Need critique - I feel stuck

xeoncat

Hello everyone,

I've been lurking polycount for a while now and I've been meaning to make this thread, because I'm a concept artist, but I don't know how to improve my work. Digital painting is my focus, but when I shoot for realism, my colors always end up feeling bland and I take a really long time to do anything compared to other artists.

Please take a look at my work on artstation > https://www.artstation.com/artist/xeoncat

I don't think I'm half bad, but I'm lagging behind other professionals and younger artists seem to pickup this stuff a lot faster than me. I just did this photo study warmup and I took 2 hours, and I feel really frustrated , and I've been feeling really stuck in this for a year at least, everyone else seems to be doing better than this in 2 minutes > https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/666005/xeoncat/newyork.jpg

So, any tips and critiques are more than welcome

Muzzoid

Hi pedro.

Welcome to the forums, I certainly know what it feels like to be suck on that plateau and not sure how to get off it.

Now I'm going to be making assumptions to your working habits and your understanding of theory, so correct me if i am wrong here. Also before you read this i want you to get a piece of paper, and see if you can look at that latest study, and list everything that you think should be better, and i think you will be surprised to see how much you already know of what I'm about to say.

Right now it seems like your biggest hangup is that you seem to be having trouble stepping out of the territory of using small brush strokes with a hard simple brush. It's important to be able to competently render using a hard round brush, but it shouldn't be out prison cell where we need to rely on it to do all the heavy lifting of everything we make. You need to not only just use it, but you need to step back and analyze how you use it. I can tell you right now looking at it, all of your strokes are making additive shapes, and there isn't much in the way of negative shapes. It is easier and faster to clean up forms with an eraser than it is with a brush.

For cities, if you are trying to get it done in a timely fashion you are really pushing shit up hill the way you are doing it. You will see a lot of the best guys just grabbing a large selection of an area with a polygonal lasso tool and filling that area in with a large fuzzy brush, then cleaning that up afterwards.

Other than that you have a really weird sense of light and colour, you aren't really considering the light and ambient colour of the scene, and as such you choose colours that look out of place in the same scene together. I think you need to go and do some serious reading and try and wrap your head around these things more thoroughly.

Anyhow here are two links that should help you out with these problems.
http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php/148355-translation-LINRAN-s-Light-and-Colour-Tutorial-Mini-tut-BIG-download!

Good luck man, changing your trajectory is hard, but it is super rewarding when you manage to pull it off.

xeoncat

Wow Muzz! Thank you very much for the valuable input. I didn't actually guess anything on my list except the colors, hehe =P

I have Color and Light by James Gurney, I read it back to back and I learned a lot, but maybe I'm not actually applying everything that I could, at least consistently.

I'm going to process those tutorials you mentioned too, thank you!

Muzzoid

Great!

I'm just curious, what DID you write down?

xeoncat

bland colors, redundant brush strokes, lack of detail. but the bland colors it's the thing I do the most, it's always either too diffuse or too saturated, maybe it's the values I don't get. But I should get back to it again soon

Muzzoid

Hmm,

"it's always either too diffuse or too saturated, maybe it's the values I don't get."

Hmm not sure that is the right way to think about it. saturated, unsaturated, they both can work well, instead it's the choice of colours in lighting situations where they shouldn't be used.

xeoncat

Indeed. I tried several times doing value studies and then try to paint hues over them, but I never got used to it because colors always end up out of place, and to me it all felt pretty unnatural. But I learned from that that the brightest value is at different saturations in each hue (for example, the brightest 0º red is at about 75% saturation).

The Lin Ran tutorial mentions an approach to colors using RGB, but pretty complex for me, I'm used to thinking in HSV.

Here are two other studies I did from movie shots (one from interstellar and another from Jupiter Ascending). one very light scene and another very dark
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/666005/xeoncat/study1_1280.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/666005/xeoncat/jupiterstudy1.jpg

and the REFs:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/666005/xeoncat/study1_.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/666005/xeoncat/jupiterstudy.jpg

levigilbert

I found someone posted this video the other day and I found it quite helpful to remind me how to play with color. I think you might find it helpful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nINus0lYQjo&feature=youtu.be

xeoncat

levigilbert wrote: »

I found someone posted this video the other day and I found it quite helpful to remind me how to play with color. I think you might find it helpful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nINus0lYQjo&feature=youtu.be

This is really interesting levigilbert, thank you very much. I will test all this soon

Muzzoid

levigilbert wrote: »

I found someone posted this video the other day and I found it quite helpful to remind me how to play with color. I think you might find it helpful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nINus0lYQjo&feature=youtu.be

I'm getting seriously sick of teachers telling students that colour is an abstract thing where you can do everything and it just works. Just because HE doesn't understand how colour works or what he is doing does that mean he gets to tell people this bullshit.

The thing is his painting is better than his active knowledge. I'll tell you exactly what he is doing. He is using a grey local colour(cardboard) which reflects light exactly in the proportion of the light hitting it at the eye, meaning that if you have a shifting ambient light, which he has exaggerated, it works. He is in a forest which means his ambient will be shifting from green to blue. If you notice when he has a more saturated local colour he isn't doing this dumb "abstract colours" thing, because with saturated primary colours the majority of the effect of changing light hue is actually changing value.

In fact all Marco is doing here is using a restricted Gamut because of his light source colour and it's the only reason he has a harmonious palette. He is saying one thing then doing another.

UUUUGH.

---

Anyhow back on topic.

Yes the Lin Ran tutorial talks about painting in RGB, but i would seriously recommend you consider learning how it works, and it is slowly starting to win over a lot of artists who paint with it. I do it, Devin Platts does, Lin Ran, Arne Niklas Jansen, (i actually need to compile a list of artists that do, i just can't remember them all off the top of my head)

I don't think it's going to instantly let you become a better artist overnight or is necessary to understanding, but if you are struggling with learning colour and light, it could be something you could try to radically change how you approach light and colour.

Have a think about it .

PS.

I tried several times doing value studies and then try to paint hues over them

This is a slow and outdated technique, it doesn't work and has never worked without spending a crazy amount of time painting over the top to fix all the problems where you colorized your specular reflections and had no temperature shift in the shadows.

Il_

Wow, Muzz, thank you very much! Had to read several times to really understand what you mean (ok, my terrible english is one of a reasons), but, actually, you're telling stuff I've never heard before and it answers so many questions I've had!

xeoncat

Hmm, yeah, but I think that Marco is shooting more for expression than realism, still, it's definitely not random hehe. But he does say some right stuff, context is more important than anything when dealing with color. I saw paintings where I would swear they had a blue sky when in fact all strokes were desaturated red hues. Context is definitely very important and if played well, give the necessary depth to any surface.
Anyway, today I'm going to test that RGB thing. It sounds clunky to move around values, but there's one thing that makes full sense to me. If I have a lower and a higher primary color, and make the one in the middle move around, the color shifting is pretty natural while keeping the value the same

Muzzoid

"context is more important than anything when dealing with color."

Context is what a colour gamut is. The problem isn't that everything he says is wrong, the problem is that he is just showing effects of light without understanding or explaining why it works. Sorry if i sound a bit harsh, but I'm pretty passionate about teachers having the correct information. I never had it, and I had to work out everything i know from reading technical documents and playing with coloured lights, so it annoys me that we have the information but the teachers aren't teaching it.

Good luck trying RGB, it will take a bit to get used to, but once you wrap your head around how it works it should help your painting, even if you don't always use it.

xeoncat

I understand. Gamut masking is one of those things that I learned with Gurney, but never really did apply. Photoshop really needed a tool for that, and an actual color wheel, hehe

Meanwhile I did the RGB thing. I think it's looking better, the photo referenced helped of course. no advertising to the brands intended, hehe xD
Study
REF

EDIT: I think I'm gonna use this more. It's hard to control the saturation, but values+hue are much easier

Muzzoid

Nice job, looks good!

DireWolf

From a quick glance yea you seem to suffer from going into smaller details while losing the over all value.

1 quick tip how you can check your value correctly... drop a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer on your piece and make sure it's set to "Color". If you don't do this, the b/w value will take saturation into its equation and the value you see will be incorrect. Bright saturated yellow will turn out really dark for example, give it a try.

When doing this on most of your pieces, you can quickly see how monochromatic your value is.

xeoncat

DireWolf, thank you very much! This is a great tip indeed. Yesterday I was just thinking about how yellows were really dark and I thought it was my perception of it when it's colored