Thanks, Meph and Krule.
I wanted to do a little photo experiment and take a few pictures using my camera phone (iphone 4S) instead of the fancy regular digital camera. I mentioned in a post over of BFK's thread that if you have a decent lightbox and light setup (daylight bulbs) you can still take nice pictures with the camera phone. So I thought I'd do just that and put my statement to the test. These pictures were then resized and cropped, but no tweaks made to brightness, contrast, or color.
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Now there are a few difference between the camera phone and the regular camera. With a regular camera I will step back from the subject and zoom in (the same way you'd do a portrait of someone). With the camera phone I have to move the camera closer to the figure. Yeah, you can zoom with the camera but that's a digital zoom and not an optical zoom. Optical zoom means you change the focal length and get a larger picture at the same quality. Digital zoom is the same as hitting the magnifying glass on the computer, it just blows up the image and the quality drops (so no good). You can see a comparison below. The one of the left is with the camera phone and the one on the right is the regular camera. To get in nice and close with the phone leads to a sort of fish eye effect that mildly distorts the image. Using the zoom on the regular camera does not.
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Also worth noting is when I turned on the HD photo option in the camera phone it seemed to slightly overexpose the image. The picture on top is just the regular photo and the one on the bottom is the HD photo. You can see the bottom one is a bit more washed out.
Okay, enough about the cameras and back to the figure. There's a quick peak at the beginning of my base for this guy. I have a tendency to take a figure like this, plop him on a dirt base with some grass and then call it a day. But that's not very interesting so I'm trying to push myself to come up with some more creative scenes. The story I want to tell here is this guy is raiding a village and he's busted into someone's house or a mead hall or something like that. I want to give the idea of a building without actually making one. It's a small base and adding a wall will block a portion of our view of the figure. So my hope was if I add a structural element like a supporting beam and soon a wood floor that would be enough to show he's inside a structure. Next I plan to create some debris to show that there's been a fight. Probably some broken furniture, spilled cup, shattered plate, etc. I made a section of overturned table but it was too large for the scene. Even part of a table took up too much space on that base. So I'm thinking I'll do a smashed chair instead. It's definitely a challenge to figure out what I can put in the limited space available in order to tell the story I want for this guy.
As I'm sure you've guessed, the post is just a few pieces of balsa wood. Arts and Crafts stores often sell bags with assorted sizes and shapes, perfect for what I want. I cut them to the desired size and then used an x-acto knife to give them some wear and tear.
If I am reading this correctly, though, you place the midtone first, and then go from darkest shadow to lightest shadow. This differs from the norm, I believe, of midtone then shade from LIGHTEST to darkest. A small difference but a difference indeed. My only issue with this method is that I would certainly overwork the paint by trying to make a dark color lighter. Second, I'd find it more difficult to blend. I would have to end my brush stroke in the darker area, and I don't like this because one has more control over where they start a paint stroke than where it finishes, thus it would be tough for me to clearly establish a line of transition and the blend would not be uniform. Difficult for me to put this in words, but I hope I am understood. Anyway, I enjoy talking about technical differences like these because I grow a great deal from such discussions.
