Crimson Daggers — Art forum

I recently got one of those emails where its a publication looking for artists to pay a fee to get featured in a annual art book. I've heard a bit about these and it's not really a scam from what I know but it's generally not really worth it and they only contact lesser know artists with the promises of getting there work to be seen by art directors and stuff. Whole thing sounds shady to me and I doubt anyone actually buys these books, I'm assuming all the money made is from the participation fees. Talking about capsules books in particular.

If anyone has experience with this stuff I'd love to hear

Dear diary 

Started a study of Pierre-Auguste Cot's Springtime. Nothing like trying to copy and understand a painting like this to make yourself feel inadequate.





leg placement on the guy is off I think and they should be a bit skinnier but its hard to fix.I think the lines in general are pretty close to the reference and I'll start painting the next time I work on this. Not sure when I'll finish this because I'm busy with photography and have to start printing stuff very soon :c
 Other than that I've got a lot of images finished for a long time that I just can't make myself upload anywhere online, all my images make me cringe when I look at them and I don't know why

and here is my version



I think it looks pretty good but I struggle with getting subtlety in general and even when I try not to I still paint everything bright and saturated 

and then I compared the original and my study



it's pretty bad, the proportional problems and the overall placement I don't much care about because I could see that it was messed up and I had other goals with this study so the lines were rushed and just eyeballed. All the color and values being so off is what bothers me, seeing these 2 images like this and being able to compare them I can see now how obviously off everything is but when working on it everytime I wanted to look at the reference I had to look away from what I was painting. Maybe if I had the too images right next to each other instead of on 2 different monitors I would have nailed it but that would also be much easier and whats the point then.
I'm not going to work on this image anymore because seeing such a direct comparison kind of does all the thinking for me and it would just be rendering and how much time I put in to it from now on. So many simple things that are like 5 min fixes x.x I'm salty

Here it is! The pinnacle of art, it doesn't get better than this and that's just a fact.

Great try on the master study! There are monitor calibration tools like this https://www.amazon.com/X-Rite-ColorMunki...PMNB0?th=1 that work really well on getting color consistency with multiple monitors, unfortunately they do cost a bit, but could be a worthwhile investment. I bought one and it works perfectly, especially for print accuracy.

(04-10-2019, 01:58 AM)ubem Wrote: [ -> ]Great try on the master study! There are monitor calibration tools like this https://www.amazon.com/X-Rite-ColorMunki...PMNB0?th=1 that work really well on getting color consistency with multiple monitors, unfortunately they do cost a bit, but could be a worthwhile investment. I bought one and it works perfectly, especially for print accuracy.

There are some local calibration services where I live but its not really worth it for me because the 2 monitors that I have are both kind of crappy. but my display monitor that I paint on is very accurate. I have to print stuff a lot for university (graphic design) and have compared my display monitor with one of those crazy expensive eizo ones that printers use so really color accuracy is only a problem when doing master studies and the solution to that is just getting better.
I think the reason why I got so upset from that master study is because other ones that I've done just as warmups or practicing a specific thing have turned out much more accurate but there's something about that painting that just kicked my ass :D

I was sure I posted an earlier version of this here but guess I didn't... idk



I love this painting its so great and so stupid at the same time

started another master study of a painting called  Ask me no more  by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema






lines I made. I want to paint this in my style but still try to get the colors to be close to the reference instead of trying to make it look like the original but I'm still not sure if I can pull it off.



also made the momji comic I was working on for university. Hardcover stitch binding all by hand, it was perfect up until I had to glue the book body to the hard cover :c everything went to shit and it makes me sad. Will post more picture when I actually get my camera out and make a proper photo session.

I love your style dude. I dont know enough about art to start throwing fancy terms around (i hope I never do and turn iinto one of those assholes that never shut up) 
But I cant say it enough, your painting have life in them and stand out. I saw in one recent one you criticize yourself for the brightness in your painting, well I actually think yours looks better. 
Im an old chunk of coal, so I'll never attend a university I didn't even graduate high school, but I hope someday to be as good as you man. People use this word too much but you really are an inspiration.

(04-18-2019, 11:33 PM)SufferDriver Wrote: [ -> ]I love your style dude. I dont know enough about art to start throwing fancy terms around (i hope I never do and turn iinto one of those assholes that never shut up) 
But I cant say it enough, your painting have life in them and stand out. I saw in one recent one you criticize yourself for the brightness in your painting, well I actually think yours looks better. 
Im an old chunk of coal, so I'll never attend a university I didn't even graduate high school, but I hope someday to be as good as you man. People use this word too much but you really are an inspiration.

Hey I'm flattered by your comment but I'm just some guy that draws little girls on the internet, I'm not even getting any work or anything out of it, plenty of other people that do the same but better. What I'm trying to say is don't do what I do because I've been at it for years and its getting me nowhere :D

Hey I'm flattered by your comment but I'm just some guy that draws little girls on the internet, I'm not even getting any work or anything out of it, plenty of other people that do the same but better. What I'm trying to say is don't do what I do because I've been at it for years and its getting me nowhere :D

Well in any case dude, your work stands out and I like it alot.
If you're not getting work it's probably because you're not marketing yourself properly.
Maybe you need to set your sights higher?


You know something I always think about? Screenwriters. 
Imagine how many bad ass truly unique scripts are passed or for some bullshit like the ghostbuster remake? 
So is the dude writing amazing screenplays bad because some pencil pushing idiot passed over his script?
Dont sell yourself short.

@SufferDriver yea you have a point



I'm stopping this study here because I don't want to work on it for too long, getting all the details from the original isn't really my goal. I enjoyed painting it in a more natural to me style rather than trying to make it look like the original. Some conclusions I had while making this are I don't understand how to use white as a color while all of Alma-Tadema's paintings have either white of black in them. Also realized you can use saturation to make something look darker and that is something that I was playing around with while making this. Lastly if you look at the original reference all the color and value changes are very subtle while I paint like a gorilla with a paint brush, in part the subtlety come from having everything super detailed and my version is very rough but still... gorilla painting. I got really lazy with the marble and just kind of rushed it but I think if I use some my mixer brushes it wouldn't be very hard to get it to look like the reference.
In general I'm happy with this, I couldn't get the same feeling as the original tho, maybe if I go over and make everything a bit more soft but then I would just be trying to change the style more than everything else that gives a painting its mood.

If you've ever thought to yourself "Damn my sketch looks terrible how am I going to make this work?"
Check out what starting a new 3D project looks like 





yea I can make this work :D

I guess it would be smarter to just download some rigged kid models and a tree to get the lay in but making everything from scratch forces you to learn and I'm a big dumb idiot that likes doing things the hard way

edit: progress from when I made the post. I also worked on a box design that I'll post when everything is printed and put together

Your master study look great, having trying it myself on bouguereau I know that its difficult and tedious to reproduce old master feel. They have a lot of drawn stuff and its always very precise.

I think you may get closer to the original by cleaning your edge in the wood one , making them less blurry and brushy, and softening everything in the inside. Painter of this time used to glaze a lot, adding a lot of dark with transparent layer, and grazing paint to bring up hightlight, so you may want to try to work with layer and opacity as post process to get a similar glow effect.

@Baldgate I think that if I spend a lot of time on these studies I can get it too look the way I want but I get bored really fast with master studies T.T For the next one I think I'll focus more on getting as much as I can with as little brush strokes as possible and that way I'll have to really think about what I'm doing not just rendering till it looks right. Or maybe I'll open it painter and check out the glazing layers there :D

Image I started yesterday, I want to start posting more frequently again



I fucking hate it it blows on all fronts but has potential to be good... just need to figure it 



I was thinking of painting it wide and dropping everything in the foreground  and that could work but idk I'm still figuring it out
oh and the 3D sculpt is coming along nicely but I haven't worked on it these days

Mauresques by Jules Pierre van Biesbroeck



original



I'll start painting this tomorrow

this is going to take a while

Finished study



got my stuff from the printer and made a box for university. I don't remember if I ever posted the actual painting that I made for it so here it is



and this is from yesterday




it's real dumb I like. Composition is a little ass I need to figure it out today and start painting.
If anyone has good night time reference post a link or something because all the artists that I like a lot tend to paint mostly day time images and it's harder to find reference for what I'm going for. Most of the artists I admire make images that are the exact opposite of mine so I struggle finding reference for things.

The master is cool, the only thing I notice is that magic is somehow missing in the relationship between the sand in light vs shadow.  I lived in Hawaii for a bit and the master painting nails that vibe you get on a beach when your in the shade. The sand might just be a bit too yellow maybe? 
New painting line work looks nice, I dont know if it's what you're looking for but I've seen alot of the warcraft art has some really night time scenes

(05-04-2019, 07:17 AM)SufferDriver Wrote: [ -> ]The master is cool, the only thing I notice is that magic is somehow missing in the relationship between the sand in light vs shadow.  I lived in Hawaii for a bit and the master painting nails that vibe you get on a beach when your in the shade. The sand might just be a bit too yellow maybe? 
New painting line work looks nice, I dont know if it's what you're looking for but I've seen alot of the warcraft art has some really night time scenes

yea the sand is like mega yellow same is true almost everywhere on my study. There's a lot of subtle changes in the original while on mine I keep going from one extreme to the other and it's just a mess. I spent some time color picking around seeing all the differences, I keep making the same mistakes over and over even when making a conscious effort not to.