Crimson Daggers — Art forum

Great work jake! Tons of improvement going on! Keep it up!

Mindwrack - Cheers man. Yeah i often forget about edges. Need to keep that in mind. Thanks :)

JonHop - Haha cheers man, shall do ;)

New stuff.

Sketchbook, applying the facial anatomy stuff



Sketch from yesterday. No contrast again. Have to work on that.


Eye Study


Horrible faces


Line faces


And pushing Merlin a bit further this morning

Hey man! Great sketchbook :)
I really like your approach to digital , also the colors in some of your previous paintings are really great! When I looked at your sketchbook , I had in mind to advise you to do anatomy and proportion studies , but scrolling through some of the previous pages , I saw that you were already doing that , so my advice is - keep doing what you're doing , just do tons more of it :)

Othrandir - Cheers :). haha, yeah that's the plan. Tons and tons of the stuff ;).

So, recent stuff
Greyscale Merlin Rough



Thinking about adding a chinese dragon coming out of the sand? I rememeber in Excalibur, Merlin talks about the mist as the 'dragon' a lot. So figured if my Merlin is a chinese priest, travelling with Mongols through the desert, a sandy dragon could be a cool way to push it?





More gestures



Loomis


Studies for the Merlin piece. Trying to mix less and be really efficient with the brush strokes. Picking all the colours by eye. Pretty tough, gives a cool look sometimes though :)




Sketches



And some pencil stuff



Oh, and a couple of faces from this morning. Gross

New stuff. Not managed to post recently, but here's what I've been working on.

Following some feedback from others, decided to rework the pose for Merlin. He looked constricted, and really needed to look more dominatiing, so worked on that.







And this is where he's at now, still working on it though :)


Speedpaint study for the speed paint group on DA


Life drawing this week



Tried charcoal for the first time :/



Bit of Loomis


And some more daily pencil work.





That's all :)

Coming along well Jake! Keep up the good work man :D

Laura_H - cheers, Imma try :)

Keep forgetting to post. AHHHH. So yeah. Here's some new stuff. Oh and HIT 700 HOURS WITH THIS POST (maybe someone will care in the future lol)

Here goes

Finished Merlin, not really sure where else to go with it tbh, os calling it done,


Studies from that


Dan's given us a 1 week extension, before the Morgan character, so I'm going to rework Arthur. Was pretty disappointed with how he turned out, and learnt a ton doing Merlin..


Sketchbook pages



Bargue study spread over 2 days.
Suprisingly fun. If I do another one I think I need to do it slower, more accurately, and for longer. Kinda panicked though. ;)


Study, thought the lighting was pretty sweet here. Trying to think about that more.


Sketches






Sketches for the CHOW - Gonna start doing these as regularly as I can (Every damn week!) - Hopefully it'll stop me noodling around with stuff quite so much.


Then just, Loomis


Gestures






And life drawing (Charcoal's so tough.. if anyone's got any tips, I'd love to hear them!)







That's the lot :)

NIce update man, you'll soon be hitting the first 1000 hour mark! That's awesome! I really like what you did with your merlin. Looking forward to seeing th re-worked arthur. Not an expert on charcoal but one way you can use it is you rub it so it's like dust on a piece of paper then take a water colour brush and use it to 'paint' the image you've drawn you can get some really nice blending this way.

JonHop - Yeah hopefully. Aiming to get there by christmas :). Oh that sounds cool. Not sure I actually have any brushes :/, might have to have a go though :)


Bit of new stuff. Finished redoing my Arthur.


Studies








Sketch, trying to apply the studies


Work for this week's CHOW








Gestures



Btw, I uploaded the sheet here, with a little guide, if anyone wants it. http://jakewbullock.deviantart.com/#/d5m4t89

Loomis




Crits, etc welcome, as always :)

nice lighting on the king arthur, and the studies keep getting better :)

HIT 800 HOURS HERE

BenFlores - cheers man, yeah trying to get back into studying more regularly. It dropped off a bit.

Haven't posted in a while, here's my recent stuff though.

My entry for last week's CHoW - Raging Elemental Colossus.



Studies













Work on Morgan le Fay for the Mentoring project. So yeah, Mongol Morgan











Someone pointed out a slight anatomy issue. The small head makes her look like 2 kids in a huge suit. Need to fix that lol.


WIP for this week's CHoW - Infected Scientist


Gestures



Expression Studies, fast ones...




Aaaaaand, to round it all off. Pencils










Decided to use some old CHoW briefs as pencil exercises, so this is from CHoW 002 - Human Merchant

Daaam dude, i always love stumbling across someones sketchbook which is filled with this much work, it reminds me why i love the daggers so much. Not much to crit at this point, your studies are coming along nicely. My only suggestion would be to perhaps have a go at painting the faces of your figure studies, going through this latest page it seems you miss them out alot, or block out the eyes. Remember that the face is a part of the human anatomy too and a critical part to the character of that person.

Keep going man, very inspiring to watch and i look forward to seeing more of your stuff in the future.

Warburton - Hah, cheers man, that means a lot. Yeah, I wouldn't be doing this without the daggers for sure. Yeah, regarding the faces, I've been trying to do a different study each day for the last couple of weeks, so on the figure ones, I blocked it out, to focus on the rest. Was trying to keep them to like 2 hours. You're right though, I'll try and focus on that more. I'm kinda just getting used to doing this stuff all the time, trying to come up with the schedule that works best for me.

Some current ish stuff. :)

Final CHoW from last week


Horrible sketch, trying to apply last week's studies


Figure study


Portrait Study


Glowy study


Hands studies


Sargent Study



Hands


Expressions


Clothing


Started a recomp study, pretty fun


Scrappy Portrait


Morgan WIP


Work for this week's CHoW - Life




Sketchbook stuff



Gestures






Loomis






Andd that's it I think. :)

Hey man, great job! Still hitting those studies hard which is awesome.
I thought i'd try and help you out with a little paintover to show stuff which reoccurs alot in your work. I know it's a study but hopefully it helps anyways, i usually find showing people rather than telling them help way more. It does for me at least anyways :p

Firt of i just want to explain that this didnt take long at all, about 15 minutes give or take. These problems are prity minimal but will help out alot once you understand them.


1.Edges.
The biggest issue is your marks, or edges. I ran over alot of your marks with simple soft brushstokes. Also between light and dark there is a point where colour becomes saturated. You can see it most on the breast and forehead. In painting, usually less is more, but i'll get more into that in point 3. By softening up the edges i tried to push the forms, just trying to imagine to the face as basic objects and how light hits it. Also in female faces, people are attracted to softness and curved edges, as apposed to sharp shapes and big mark contrast. So basically what i'm saying is, try to really look at your forms in your studies and replicate how they react to light, the sort and hard edges. By doing this you will make your forms look more believable.

2, Contrast.
Not only the contrast of light and darks but also the contrast in soft and hard. Jason Chan is a big one for contrast. He uses it alot in his designs too. Beauty and ugly, reds and greens, rough and smooth, slimy and rough, you get the idea. Its a big part of making your designs and images interesting. In this i pushed the contrast on soft edges around the sides of the figure and also the lights and darks, which brings me onto

3, focal points.
The problem with photos is they just capture everything. Its a cluster fuck for the eye alot of the time which gives the artist an edge over photos, because they can choose what the viewer sees. In this piece the focal points are her face, and her breasts. I chose to soften up alot of areas like the outline on her shoulder and heck which keeping hard edges around the face and breast. On the breast i even upped to contrast to draw more attention to it. The way i did this was with contrast, of hard and soft and also light and dark. If you follow your eyes from right to left across her chest to her right arm you will see, hard light, hard dark, hard light, hard dark and also some soft edges for more contrast. This was deliberate.
Its quite alot to wrap your head around so i hope i havent confused you and this has helped. I tried to explain as best i could. I would recommend studying masters and other great artists work too to better understand it. I learnt this from the Jason Manlet vid on composition which is really helpful and is always worth a watch.
Now im rabbling again, and i'll leave you in peace. Love

So much good stuff, you are working hard and you shall be rewarded in the future. Mark my words Sir!

Warburton - I can't thank you enough for that man, in some of the studies I've done since I read that, I've really tried to concentrate on a focal point and edges. I had everything way tooooo hard in some of my stuff, and reality isn't like that. I'm trying to do a master study, even if it's only a quick one, once a week, so I'll keep that in mind. I'm actually in the middle of a still life (Lunch break) at the moment, and I'm definitely learning a ton about lighting and edges from that. Plus, it's crazy fun.
Again, thank you man, and no way is it rabbling. This kind of feedback is why I love the group so much, people are so helpful. Just need to understand a bit more, then I'll feel confident giving back in the same way. So yeah, Cheers, I'll be looking back at this comment a lot I think, lots to think about :D

Ramalooke - Cheers man, means a lot. Just gotta try and ramp it up now ;).

K, recent stuff.

This is as far as I got with the last CHoW, kinda bailed on it towards the end, was kinda bummed out with it by the end of last week.


Decided to redraw Morgan, wasn't working too well.
WIP


WIP


And some work for this week's CHoW - Really enjoying this one so far.
Rough character layout


And an actual illustration :O
WIP


Little bit of sketchbook work






Ummm, studies
This is where I pushed that 'recomp' study to.


















And then just Gestures and Loomis stuff








As always, any feedback's most welcome <3

Some nice work in your sketchbook bro. I'm just going through the Loomis books and will be keeping and eye on your thread. Keep it up! :)

Wow, your sketchbook is really awesome! You've put a lot of commitment in it, which makes me realize how much I still need to learn. Great improvement :)

gdsworld - Cheers man. Ah nice one, yeah the Loomis books are great. I'm learning a ton from them.

Supermuts - Thanks. Haha, me too, always got a ton to learn :)

Last coupla days
Still life


My Final for this week's CHoW


And some more work on Morgan

Also, could you maybe help me with a link to Imagination and Loomi? I've tried to find it, but it's near impossible. All I get are drug dealers and silver smiths.