Workshops

Jean-S bastien Rossbach

COUNTRY: France JS Rossbach is a freelance illustrator and concept artist. You can see his art in many RPGs, gaming cards and book covers. He is also a wellknown graphic designer in the music industry. He recently designed his friend, Jason Felixs art book (see page 60) and is busy completing his own fully-illustrated book, titled Merlin and on sale in May 2008. http://livingrope.free.fr

THE ABSTRACT DRAGON

Illustrator JS Rossbach shows you how a popular fantasy theme can be viewed in an abstract way
his is an image that I created for a French art book called l'Univers des Dragons (The World of Dragons) for Editions Daniel Maghen. It showcases the work of renowned fantasy artists, including dragon piece specialists Todd Lockwood, Paul Bonner and Donato Giancola. My first thought when starting my image was to ask myself what more I could bring than these

Photoshop and ZBrush

DVD Assets
The files are on your DVD in the JS Rossbach folder. For a demo of Photoshop CS3 go to: www.adobe.com

extraordinary artists, and the answer obviously was: nothing! Nonetheless, I had the opportunity to do something different than what one expects from a dragon piece. And that's why instead of depicting the good old realistic and anatomically viable winged lizard, I chose to adopt a more symbolical and abstract point of view. In this workshop, we'll see how strong shapes are important to create a

well-balanced piece thatll be special and will catch the eye in a second. My experience as a graphic designer led me to know how playful a good composition can be; what elegance lays in a beautiful volume and how it can be destroyed by uncontrolled details. In this image I used Photoshop CS2, except for a few 2D patterns that I did in ZBrush (examples of this are included on the DVD.)

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In depth The Abstract Dragon

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I always begin with a medium grey texture that I paint with acrylics and gesso on paper. I have a few scanned textures that I always use, but you can produce some yourself by taking photos of surfaces and mixing with a textured, grainy brush and so on. The goal is to let your subconscious decide for you what shapes are on the irregular surface. Its the same process as looking at clouds in the sky and finding shapes in them. I take a regular Round brush and begin to build my dragon shape. I want my dragon to be sinuous, so I draw a curvy shape that will divide the canvas in three. I dont care too much about traditional composition rules, preferring to rely on my own taste. I also know that a dragon is a pretty long beast, so I choose a rather long format. I am really playing with the marks on my grey texture, still cutting and pasting into my black shape to let it emerge by itself.

Playing with shapes

A few months ago I tried to learn ZBrush to see what new tools it could bring to my rack and I found it had some very interesting features. I saved a series of abstract patterns I did because they looked beautiful on their own, with a sort of Japanese pictogram flavour to them and a smidgeon of fractal waves. My dragon gives me an opportunity to use these patterns now. I use them as layers set to Multiply and I stretch them in every direction to see where they fit. To me, a dragon is a magical creature that represents time passing by, so Im trying to use ethereal, sinuous elements. Its also very masculine, so I add a female character to balance it.

Form and sense

Use a concept
Young artists can forget that although a good illustration needs a creative style, it needs a fair dose of common sense too. Be a fan-boy (like me!) and try to copy that image that rocks like hell. Trying to recreate an artists work is no bad thing because you learn new techniques. But you also have to understand the artists intentions. Try to understand why the artist did what they did and see if it fits with your own image.

Before going to colours, I try to distribute the values of grey on the image. It will help the eye focus on the important parts of the finished piece. Basically, the most contrasted values must be located around the most important areas of my picture. The image is fairly simple; this is a choice I made in order to emphasise the abstract shape of the dragon. I also begin to gradually add some light around the area where the female character is because I know that she will need to be highlighted on the background. At the same time I'm still playing with abstract shapes, trying to allow surprises to happen because my main shape isnt satisfying me enough.

Values

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In depth The Abstract Dragon

Time to bring some colour to the piece. Again, I do it very gradually. After having flattened the image, I'm adding a brownish tint to it using Variations (Image>Adjustments>Variations). On a new Overlay layer, I begin to paint around the dragon with a light blue thats meant to be the average complementary tone of the brown that I used just before. Its important to stick to just two complementary colours, as I want it to be simple and effective. At this point Im beginning to take as much care as possible with the rhythm of the colours.

Colouring
Ctrl/Cmd+L This shortcut controls the depth of the blacks and lightness of th e whites. The blacks wo nt turn to grey when printed.

Levels

Im moving my abstract ZBrush patterns over the dragons shape and desperately trying to make his face look cool and just when I was abandoning hope, the miracle happened. I can now see a crown of spikes around his neck, and quickly paint over the apparition. I decide that they must be made of bones stretching out of the dragon's head and spinal column. When the new idea is blocked I leave it aside for a while and I switch to the girls face. Im still thinking about bones and skeletons when that she could also bear a crown made of bones. This time Im searching into my personal references database, and choose a piranha image because his bones look so sharp. Just like when I used my abstract patterns, Im playing with the fish bones and a beautiful mask appears on the screen.

The miracle happens

When it comes to texturing, having a good photo base is helpful especially for this piece as I have to slowly paint each scale on the dragons skin one by one to recreate the reptiles skin texture. I then add this to the PSD file as an Overlay layer and distort with the Warp tool to make it fit to the dragon's body.

Photographic textures

Speed things up
Sometimes you work on big PSD files and the processing time is too slow zooming in and out. This is due to your graphic cards low memory. Shut the Navigator window to gain more. Another tip is to shut the thumbnails on the Layers palette.

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I am pretty happy with my image now and I know that nothing terrible will happen to it since everything is taking place nicely. I can relax. Its now time to paint the details, and to take more care of the light sources and see how it effects the characters. This is the moment where I can choose what stays an abstract design and what needs to be a more realistic and precise object.

Refining

Theres no need to add details everywhere on the canvas because if you do so the viewer's eyes will be lost. I take care of the two characters faces because this is what you always look at first. I add a few spikes and scales where the light falls on the skin. But I keep the wings and tail very rough, almost as black shapes because they are only important at abstract level, for the global composition. Basically, I would say that the parts you choose to be the focus of the image need to be detailed, and the rest can stay rough. The eyes and the minds of the viewers will recreate the parts you dont paint anyway. Its also a nice way to enable the viewer to take part in the piece.

Detailing

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