Hey guys, so I've been talking in recent weeks about some pretty technical topics. Moreover the last two bundles I released were, again, pretty technical, one talked about 3D, the other one talked about photo overlays. And as a reflection of that, I got a really, really good comments on a previous video from a reader named Dante. And I'm paraphrasing here, but he was worried about this kind of work. He brought up the notion that he worries it's a crutch and that you're cheating and that it doesn't help you become a better artist. He acknowledges that the professional or the industry standard approach is to use these tools. But in his mind, it sort of deviates from what he sees as painting. He ends by saying that I'm worried that if I do, I'll never be the best artist I can actually be and become more of an engineer of images. The inference here is that by not having visible brushstrokes or by not having the traditional aspects of what we think of as painting or oil painting, it's somehow a different thing. It's less artistic, it's stiff, whatever that might be. So I just want to show you this painting that I'm working on today. It's not quite finished, but I'm getting there. And I want to talk about the steps between the thumbnail and a painting like this one. And just talk about how I use certain tools. Now in this case, I started out by deciding, okay, I want a beach side house, some urban Southern California. And I had a kind of a specific look in my mind. This thumbnail you can see here is really vague, but I had like, you know, driveway, I wanted a specific Jeep Wrangler on the side and a view of the ocean. But that was about it. So then the next tool I used is really pretty futuristic if you think about it. What I did was to go into Google Maps, go into Street View and start checking out Southern California towns. This here is Carpentaria, California. And it was kind of the closest to that look that I was going for. I just kind of, I had an aesthetic in mind. I've never lived in California. So I tried to find a place that kind of matched what I was going for. And when I found just that right spot, I took this screenshot. So it's not beautiful, but it really kind of summarized what I was thinking about. And then as I got more specific with my image, I started looking for design reference. So here I was on Craigslist. I was just looking at pictures of kind of low rent apartments or duplexes in the Southern California area. Once again, Craigslist, not necessarily a tool you'd think of for painters, but it was a way for me to learn something that I didn't know by memory. So then armed with those different photos and my thumbnail drawing and the Jeep Wrangler found this one on Craigslist, I start to cobble together a thumbnail. So here I've used that original plate from Google Earth. And then I've kind of slapped in some different pieces of photos, but I'm mindful of perspective. I'm still thinking about that initial composition. Clearly there's no house here, but it didn't take many steps to kind of put that in as well. So right here, I have you, you call it a thumbnail, I guess, or you could call it a collage or a rough. Obviously it's not beautiful, but it combines the elements that I've figured out so far. So it's the composition I want. It's the specific detail photo elements that I want. And it's all sitting on top of kind of the environment that I'm looking for. But the whole point of this image is for me to design the house that the character lives in. So then I go into 3D software. What you can see is it's not that detailed. I think a lot of people envision 3D modeling as sort of a replacement for drawing. And in my case, generally it's not thinking of sort of shape and form, rhythm, design, balance, all the stuff I think about when I'm painting. I just happen to be using a different tool. But it's by being able to move the camera that I don't have to think about perspective. Because drawing in perspective is one of those things that is really just a technical exercise. There's nothing creative about drawing in perspective. It's one of those necessary evils. And so what I'm doing at the moment is design. It might actually help me to be able to not think about perspective for a minute. So once I'm finishing 3D, what I get is a 2D render. So here's that back plate that I'd kind of cobbled together. And the render is this. We can see it matches the perspective of the photo. And it's got the right shadows and light. But really there's not a lot of detail here. This is a very simple model. But I know that I'm going to embellish it with photo texture overlays and with brush strokes. And here's where things slow down and they start getting a lot more realistic. Now in this case, I've used a lot of photos and I've carefully cut them out and change their perspective and change the lighting to make it all match. I think this Jeep is a really good example. So here we'll do a side by side. This is the Jeep as composited into my painting. And here is the Jeep as I found out on Craigslist. This is a different perspective. The lighting is all different. It's sort of a raw material that I know is going to work with a lot of finessing and hand painting. But if I were to just throw it in as is, it wouldn't work at all. And then in the course of my reference, I kept coming back to this memory I had of the movie Her. If you haven't seen it, go see her. It's awesome. But there are these few beautiful beach scenes that just had a really nice sense of color. It kind of makes you happy just looking at the colors. So I used this as just a color guide. And I took my image as it stood and then applied that kind of a color palette to it. Now this took a lot of work. It's lots of individual adjustment layers as you can see here. Each one's masked. So it's careful work. It's not tweaking one knob and applying a filter like Instagram. But you can see that my image and the screenshot from her have kind of a emotional similarity. And I think emotion is the key word here. Because I've just gone through a whole bunch of different steps, all technical, some more like painting, some more like collage. But the end result captures the emotion that I wanted. He's got this charming life in a beach side house and things are good before the events of the story take him into a dark place. So what I needed to establish with this image of his dwelling is an emotion. It's storytelling. So to make that possible, I used a lot of different technical tools along the way. But each one of them was just a different way for me to practice a purely creative idea. If a brushstroke is a tool to get a creative storytelling moment onto the page, so is a photo overlay, so is 3D. They're all just tools. And while some of them might feel unfamiliar, none of them are cheating. And if you guys have thoughts on this matter, put them in the comments below and we'll talk about it. Thanks for coming to the site.