Help With Advanced Techniques

[-Silver-]

Or at least, i'm assuming these are advanced techniques. Below is a piece of concept art for a game called Aion. What interests me the most about it is two things:

1) The red glow effect emnating from the pillars. I've seen these glow effects on countless images, and am really wondering how they're created. Is it as simple as creating those colours yourself? Finding the exact shades and placing them in the right points, exactly where the light would fall? You can see the colours of the pillars building affected in such intricate ways around the windows. Or is there some specific way of accomplishing this, perhaps with opacity levels?

2) More specific to this image, the smoke effect. It's clearest in the bottom right of the image. The realism of the smoke is uncanny, not just from the patterns and the way it moves, but also because the smoke effect is 'stronger' at the edges. Would the artist have used any special tools and tricks to create this smoke, or simply used the standard brush tool?

This is the level of quality i'm aiming to reach in my own work, hence the desire to learn any tips and tricks for creating these sort of effects (if there are any at all). So far i've learned that size caters for a lot of the quality, allowing for a lot more detail to be applied. I'm currently working in sizes at around 10'000 pixels, and that seems to be the sweet spot. Any thoughts, ideas, and feedback on these effects will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for reading,

-Silver-

Spoiler

 

[Soggy]

Hey -silver-,

I don't want to claim you as a beginner or say anything about your knowledge and skill so please don't think of this as something negative. I would really start with something a little bit smaller, like 800x800 pixel canvases for learning advanced techniques, it's faster and you get more practice in. The red glow can be accomplished many different ways of course, but a really basic one would be to just take a red brush add a new layer and color over the areas you want to have that red glow, then you can set the layer blending to something like lighten or soft light. You can also adjust the flow of the brush to make it blend better. The Smoke can be accomplished with using a light colored brush and making streaks in the direction you want the smoke then add a bit more to certain sides of the smoke to make it have that real smokey look.

I'll try to find some time to make a tutorial on how to accomplish these effects or search one up for ya.

 

[-Silver-]

Hey -silver-,

I don't want to claim you as a beginner or say anything about your knowledge and skill so please don't think of this as something negative. I would really start with something a little bit smaller, like 800x800 pixel canvases for learning advanced techniques, it's faster and you get more practice in. The red glow can be accomplished many different ways of course, but a really basic one would be to just take a red brush add a new layer and color over the areas you want to have that red glow, then you can set the layer blending to something like lighten or soft light. You can also adjust the flow of the brush to make it blend better. The Smoke can be accomplished with using a light colored brush and making streaks in the direction you want the smoke then add a bit more to certain sides of the smoke to make it have that real smokey look.

I'll try to find some time to make a tutorial on how to accomplish these effects or search one up for ya.

I'm very much a beginner when it comes to digital art :P
I have the experience and natural flair to produce quality work, but lack the knowledge of photoshop to really maximize my potential. So right now i'm trying to learn how to use all the tools at my disposal.

You're right about practicing on smaller canvases, and i'll attempt to knock up several small studies once I have it down. While lighting seems simple enough, I can see smoke effects taking a while longer to perfect, so any tutorials you can find (or indeed create) i'd love to check out. Thanks for the reply.

 

[Soggy]

You got me motivated to make a tutorial now hehe I love teaching so I'll work on one right now, I'll probably post it in a few hours. ^^

 

[Toams]

By the way, most of the time those smoke 'overlays' are done with the help of brushes..
I don't know how much you know about photoshop, but there are tons of brushes out there, for various purposes, which can be imported into photoshop, to make things easier.. :D

 

[-Silver-]

Soggy: And I love learning! Looking forward to a knowledge injection =P

Samot: Interesting, i'll see what google brings up. Thanks for the tip man.

 

[Soggy]

Ok I made an example although it'd be easier to explain it all on MSN or something because I won't be able to type it all up in here and post it.

Here's the example image I made though,