Digital Depth

Athena with no atmosphere layers active.

I learned a lot in one glorious week at Larry Elmore's art camp.  Which if you have the chance to attend, then it is well worth the money!  Go to his site and sign up, because you won't regret it.

One of the things that I learned at Larry's class was about depth in painting. In art classes I had previously been introduced to perspective in drawings, but painting was an area that I was largely self taught. Beyond horizon lines and perspective drawing, I had not been introduced to the concept that color can also interpret distance.

Although you can see it every time you look at mountains in the distance, it took someone pointing it out to help me truly see it. At that moment, I had a Keaneu Reeves "Whoa", and suddenly my art jumped up to a whole new level in realism. Perhaps you will experience the same leap in your own artwork with this knowledge.

When you are looking out on something, it is affected by the atmosphere. The air holds tiny water droplets that generally cover the landscape in a thin fog at all times. This is obviously increased in places of higher humidity, but is barely perceptible in low humidities like deserts, where you can see farther with less atmospheric intervention.

Athena with only the back atmosphere layer active.

For the artist trying to capture the effect, this means that your truest colors are those that are closest to you. Your darkest darks, brightest brights, and purest colors will all be in the foreground. As it gets further away from you, it becomes a greyer and muddier color, unless it is a light source, at which point, that should always be your brightest colors. Even if someone is wearing a "white" shirt, it will still be a duller greyer color if you want your light source to appear to be generating light.

With traditional painting methods capturing the atmospheric effect, means constant paint mixing to ensure the correct colors, or paint in thin washes of blue/grey to push background into the back. However In digital, things become a lot easier. When constructing a piece, you can separate the distances into individual layers, then after the fact add in layers of atmosphere.

Athena with both atmosphere layers active.

I have been working on my digital painting of Athena for quite some time, and now that I have some time to focus on her, I wanted to share this process. At times when I am posting my progress pictures, I forget to turn on the atmosphere layers, and it makes a distinct difference. As an artist, I feel better explaining with images, so I have posted some screen shots of Athena (who isn't done yet) with no layers turned on, and then the depth being added.

For the atmospheric layers, I took a muted blue grey color then did a gradient from it to clear, starting at the top and ending at ground level for the farthest layer. The tree layer had one tree almost as close as Athena, so I did the same as before, but then cut the foreground tree from the layer.

Atmospheric effects is a simple concept that many artists miss, but in its application, it can instantly add depth to any digital piece.