Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Color Mapping Shine

When creating an animal portrait, especially if the animal is short-coated, accurate shine patterns are critical to getting the image to look "right."

As shine patterns can be confusing to read even when you have good reference photos, I will sometimes use my computer to help me see and make sense of them.

Here is an image of a shiny, short-coated dog that I photographically enhanced and then used to create a topographic landscape map of the dog’s shine pattern.
Color shine map of dog with a shiny coat
For a dog with a mottled coat,a shine map may only need cover the solid colored areas as in the next example.
Color shine map of dog with a mottled coat
Creating shine maps is a useful technique that can help provide a solid planning platform to making your pet portraits look much more realistic.

10 comments:

  1. Very interesting technique! I'm going to try it!

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  2. Thank you for the info and what a great idea. I love painting horses and this will help me a lot.

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  3. It's always fun to share techniques with other artists. Glad the post was helpful. :-)

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  4. I use that technique when drawing, but I've never used a computer to do it. I'll have to look into that, as it looks more accurate! Thanks!

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  5. Interesting idea, thanks for sharing!

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  6. Oh, that's interesting! I'll keep that in mind - great to see how artists work, thanks!

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