What does "Blocking something in" mean in photoshop?

[Tonnichiwa]

Hello fellow Cartographers.

I was going through Torstan's wonderful tutorials on how he makes Isometric Mountains, and he says one of his steps is to "Block in the basic light and shade on an overlay layer."

Now I've searched far and wide across the internet for what to "Block In" something means. All I get back from every search engine is how to block spam and a bunch of other irrelevant garbage.

Do one of you wonderful Photoshop users know what it means to "Block In the basic light and shade? "

I know that he means he wants us to add highlight and shading to the mountains but I am talking about his specific technique for doing so.

I've painted miniatures for years and highlight and shade those all the time but I've never heard anyone say to block something in. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

[Tonnichiwa]

Hello fellow Cartographers.

I was going through Torstan's wonderful tutorials on how he makes Isometric Mountains, and he says one of his steps is to "Block in the basic light and shade on an overlay layer."

Now I've searched far and wide across the internet for what to "Block In" something means. All I get back from every search engine is how to block spam and a bunch of other irrelevant garbage.

Do one of you wonderful Photoshop users know what it means to "Block In the basic light and shade? "

I know that he means he wants us to add highlight and shading to the mountains but I am talking about his specific technique for doing so.

I've painted miniatures for years and highlight and shade those all the time but I've never heard anyone say to block something in. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

Oh, and in case you are interested, I was translating the techniques to CC3+ and got about this far

[Voolf]

Hey Tonnichiwa,
I studied his tuts for a long time. I believe what he ment by "block in" is to just paint whole right side with subtle shadow and left side with subtle light. It is just the first stage of his shading process. You 'block' (paint with big brush) the whole area here, you dont go into details, that is why he use this word.

[Falconius]

I think it just means drawing in the basic shape outlines of objects and then the basic outlines of the shading. Like this:
DSCF7206 (Copy).JPG
Here's Alphonso Dunn explaining it far better than I ever could.

[Tonnichiwa]

Well that would certainly make sense. Thank you Voolf

[Tonnichiwa]

Thanks Falconius. That helps a lot.

Could a mod please merge my two threads together? Thanks.

[Runninghead]

Hello! So pleased to find a question I can actually answer! Blocking in is an art term that usually means painting flat colour or tone to fill in the shapes made by your line art (eg- the coastline of an island or county). In this sense he's using the term loosely to mean "quickly and loosely add the shadows and highlights without worrying too much about making them detailed". It sounds like he's expecting you to essentially do a rough version of what's called "toon shading". There are a few VERY cool tricks in Photoshop to turn your toon shading in to smoothly blended "airbrush" style shading, and back again... but that's another topic Best of luck, should be fun.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Tonnichiwa]

Nice to know. Thank you Runninghead