Advice required please Digital Painting

mccartm6

I have been trying to turn one of life drawing sketches into a rendered digital painting but just cant seem to get it right. have a look please and any advice as to what im doing wrong or were i could improve would be awesome!

elementrix

ehm, first of all, upload smaller pictures, what is the use of a 7k by 5k image of a rough drawing?

Are you using photo reference of just painting this without examples, those skin colors look very monochrome, read on how skin reacts to light and try to see those things happening in reference images and then try to mimic those.

AlecMoody

i'm not a painter but your shadow tones for the flesh are too low saturation. Also, whatever that solid black thing is behind the figure is too dark/ is a void space.

killnpc

interesting subject... a guy's butt... /shrug

i think your problem is your inability to render forms. practice rendering forms in pencil. create spheres, cones, and cubes. then make more complex shapes that are fused, twisted, and overlap one another. then render dynamic light over their surfaces. these understandings will easily transition into paint.

this is the type of practice you need.

mccartm6

sorry about the pic size. thanks for the advice, @killnpc ya the image is terrible, unfortunatly that was the angle i got in life drawing classes and that was the drawing we were told to bring to a finished image,thanks for the advice on renderin forms.@ alecmoody its supposed to be the covered pillow he was lying on but i just threw them in at the end, in frustration more than anything else, il get rid of them!

mccartm6

@elementrix im painting without a picture or anything, im using bits of reference but mostly its from my head?

Oranghe

you will find this difficult at first mostly if your new to anatomy and photoshop, you really need a reference image to be able to color this.

http://itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm you might find some useful things here about skin tone, rendering and lighting.

maybe find a similar image or any image of a person laying down so you can digest this a bit easier. But don't worry to much it's never about an image always about learning, best of luck!

eazy

your pencil sketch has a lot of great shadow definitions. great stuff, man, keep it up! a cool website that lets you do some great figure studies and sketches is here http://www.pixelovely.com/gesture/figuredrawing.php. Also, if you can get a hold of any [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Figure-Drawing-All-Its-Worth/dp/0857680986/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325997068&sr=1-1"]Andrew Loomis[/ame] books or stuff by [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Bridgmans-Complete-Guide-Drawing-Life/dp/1402766785/ref=pd_sim_b_1"]George Bridgman[/ame], that would probably help you cover the foundational stuff a bit better.

Dylan Brady

In my life Drawing classes whenever I knew I was going to be tight on time I would snap a picture of the scene from my angle.
This is probably a good idea to start doing in your sessions.
hopefully the teacher gave you warning that you were going to be rendering this pencil drawing in full color but if not that's a little unfair.

I would also take pictures of my drawing in order to see it smaller and take a step back to get an overall perspective... this can help with noticing errors that would not be obvious otherwise