approaches of the great illustrators and painters. It's a method of taking apart, dissecting, and reconstructing the thinking and processes of the great masters.

Original painting: "The Indian Lance" by N.C. Wyeth

Virtual Reality
Illustration
Tilt Brush
Research & Development
 
View this on the web

Objective

  • Adapt a famous 2D painting into VR
  • Painting it in the style and closely following the techniques as the original master

Challenges

  • There's no way to mix or blend colors in VR like in traditional painting. To create a gradient, it requires a strong knowledge and control of color
  • Traditionally, underpaintings help serve a subtle undertone to a painting and is quickly applied on the canvas. This didn't have the same effect in VR painting because there is no opacity control for the brush strokes applied. The underpainting didn't serve well in this painting. (Will attempt again.)

Some lessons learned

  • Came out to a 2.5D painting!
  • Blending colors in VR is very manual and requires great control of values and color.
  • Value grouping is king, as always.
  • It's nice to work in layers, to physically go back and forth between layers. But it's also okay to overlay the background colors on top of the foreground layers to clean up the edges.
  • It's still all about relationship between edges!
  • I really loved experimenting with this!! An hour felt like 10 minutes while painting this. 

Inspiration for Future Experiments

I'd like to try 2.5D paintings with some focal points done in 3D depth. I did this with the rider's grip of the reins in this one.

I'd like to further explore an effective use of an underpainting as it relates to background/foreground relationships, likely as it relates to depth in the VR space. This would likely be executed with strategic mark-making to ensure that the back layers/underpaintings show through the gaps of the marks.