And what are those issues? Should be interesting to know what problems you have in order to help you directly
* The image seems to be cut in half horizontal and vertical.
* The shapes of the two mountains are too equal, get some variation in size and form
* Nearly everything tends toward a spikey shape, contrast it with more round (for example) forms
* The values in the mid and the lower part of the painting seem to have kind of all the same size
You sir, are the man. Thanks immensely for the feedback.
The issues that I'm encountering are numerous, and just as varied. Primarily it's that a large majority of the stuff in this painting I've got very little experience with. Mountains? Those things are covered in rocks, and rocks are hard. As you can probably tell looking at the previous page, the last thing with any significant environment bits didn't turn out so great from a rocks and mountain standpoint. (Or most standpoints beyond fruity pebble amounts of color, if that counts). Mountains in my head up to this point have pretty much been "those triangles you see in the distance", which is so many kinds of wrong. Including them pretty prominently in this one was to help me fix that mentality. Tackling them and having them look like they might actually have rocks and snow on them was sort of a new thing and took like, six tries to get looking ok. Trees? Most of the trees I've ever implemented into anything have been an afterthoughtbackground, and I'm trying to avoid that this time around. Foreground - like, ground and dirt and grass and other things that people closer to the viewer are on top of? I never posted updates on this one due to difficulty with that very thing (well, and also the same rock environment background I can never seem to get right).
So this one for me is a whole lot of stuff I'm usually very bad at. I've been working away at these sorts of things individually on stuff I haven't posted, but by recommendation of a friend I'm trying to finish some more robust, complete paintings. I tried to take some time to plan this one (seems I may have fucked that up a bit), so at least I'm not sitting there trying to figure out what's going to fill up the rest of the image.
Some of the things you mentioned are things that I was planning on implementing at least in part - the clouds are obviously placeholders, their shapes will likely change and I was thinking there may be more, possibly obscuring/softening parts of the mountains. The foreground has received no real attention so far, but I'm really glad I posted when I did because you pointed out some things I would have likely overlooked - if they got fixed it would have been due to mere coincidence, not by my knowing which would obviously be preferable.
I had every intention of not posting anything until this one was finished, figured if I posted something it'd just sit here until I posted the finished one anyway but I figured what the hell. I'm glad I took the time, I hadn't realized a lot of the things you mentioned with overall composition and I'll see what I can do about them. Sort of funny the things you mentioned weren't what I'd struggled with directly...rather they were with things I hadn't even realized at all, haha.
First of all, as Yohann Shepacz said so wisely on a question how he is so good: 'I reference the shit out of anything I paint, even if it takes longer to search for the reference than the painting itself.'
I can just agree on this. Your painting totally looks like you've drawn and painted everything out of imagination. Get references for everything and use them! Even for composition. Look at paintings you like from other artists and look what and how they did it! You really cannot know anything!
It's been a long time since I've posted anything. I've spent the past...however many months trying to work away at all sorts of things, to try and find a workflow that...resonates with me, I guess. Don't really want to get into it.
Here are a few paintings I've worked on over the past several months, shown in the order they were done. The second one is still a relatively early WIP; tried a lot of new things with that one and wound up jumping to the next one when they weren't working out.
I will probably be uploading things a bit more regularly this year. Thanks for looking.
Pencil sketches today. A thread in GD got me thinking I should scan in what's sitting in my current sketchbook. I felt like surely some of these had been uploaded before, but I couldn't find them if that was the case. Sorry for what will probably be a lot of scrolling.
Something else I wanted to share on the offchance it was helpful to anyone looking, is what I'm using for a sketchbook. I encountered a problem last year where the sketchbooks I was buying from a local art store were removed from stock. All of my sketching is done with a regular mechanical pencil, and paper with a lot of tooth didn't work as well as smoother paper (like the stuff used for pen sketchbooks some times). I looked around online, but as I really started to buckle down and crank stuff out regularly, I wound up going through an 80-100 page sketchbook every couple weeks. I am not a rich man, and I just couldn't afford to keep paying anywhere from $7-15 for 80-100 pages.
It occurred to me that regular old printer paper usually worked fine for my sketches, but did I really want to keep them in a clunky 3-ring binder where the pages are free and have more room to move (and consequently, rub together)? It's hard to find a decently small 3 ring binder anyway. So I started looking into book binding, and ran across disc binding. Usually used for more office stuff or school work organization I think, but after looking into it I thought it could really work. In recent years Staples (here in the US anyway) has started selling disc binding materials, so I picked up a punch (for ~$40) and a small notebook and have been thrilled ever since. It is so much cheaper to be able to buy a 500 sheets of regular printer paper, that I can always count on to have the same "toothiness"/grain, etc, than to shell out $7 for 80 pages every few weeks. The initial "investment" was paid off by the money I saved in no time at all.
Below are a couple pictures of my sketchbook(s) (and the hole punch, in the first image):
The book always lies flat, pages are easy to remove and replace (which is fantastic given I often start a digital painting as a pencil sketch), and when my preferred (thinner) book gets full, I can move the pages over to another book with thicker rings for storage. I find that because of the mushroom-shaped holes you punch onto the paper, they don't really move around or rub together in the book hardly at all, which helps with longevity compared to many other sketchbooks/binding types.
That's it for now, thanks for looking.
Edit: Oh, just as a forewarning, if anyone looks into the disc binding thing - Rollabind is apparently something to be wary of. I spoke briefly with their customer support, which I sort of gathered was maybe one or two people, and read a LOT of scam reports of products not getting received, etc. Circa & Staple's ARC products seem perfectly legit.
Now that I've painted some atrocious armor design, I'll try to move on with a bit more studying/reference pulling. The main goal here was to see what would happen if I put more effort into retaining shapes/feelings present in my sketches, more trying to understand my workflow. More or less feeling successful so far as that goes, but not going to try and finish this one right now.
"Clear my head" sort of PS sketch. Always so annoyed that I find environments much more relaxing than character paintings, since they're not what I find myself more drawn to.
Thank you for stopping by Erik. I wound up liking that one quite a bit myself; I intend to go back and add some more stuff/polish at some point.
Here's my current WIP. Painting one of the sketches from last time. ...after this one, I really need to sit down and try to get some more scene...type...paintings done. I have a hard time combining people with more solid environments and backgrounds, for some reason either on their own usually isn't too bad.
Threw in a close up for the sake of it, in case anyone's interested in how messy stuff tends to be prior to shrinkage.
Looking at this sketchbook is very fun ^^ it reminds me of my figure drawing classes I had not too long ago
Should probably scan my charcoal stuff as well.. now to find and A2 scanner :poly121:
Also wanted to say thanks for taking the time and stopping by my sketchbook all the time
Thank you for stopping by Jessie. I like to stop by your sketchbook; its mood is generally very lighthearted and uplifting. It's interesting and doesn't interfere with my own mood or mindset, so definitely keep posting. :thumbup:
I don't generally like bumping this thread without an art update, working on this one at the moment:
Decided to do a girl, since I haven't taken very many paintings of girls to a more finished state. Still several things to work on, pretty sure her sword arm is too long & various things are still very messy.
I think this is probably the only painting in recent memory I'm feeling...fairly happy with. Still have several things I need to do/want to try with it, and even then it won't be as great as the artists whose work I try to study. But I guess I just feel like the however many years of working on things are starting to pay off a little bit. I look at the first page of this thread and see improvement. Painting has become more of a joy than a burdensome trial of constant problem solving (as it used to be).
After I finish up this one, I intend to go back over several of the paintings on this page & put together an actual working portfolio. Finished up most of the code over the past couple weeks, will hopefully just be a matter of plugging in images.
Presently I think it's mostly lacking in content, but I'm really happy to finally have a site of some sort up and running. The (simple) CSS/PHP I learned should make adding images in the future super straightforward & organized.
Prior to getting the site up, I did some more work on these images:
Replies
* The image seems to be cut in half horizontal and vertical.
* The shapes of the two mountains are too equal, get some variation in size and form
* Nearly everything tends toward a spikey shape, contrast it with more round (for example) forms
* The values in the mid and the lower part of the painting seem to have kind of all the same size
OP
The issues that I'm encountering are numerous, and just as varied. Primarily it's that a large majority of the stuff in this painting I've got very little experience with. Mountains? Those things are covered in rocks, and rocks are hard. As you can probably tell looking at the previous page, the last thing with any significant environment bits didn't turn out so great from a rocks and mountain standpoint. (Or most standpoints beyond fruity pebble amounts of color, if that counts). Mountains in my head up to this point have pretty much been "those triangles you see in the distance", which is so many kinds of wrong. Including them pretty prominently in this one was to help me fix that mentality. Tackling them and having them look like they might actually have rocks and snow on them was sort of a new thing and took like, six tries to get looking ok. Trees? Most of the trees I've ever implemented into anything have been an afterthought background, and I'm trying to avoid that this time around. Foreground - like, ground and dirt and grass and other things that people closer to the viewer are on top of? I never posted updates on this one due to difficulty with that very thing (well, and also the same rock environment background I can never seem to get right).
So this one for me is a whole lot of stuff I'm usually very bad at. I've been working away at these sorts of things individually on stuff I haven't posted, but by recommendation of a friend I'm trying to finish some more robust, complete paintings. I tried to take some time to plan this one (seems I may have fucked that up a bit), so at least I'm not sitting there trying to figure out what's going to fill up the rest of the image.
Some of the things you mentioned are things that I was planning on implementing at least in part - the clouds are obviously placeholders, their shapes will likely change and I was thinking there may be more, possibly obscuring/softening parts of the mountains. The foreground has received no real attention so far, but I'm really glad I posted when I did because you pointed out some things I would have likely overlooked - if they got fixed it would have been due to mere coincidence, not by my knowing which would obviously be preferable.
I had every intention of not posting anything until this one was finished, figured if I posted something it'd just sit here until I posted the finished one anyway but I figured what the hell. I'm glad I took the time, I hadn't realized a lot of the things you mentioned with overall composition and I'll see what I can do about them. Sort of funny the things you mentioned weren't what I'd struggled with directly...rather they were with things I hadn't even realized at all, haha.
I appreciate it, thanks again.
First of all, as Yohann Shepacz said so wisely on a question how he is so good: 'I reference the shit out of anything I paint, even if it takes longer to search for the reference than the painting itself.'
I can just agree on this. Your painting totally looks like you've drawn and painted everything out of imagination. Get references for everything and use them! Even for composition. Look at paintings you like from other artists and look what and how they did it! You really cannot know anything!
Here are a few paintings I've worked on over the past several months, shown in the order they were done. The second one is still a relatively early WIP; tried a lot of new things with that one and wound up jumping to the next one when they weren't working out.
I will probably be uploading things a bit more regularly this year. Thanks for looking.
Cont...
Cont...
Something else I wanted to share on the offchance it was helpful to anyone looking, is what I'm using for a sketchbook. I encountered a problem last year where the sketchbooks I was buying from a local art store were removed from stock. All of my sketching is done with a regular mechanical pencil, and paper with a lot of tooth didn't work as well as smoother paper (like the stuff used for pen sketchbooks some times). I looked around online, but as I really started to buckle down and crank stuff out regularly, I wound up going through an 80-100 page sketchbook every couple weeks. I am not a rich man, and I just couldn't afford to keep paying anywhere from $7-15 for 80-100 pages.
It occurred to me that regular old printer paper usually worked fine for my sketches, but did I really want to keep them in a clunky 3-ring binder where the pages are free and have more room to move (and consequently, rub together)? It's hard to find a decently small 3 ring binder anyway. So I started looking into book binding, and ran across disc binding. Usually used for more office stuff or school work organization I think, but after looking into it I thought it could really work. In recent years Staples (here in the US anyway) has started selling disc binding materials, so I picked up a punch (for ~$40) and a small notebook and have been thrilled ever since. It is so much cheaper to be able to buy a 500 sheets of regular printer paper, that I can always count on to have the same "toothiness"/grain, etc, than to shell out $7 for 80 pages every few weeks. The initial "investment" was paid off by the money I saved in no time at all.
Below are a couple pictures of my sketchbook(s) (and the hole punch, in the first image):
The book always lies flat, pages are easy to remove and replace (which is fantastic given I often start a digital painting as a pencil sketch), and when my preferred (thinner) book gets full, I can move the pages over to another book with thicker rings for storage. I find that because of the mushroom-shaped holes you punch onto the paper, they don't really move around or rub together in the book hardly at all, which helps with longevity compared to many other sketchbooks/binding types.
That's it for now, thanks for looking.
Edit: Oh, just as a forewarning, if anyone looks into the disc binding thing - Rollabind is apparently something to be wary of. I spoke briefly with their customer support, which I sort of gathered was maybe one or two people, and read a LOT of scam reports of products not getting received, etc. Circa & Staple's ARC products seem perfectly legit.
Now that I've painted some atrocious armor design, I'll try to move on with a bit more studying/reference pulling. The main goal here was to see what would happen if I put more effort into retaining shapes/feelings present in my sketches, more trying to understand my workflow. More or less feeling successful so far as that goes, but not going to try and finish this one right now.
Thanks for stopping by.
Love this one man, niiiice colors, it has a certain weight to it
Here's my current WIP. Painting one of the sketches from last time. ...after this one, I really need to sit down and try to get some more scene...type...paintings done. I have a hard time combining people with more solid environments and backgrounds, for some reason either on their own usually isn't too bad.
Threw in a close up for the sake of it, in case anyone's interested in how messy stuff tends to be prior to shrinkage.
Should probably scan my charcoal stuff as well.. now to find and A2 scanner :poly121:
Also wanted to say thanks for taking the time and stopping by my sketchbook all the time
I don't generally like bumping this thread without an art update, working on this one at the moment:
Decided to do a girl, since I haven't taken very many paintings of girls to a more finished state. Still several things to work on, pretty sure her sword arm is too long & various things are still very messy.
I think this is probably the only painting in recent memory I'm feeling...fairly happy with. Still have several things I need to do/want to try with it, and even then it won't be as great as the artists whose work I try to study. But I guess I just feel like the however many years of working on things are starting to pay off a little bit. I look at the first page of this thread and see improvement. Painting has become more of a joy than a burdensome trial of constant problem solving (as it used to be).
After I finish up this one, I intend to go back over several of the paintings on this page & put together an actual working portfolio. Finished up most of the code over the past couple weeks, will hopefully just be a matter of plugging in images.
Crits welcome as always.
And the original pencil sketch, for the sake of it:
http://www.two-listen.com/
Presently I think it's mostly lacking in content, but I'm really happy to finally have a site of some sort up and running. The (simple) CSS/PHP I learned should make adding images in the future super straightforward & organized.
Prior to getting the site up, I did some more work on these images:
Thanks for looking.