Sketchbook: bounchfx

bounchfx

hey guys, I keep meaning to do more art and now I'm going to. yay. any feedback, comments or crits are of course welcome.

for now, most of the stuff I put in here is either going to be color studies, env studies, or life drawing studies. if anyone has any suggestions of things to do that's great also, but I want to at least try to have some focus.

here's some stuff from the past couple months, with more to come. the mountains are the most recent. I usually spend around an hour or so per piece.

jackwhat was a big motivation for me starting to do these as well. thanks jack.











thanks again to everyone who took time to check this out.

bounchfx

did another. pretty much all around unhappy with this, but then again I'm still trying to figure (HA!) out a decent workflow for doing this kinda thing.



do you guys recommend painting in layers when blocking stuff out like this? I'm feelin it out colorwise and in general ways to put it down. this particular ref image had weird lighting that I tried to stick to. ah well. thanks for looking.

bounchfx

did one more for the night.. this time starting with four values, one per layer, then after the base was down i merged and added 2-3 more values. smoothed it after (just used the smudge tool.. would appreciate advice on this). not sure if I prefer the smooth or unsmoothed one of this but it didn't come out too bad this time I dont think.


also, my strokes seem to be very wobbly. any advice for this at all or is it just a case of more practice?
next I'm gonna start it the same but paint with like 20-30% opacity and see how that goes. Thanks again!

Quaggs

I really like the work you've done with those environment pieces, especially the graveyard its got a really cool foggy/ethereal quality about it and Your figure paintings are showing a steady improvement.

As for critiques i would say, be more conscientious of where you're lighting is coming from, and If you aren't doing it already, it could help to use a larger size brush when you start out to get forms and lighting blocked in, and then use smaller brushes to fill in the finer details later. Of course, the more you practice the more you will improve, wobbly strokes and all.

Rens

Blue, green, red figures! haha

If your strokes get wobbly, they might be too long for the type of movement you make. You might need to move your hand more instead of making the lines fromout the wrist.

I mostly use layers to stack progress, blocking things out is just one layer for me. (might be a bad habit..)
The last img is a bit weird, you can try to make some changes by using the liquify tool and push things around a bit, really helps to find the forms your looking for. (use a duplicated layer for this)

Good practice pieces, more!

whipSwitch

Yea, drawing from the "elbow" is definitely a good habit to develop. This might be easier or harder depending on the size of your tablet, but it will help take the wrinkles out of your strokes. As a side effect, it also helps discourage "preemptive rendering", which i think we all need sometimes.

StephenVyas

I really like the grave yard scene, because of the mood lighting you gave it. Nice job

Also the women in green, first thing I noticed was the proportions were really good. It has a nice flow to the drawing as well.

Over all, sweet work man

bounchfx

whew, I hope you guys appreciate this. spent more time than any of the other pieces and I had to force myself to stop. looking at it after I noticed I made myself a bit too chubby amongst other things but that's learnings for next time. you can probably tell the areas I didn't render or spend a lot of time on. Oh well. It's 1:30 am and I'm still here at work heh. time to go home and sleeeeeep.

This is a self portrait of me using a picture as reference.



Thanks again guys!

bounchfx

so I obviously have no clue what I'm doing here but jouste inspired me to try something different so I did. didn't spend much time or thought on this whatsoever I just wanted to get a feel of what the flow might be like following his 6 step mini image tut in his sketchbook.

look. I'm sorry. at least I still did art tonight like I promised myself. no, I don't know what it is.



kinda think it looked better before i whacked out the color of the clouds and bone spider leg things. ah well!

once again, thanks for your time!

bounchfx

another quick envo study for tonight

bounchfx

another one tonight... this one with no reference, right from my head. and it shows.


thanks again guys.

Rens

Is that a block of tofu?

Nice bounch, i like that you put up a new piece every day or so, keep it up!

Ged

nice work on the portrait, yeah its a good effort so far. I like the sunset one.

bounchfx

it's been way too long. this took about an hour. I think I went small brush size WAY too fast.




beh. used photo as reference, and for color picking. gonna do another now and try to keep brush bigger, and use my own colors

bounchfx

feelinn like some 3d tonight





yes I would appreciate tips on realistic/mental ray rendering

Loren Broach

hmm I can't see your last two posts.

bounchfx

relinked. I can see em fine now. anyone else having trouble seeing anything?

Rens

yes sir, dont see them aswell

Ged

dont see anything in those last 2 posts

bounchfx

Okay! Uploaded to photobucket so now you guys better be able to see them haha, expect more updates tomorrow as well. Been working on a project, might not post it here but it'll go into P&P before wednesday.

bounchfx

had some life drawing with coworkers, lots of fun!
this one was an hour, camera picture of the newsprint haha

bounchfx

quick blocky in one while I watched groundhog day.

I really need to find a way to do this faster and get an actual pipeline down.

however, this one I didn't spend nearly as much time blocking out with line for proportions, it was just three quick lines (spine, legs, etc) and I put the color on, i'm fairly happy with the proportions for doing it so haphazardly

bounchfx

female midsection, value and form study, and definitely practice with traditional rendering. gotta fudge with it more.

thanks again.

Helixx

Lookin' pretty good. I should dust off my box of pencils.

richkid

looks like you hit the silhouette of your forms pretty solid, but once you start drawing inside the shape you lose sight of the forms that make it up. most of these are lacking a lot of form and anatomy.
i would take a step back and maybe do some hogarth studies. he has a lot of emphasis on exadurating the form of the muscles. in my experience exaduration has been the best way to learn something. take it over the top, then you can always knock it back for more realism

fun stuff man, keep on rockin

whipSwitch

DOH! Photobucket censored your last image.

bounchfx

Helixx: Thanks

richkid: I appreciate the advice. I've heard a lot about hogarth but never actually went and studied his stuff. I'm going to be running through the Stucture of Man DVD's and see what I can learn from that. there's a crapload but it should help. I'm also planning on reading Figure drawing for all it's worth by loomis. thanks again for the crits!

whipswitch: Ah crap! thanks for letting me know. Guess I gotta find a new host for that, ugh. I'll use my dropbox. Should be fixed now. Thank you!!

bounchfx

quick apple color study. about time I tried this exercise.

bounchfx

did a little sculpting practice and anatomy practice all at once!


still trying to decide whether i want to use zbrush or mudbox as my main. I dig em both, but dom war is coming soon!

any tips sculpting wise on brushes and whatnot is appreciated. on anatomy too, but I did use a ref image for this and I think it came out pretty darn close

bounchfx

did a head without ref for practice sculpting in general. I need to use ref next time for a head. I have SUCH a hard time with lips and especially eyes, and I think STARTING with ref will help with some of those issues. either way.



thanks again guys. I think three in one day should be sufficient.

bounchfx

another apple during lunch. it's the same one, upside down. this time the lights in the room were on.

edit:

only thing that annoys me about this that I just noticed is the colors reflected onto the apple don't match the bg color I choose. it's my desk color though. oh well!

Loren Broach

Cool fruit studies. The only thing that looks off are the white highlights, they look overpowering. I did a fruit study recently and I was having trouble with those highlights too.

A.Kincade

Your color studies turned out dope. I used to do fruit paintings back when I was in middle school. I really learned a lot about shading and highlighting from those exercises. Good stuff.

AK

bounchfx

meant to work on DW stuff tonight but I got a little distracted and did this instead

War_Destroyer

Nice dunn!! Good job!

bounchfx

did a 'color as a value' portrait practice... interesting.

bounchfx

another, 60 minutes unfortunately haha, gotta improve!

Loren Broach

Nice Studies Bounch, One thing I noticed (not on your recent post, but the two before) is that the eyes have perspective issues. Take the 'color as a value' character. even though the character is 3/4 view, the eyes look like they would work better for a front view. (hoo I hope I'm making sense)

Anyways, keep it up! I think I'll have to do a head study too sometime soon.

bounchfx

yeah, the eyes actually really bother me in the two you mentioned, and the entire proportions of the color as a value one haha, thanks for the feedback!

another, that took an unfortunately long time.

I seem to be procrastinating doing my DW fairly productively lately:

bounchfx

another


man this is hard. i need a real workflow, the one i have doesn't feel right.

Loren Broach

I really like the portrait right before your last post. Something is going on with the highlights on the cheek in your recent one, looks a little bit droopy.

I don't know what your workflow is but I would imagine it's similar to most artists.

1. sketch
2. block in colors
3. blend and add details.

Here's a couple links that might be helpful to you:

http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=107217

and that figure drawing dvd at the massive black site would be helpful too I'm sure:

http://media.massiveblack.com/

Anyways, I don't claim to know much, but I know those links are helpful to me

Edit: are thes last 4 portraits all the same person?

bounchfx

Thanks keen!
yeah, that's pretty much my workflow, but I always get lost at the block in colors phase. I never know how many to block in, is it only the big shapes, some colors are so hard to see etc. so I'm trying to try new things but blah I always give up and start blending too soon I think. I'm getting better at the sketching and proportion part at least I think. I know that boosting the contrast and levels in the images I use for ref would probably help me see shapes better but for some reason my mind tells me that's cheating, that I need to be able to see it naturally.. so for better or worse I've been doing them without color picking or contrast tweaking.

and yes! the last FIVE actually were all the same person! though you can probably only tell a resemblance in the last three, or perhaps the two before the latest one - the cheek does come across as droopy! so hopefully you see in the latest ones at least better proportion in regards to a likeness.

also thanks for the links. I've read through the bumskee one actually, but I definitely need to read it again and analyze what he does more.

also, I've been really wanting to watch the digital figure drawing massive black video.. I'll probably pick it up because it'll most likely benefit me.

you're doing pretty awesome stuff consistently in your sketchbook too, so it's nice to have these back and forths

thanks for the reply!

bounchfx

another one, this time i took caps along the process, maybe someone can give me feedback on it. did this for my cousin. Unfortunately Photoshop didn't want to work with pressure sensitivity so I had to manually adjust the size every time, much less efficient than when the tablet works, bleh. oh well.

here's the ones leading up, followed by the final. props to anyone who can tell me who it is.




thanks!

bounchfx

soft round brush, as suggested by jackwhat. I like this one. about 2-3 hours again haha

Loren Broach

Nice bounch! Soft brushes definitely give the skin...well...a softer look. These keep getting better and better, good job dude.

bounchfx

quick one, I've decided I'm going to just work on being able to draw a likeness in a shorter amount of time (or at all!) then once I can do that, get back to painting. ok, well, still some painting, but it's definitely something I want to focus on, so I don't have to worry about stuff other than painting while painting haha.

bounchfx

anyone wanna guess who?

...gotta do something during the 7 month downtime.

Thanks again for looking!

bounchfx

had done a couple more figure studies..
 

and a portrait of a co worker for a little event we're having... heheh..



thanks again guys, thanks for looking. I appreciate your support.

bounchfx

another, much quicker one of my friend alex. he told me to draw him haha. had no idea what to do for the bg though for him so I just did some gradients



Thanks!

Ged

nice portraits haha

Mark Dygert

I've never checked your thread out until today, awesome stuff, great progression! Lots of useful info, thanks for keeping it going its not just useful for you but it helps the rest of us out too, here's to many more!