Camie's art improvement - critique wanted
polycounter lvl 7
HeIlo!
I've been lurking on the forum for a while and decided to make a post.
I'm a hobbyist and have drawn for a while, but it wasn't till a week ago that I realised that I didn't know a sh*t about the basics of painting. How light and colour behaves. I've always drawn from my mind or used references.
I noticed that many of you are very good at art and give very good and constructive critiques.
I've been lurking on the forum for a while and decided to make a post.
I'm a hobbyist and have drawn for a while, but it wasn't till a week ago that I realised that I didn't know a sh*t about the basics of painting. How light and colour behaves. I've always drawn from my mind or used references.
I noticed that many of you are very good at art and give very good and constructive critiques.
Replies
As for colour, I will say that it can be a tricky thing to get the hang of, especially when so many different artists have different ways of handing it and using it to strengthen their work. Personally, I found this youtube tutorial really helpful, it works well with my style and it might work well for you too
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One thing I think you might need to work on is possibly tightening the detail within your work. Taking a guess at what brushes you use, your paintings seem very soft edged and so a lot of the details get blurred in together and it can be hard to make out what certain areas are meant to depict. I'd say experiment with brushes, be brave with your brush strokes and don't be annoyed if it goes wrong, that's what experimentation is all about, you may find something you really like from it
Really great work so far, keep at it, looking forward to seeing more of your stuff on the forum!
I did a really fast "paint over" by taking your color pass, putting the value painting over it and set it to luminosity, then lasso'd out the top of the head and extended the backlight to the top of the head. 3 minutes and it reads a lot better imo. You may want to give it a look.
@zindagi dagabaz Thanks a lot
Hey man, I had a couple minutes so I did a bit of a paint over. Probably the biggest reason she reads flat right now is because the perspective she is sitting in is very misleading for the eye. The right hand is huge, but nothing else falls off fast enough into perspective to justify it. your center line for the girl doesn't also accurately trace up her body and causes the eye to skip over landmarks that would normally give it form. Also, I liked the idea of having the head tilt back but when you try that pose yourself with your shoulder as high as it would need to be in this perspective its uncomfortable and feels forced.
Your material rendering is fine and the parts that you have spent time on look very polished. I think I would increase the specular though exceptionally with flames. Flames and metal means light is bouncing everywhere.
Last you're not really playing with atomospherics. This is generally a term reserved for large objects or environments but if you look at the way someone like Kekai renders you'll see he is really able to push form by putting in atmopshere in between legs and create seperation even in hair. I hope the quick paint over helps as I only had a few minutes to try to describe everything.
Thanks a lot for the valuabe feedback, it instantly looks a million times better!I'll try to play around with athmospherics a bit, but I haven't really gotten the hang of it yet.
You and me both. its something I push a bit in every piece but there is always more to learn man. Just keep pushing man you're getting better.
However, I'm having problems making it into colour now. I've tried using a colour layer on top but I the colours become dull and the other layers (multiply, overlay) make it so that I can't pick colours from the canvas... So I painted over with a normal layer, but that removes all the effort I've put into the details on the grayscale.
Does the colours from the "colour layer" become dull because my values are wrong?
here is a little painter to show you how to make the lighting a bit more interesting on your latest piece. I think by making the whole image more darker and carefully putting the main light source direction more clear, it will result in more depth for your characters.
Good luck!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1d4mz3xdmxemk5f/paintover.gif?dl=0
However I need to point out that the design and colours of the characters aren't mine, I'm merely drawing someone's characters from the game "Guild Wars 2" belonging to ArenaNet.
Secondly, I can't tell the difference between your dropbox image and how my original image looked. Did you attach the correct one?
Hey man, I was going to do this last night but I've been swamped with work so I didn't have energy but I wanted to show you this really basic way of doing this. First off, your value pass looks great. One of the catch with using the color layer is that it does weird shit with saturation and it is only the correct saturation at the natural value of the color you're trying to apply to the layer... which means that its near worthless. I never use color layer because it doesn't feel natural at all. I showed you this trick with your Annie piece above and its the luminosity layer. If you spend a ton of time doing a good value pass, use it.
I usually block in color and value seperately on my line art, The colors are generally masked off per material so I can switch it up layer. The value pass I usually do similar to yours but I seperate out the lighting as its applied to the character so I can go back and change the source if I need to to either tint it or its strength. Like my Ao is different than my rim light which is different from my bounce light etc... That being said, if I block out my color I can just set the entire group of layers to luminosity over my blockout and it does nearly about 90% of the work for me and I get to keep my saturation. I think if you used this method you would get something polished a lot fasters as I did my "color pass' as a scribble in 2 minutes and fixed the saturation problem immediately.
I think you understood well the point without the paintover. It was a gif file, it is suppose to be animated so let me know if it is working or not, maybe I didn't export the file correctly.
Great progress keep going ; )
@wizo Thanks for your reply, seems my reply from a year ago isn't showing, but thanks for the reply! It was great feedback and you did a wonderful job with the paint over, I was astounded! It looked so good! Thanks yet again!!!
@Greg Westphal Thanks for the feedback! The values were much better! I need to practice values to be able to see when they're appropriate as I'm having a hard time telling right from wrong right now. Figured I need to research this area thoroughly since it's such an important topic. Your explanation helped a lot however and I've tried the method in other pieces over the year. Thanks!
I've decided to start over the whole process and actually learn from the bottom up with some internet courses and I'll post my assignments here as I'm progressing and I'd love to get some critique. I'm starting with gesture.
First I'll post some pieces I did during the year, however I will not improve these ones as I'm going to start anew, and don't have the .psd files anymore. (I'll add references as I find them/if I find them)
I've been studying/influenced by different styles when doing these, Kekai Kotaki, Kuvshinov Ilya, Paul Kwon and Wang Ling, still working on finding my own style (but that comes later)
I have improved a bit since the first gesture drawings but I have a really hard time with the time limits. I'd love to get some critique. Thanks
Simply go View>Proof Setup>Custom
Change the Device to Simulate option to Dot Grain 20%
Save the new Custom Setting
Now whenever you hit Ctrl+Y (Command+Y) you can quickly check your values and go back to working in color.
Like flipping the canvas horizontal to check if an image is balanced composition wise, I now compulsively hit ctrl+y to make sure everything reads clearly. Hope this helps!
but you are focusing a bit more on painting and less on volumes and structure, which is why some parts on your pieces are coming off as dis-proportionate (left hand of the last image you posted).
this is just my input as in how I look at art study.
hope this helps!
@Mehran Khan I agree, the left hand looks really flat as well as the face of the woman in orange. I really need to work on my technical knowledge. There's so much to learn! Thanks!
Assingment 1: Block-in overlays on portraits of lights and darks. Increasing in detail.
References:
1. Jonathan Hardesty
2. http://jasonbellphoto.com/#/home/
3. http://www.paulmorelstudios.com/
4. http://apotheosiscosplay.deviantart.com/art/Katarina-Cosplay-A-New-Dawn-Cinematic-Version-571171123
This was really hard imo. Especially the trees in the picture with the house. I actually ended up using 6 values on that one.
Assignment 4: Create a finished study in a different value scheme. (Reference belongs to Jonathan Hardesty)
This one was really hard for me. In hindsight I notice the relationship between her face and the veil is not contrasting as much as it probably should.
Study, mainly focused on light
WoW inspired, trying to establish good values.
Study: Trying my hand at paiting landscapes, even though it looks rough it was really hard and took a long time. I find landscapes really hard generally.