Help with rendering techniques

[u/Trey4705]

Hi! I wanted to see if anyone knew how exactly the artists go about doing a couple things in this image. There’s like 3 things, being, how is the hair rendered, how are the reeds in both the foreground and the background done, and how is that water done. Is there some like hidden trade secret method? It looks great and I want to know the process.

[u/Business_Wallaby_905]

For the hair, mask manually with selection tool, and gradient tool/paint bucket for each step of highlight. same with the reed, but with gradient tool with two different color, or more than once with different color. Sometimes with different colors on the distance of the gradient, or to transparency. The water , the entire water is done with a few gradient, from light to dark or whatever you think looks like undisturbed water. For the ripples you manually draw in the ripple, and reduce transparency and for the strongest light reflection ripple no transparency and erase areas that is being shadowed/reflected. Every details should be on it's own layer so you can adjust the strength of shine. Flatten the layers only when you are happy or after you have saved a copy.

There are many ways, and there are many tweaks to get this look. Try it out. Remember the mask have a hardness setting. the harder the edge the more it look like a "cut-out". blur the edges to see if it looks natural to the scene. each blur edge setting is different depending on your file size(DPI) so it's best to stick with standard DPI your computer/phone/tablet can handle without crashing.

Hope that helps.

[u/sarkzar]

Depends on the level of skill you're starting at. At its core, this image shows a fair amount of knowledge in the following areas:

• Form. Understanding lighting and how it behaves on 3D forms is vital for all of it. Even though this is a 2D piece, everything is treated as if it has 3 dimensions. That's why the shading and reflections look believeable on the things you mentioned.

• Color Theory. Know how to shade with color and how to use a cohesive color palette to create the desired atmosphere.

• Line vs Shape. This artist knows when and how to allow let various shapes represent forms without using lines. It's why the reeds aren't outlined down to every little grain/leaf but still look good.

Cell shading and a more painterly shading style are utilized here. Tutorials for that kind of rendering would be helpful as well.

Referencing is another good way to go about it. Literally try to reproduce this image, ACCURATELY. Don't just half ass it and then wonder why it looks wrong.

Art of this quality is produced after years of study and a solid understanding of how the basic elements of art work together. You could try finding tutorials for all of the specific parts you mentioned, but it'd take way too long to type that info out in a reddit comment, and wouldn't be useful without visuals.

TL;DR though, there is no "trade secret". This is the result of lots of hard work studying the basics and practice developing this style of rendering.

[u/PaperCrease]

Made this before realizing you want to know how to render not just draw uhh. Anyways.
For hair, imagine a beach ball, peel and cut it. For background reed, draw in bundles, just vaguely triangle shapes is fine. For foreground, again triangles, draw the big shapes then cut and fold them like paper stripes. For water, google reflection and refraction.
Xin Yan got very nice art this year huh.