Sketchbook: telmac
Im very new to this sort of stuff, and to illustration in general, so please be nice. Almost everything up to these is pretty horrible, and these arent so great either, so im just not going to post those.
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Replies
Some value study [WIP]
I has stopped where to opacity cuts off, and then when i realized that i had nothing to put below, i moved the whole thing down and tried to make longer branches.
working on wheezywaiter:
An alien thing:
Some sorta giant chin guy with a cape:
An axe:
Each time you stop well before they're at a spot where we can really critique them.
looks like you've got basic shading down. you should try pushing it a little farther and add some hot-spots and work on surface types.
your axe needs a much bigger blade. it looks more like a hammer as is.
keep posting!
Also, you need to manage your layers and backgrounds better. Start with a background layer that's got a medium grey. Then do a second layer for linework-- block out those forms. That being done drop that linework to a 30% opacity and set it to multiply, then make a layer below it to do your actual paint / color. As you work over the form you'll be able to phase out the linework.
Try this out, and let's see what you come up with.
Keep sloggin away man.
@Sectaurus I kinda lose it when i get frustrated and im having trouble moving much further with this stuff. Ive always had trouble with surfaces, things end up looking like plastic. I should spend some time trying to paint glass and metal.
@wake I like starting on a canvas maybe 700x700 and using a 20 pixel brush. I usually work outward and build on things moving randomly through adding things. I kinda aim for the end result with how i start, which i know is way wrong. ive been trying to use bigger brushed with less detail and work that in later, but its heard.
Ive also been trying to learn to just use a palette and stick to it. This is harder from reference, but I'm doing all right with non reffed. On to recent work.
Pig nosed doodle while watching chuck. I kinda had the fuu face thing in mind while i worked on this (what i mean)
study of a painting of John adams for school:
I had started working on a few other things in color, but kept giving up. I really do need to pump out something finished, no matter how bad it is.
i forgot to mention this in my last post; make sure you lay down a base coat, it'll make a big difference. If you're working in black and white like the portrait above, set down a medium gray over the area of the face with a darker color for the general area of the hair. From there darken the pits of the eyes and capture other larger shadows of the face before you really begin rendering.
Same goes for color-- for John Adams up there set a good warm skin tone down first, that way you won't be fighting the white as you start rendering in new areas. Also, avoid rendering on white, as it can skew your perception of color. Stick to medium tones in the background, gray for working in black and white and and a low chroma color otherwise. Also for color using a cool background (blues and purples) for a warm palette (reds and oranges) and vice versa can work really well too.
Another point is that it's important to bring up the whole canvas together. That is, instead of rendering one eye all the way, then the mouth, then the chin etc., it needs to be more like how a progressive jpg loads-- you slowly bring up the focus on the entire image together. Otherwise you can end up with a kind of disjointed look for a painting, and often lends itself to problems with proportions.
That's why I keep hammering on about using a big brush, as that helps prevent you from doing exactly that-- you can't detail the eye if your brush is the same size as it.
Speaking of which, crank that brush size. After you've laid down a good base coat you should be working with a big fat brush size, about 5 to 10 times bigger than what you have been here.
Good luck and don't worry, everyone gets discouraged from time to time. Just keep on pluggin away, that's what makes all the difference. Keep posting and I'll do my best to make sure you get some kind of feedback if no one else pitches in.
God i love gimp... I dont know why ive been using photoshop for painting.
I think the linework is done. Someone sent me "chickenonaraft.com" so i had to do this. Im going to finish this. I think.
(by the way, i used wikipedia's chicken image for reference: CHICKEN)
edit: added some color to the chicken as well as basic shading to everything.
If you can get a student copy of painter I highly recommend it!!! Much better for painting and rendering out paintings and drawings if you have a tablet. That is another thing that I find is a pain to get used to if you are used to a physical medium. The tablet is the demons seed sometimes.
Ill deal with the detail later, this is pretty good for now.
a slightly foxier and older chibiterasu.
it seems polycount hates tinygrab, so now all my links are useless
A friend gifted me HL1 (and hl2, but I'm waiting to play it for now), so i drew a heabcrabtopus
I made some sorta retro radio thing, my first proper color, its all right...
Bella, my dog
Everything else I've started recently has ended up crap, so thats all to post...
Oh, and these two things...