Walent's sketchbook

[RickRichards]

Awesome work sir. Love the feel of the sketches. Cheers!

[walent]

Thanks, Rick!

[Leonard]

nice mechs, are these from the john j. park gumroad?

[walent]

nice mechs, are these from the john j. park gumroad?

Thanks! Yes, they are. I guess weird cool looking mech legs are John's signature

[walent]

Found a lot of motivation these past 2 weeks and got to sketch a whole lot more.
As always, focusing on simplifying, working a lot on my heads and once I can't get them wrong I'll continue with hands, another subject that frustrates me.

[DK]

Damn fine work! Interesting to see how you're tackling these heads.

If you haven't already, I would learn the names of the bones/muscles for the head for a greater grasp on the subject. I know some artists don't really go through the trouble of learning/memorizing the names, and only settle for memorizing the shapes. I mean, judging from these and your past sketches I might assume that you already do know the names. Either way, it looks like your heads are coming together quite nicely.

[walent]

Damn fine work! Interesting to see how you're tackling these heads.

If you haven't already, I would learn the names of the bones/muscles for the head for a greater grasp on the subject. I know some artists don't really go through the trouble of learning/memorizing the names, and only settle for memorizing the shapes. I mean, judging from these and your past sketches I might assume that you already do know the names. Either way, it looks like your heads are coming together quite nicely.

Thanks Dennis!

I have to agree that learning names isn't exactly helpful except when giving/receiving critiques on muscles or when you're actually talking about it. But not when you're actually drawing. I remember Proko saying he never actually cared about names until he started teaching and had to learn them.

I learned the names because I've heard them over and over again and I also like working out and knowing exactly how to train each muscle or better said which muscles do I train with an exercise.

I do know a lot of muscle names on the body but on the face/head I must admit I don't know names, I don't even know all the muscles. I never actually thought about learning them.

Maybe because I didn't get to studying expressions at such a deep level.
Still trying to get the shapes and proportions right.

But I'll definitely give it a try.

And now that I'm thinking about it, I guess I looked at all the simplifications out there like the Asaro head and made sense to me so I didn't bother studying all the muscles myself, so yeah, gotta do that!

[alexdanila]

Awesome jaw-dropping sketchbook! really inspired me to push even harder. Regarding the art blocks you had, i recommend maybe reading Manage your Day to Day , by 99u, or Eat the frog. I found them very enlightening. Maybe start your own project, something that contains all the things you love, and you don't plan your pages, you draw mechs when you want, figure drawings when you feel like it, and before you realize, you have a story there and you kickstart the thing! :)

Thanks for the feedback on my humble work.

[Mechanizoid]

Woah, amazing sketchbook man! Looks like you are studying all the right things for visual communication. I'm totally pumped to get back to studying after seeing all the work you are doing, thanks dawg. :D

Keep it up, I'm gonna be watching for sure.

[cesartalves]

Everytime i check your sketchbook it blows my mind away. Please, continue.
Congratz on your work dude (:

[walent]

I love the raw energy of your lineart. Can`t really complain - you are truly an inspiration.
I admire the looseness of your brushstrokes  - it is sometimes hard to tell wheter you used
digital or traditionell mediums. Damn, this is something I want to learn too.
Please keep sharing

Thanks, I appreciate it. They're all digital btw

Awesome jaw-dropping sketchbook! really inspired me to push even harder. Regarding the art blocks you had, i recommend maybe reading Manage your Day to Day , by 99u, or Eat the frog. I found them very enlightening. Maybe start your own project, something that contains all the things you love, and you don't plan your pages, you draw mechs when you want, figure drawings when you feel like it, and before you realize, you have a story there and you kickstart the thing! :)

Thanks for the feedback on my humble work.

Man, I think your suggestions might have just changed my life style. I never realized how much I procrastinate.
I have my mind flooded with a lot of ideas for some time now, they're basically for an adventure game (I'm a huge fan of adventure/puzzle games, I've played them all - almost all) and every time I thought about it I remembered talking to friends telling me how hard programming a game is, how implementing AI is tough and how hard it is to find good animators nowadays and so on that I instantly forget about everything.

I also always thought that it's ok to go with the flow, not having a routine, mainly because I absolutely hate routines and I try to stay away from them as much as possible because I get bored very fast. But now I find out that most of the great people out there have their routines, because being a professional mean you have to train your mind to work on certain hours, when you want to and not wait for the mood.

So I decided to make a schedule, train harder, work more, get up earlier, when I'm working it's no more facebook, no more e-mails, no more phone.
And I'm also gonna try to make an exercise and imagine that I have all the team set up, I have the 3d artist waiting for my concept sketches so he can start modeling them, the animator waiting for the characters and the programmer and so on.
So what is there to do now? Start working of course!

So thank you, I needed that!

Oh and btw, I've been wanting to clean up my damn fridge for months now, and you know what? I'm gonna go do it right now!

Woah, amazing sketchbook man! Looks like you are studying all the right things for visual communication. I'm totally pumped to get back to studying after seeing all the work you are doing, thanks dawg. :D

Keep it up, I'm gonna be watching for sure.

Hey, thanks man, I'm always glad to see people get motivated by my work.

Everytime i check your sketchbook it blows my mind away. Please, continue.
Congratz on your work dude (:

Thank you :)


---

One thing I am trying to keep in mind every time I work is DON'T GET ATTACHED TO YOUR WORK WHILE YOU'RE DOING IT. Every damn time I'm working on something and it turns out amazing and I REALIZE it and I stop, I look at it and say "wow, that looks pretty nice", at that exact moment my idiotic part of my brain switches on and I get a lot of thoughts like "oh, shit, this is beautiful, I don't wanna ruin it", "how can I be sure not to ruin it? oh oh I know! I'll make a new layer"
Can you guess what happens? Of course, I ruin it with the next brush stroke. I lose the energy, the flow, the rhythm I had the moment I create that new layer. Because that new layer assures me that I can do whatever and I can't ruin it anymore, BUT it also ruins the ability to continue my painting in the same way. So my solution: I don't get attached, I don't care, I don't start a painting by saying "this has to be my best painting yet"
I just start it with the acceptance that I could fail big time and I'm just gonna scrap it and start all over again. And I'm having a lot of fun doing that!
And as an exercise, from time to time I decide to delete some of my best sketches and do them all over again from scratch.

I'm also trying to write down everything that's on my mind and everything I realize over the course of a day. And I'm gonna try to write them here as well.


---

If anyone is looking for nice portrait references, here's a cool Tumblr for that: http://veraxvoltus.tumblr.com/

Here's some more of my stuff that wasn't a fail, kept practicing faces

[crackedskull]

Really love your stuff :D
Writing down good ideas is great, my folder is called "reminders" haha. Think one of the big things I was going for was to just draw slower and going outside and drawing with graphite pencil/precision ink marker combo really seemed to work. I never erased anything and have 2 chances to make the sketch work. So by the time I reach the inking stage I try to work super precise.
Do you go outside sketching? judging from your work I think youd find it quite fun :D

I gotta agree on not getting attached to your art, just focus on the process, thats the thing you get attached to, no matter the result.
I do struggle with the same issue and atleast digitally the new layer seems to fix it(traditionally you just gotta take it in stride and move on), but your stuff is so intricate and you really put time into good brushwork that I can understand it being harder.

One of the things I do when I start fucking up or am in a mess is just paint over it, simplify it to base shapes(for example if you screw up a mouth you paint over it with basic form strokes and you go again). In that way you are also constantly building upon the base sketch.

Also check this out, escpecially the 3rd episode :)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...0pfMiuir1u

[walent]

Really love your stuff :D
Writing down good ideas is great, my folder is called "reminders" haha. Think one of the big things I was going for was to just draw slower and going outside and drawing with graphite pencil/precision ink marker combo really seemed to work. I never erased anything and have 2 chances to make the sketch work. So by the time I reach the inking stage I try to work super precise.
Do you go outside sketching? judging from your work I think youd find it quite fun :D

I gotta agree on not getting attached to your art, just focus on the process, thats the thing you get attached to, no matter the result.
I do struggle with the same issue and atleast digitally the new layer seems to fix it(traditionally you just gotta take it in stride and move on), but your stuff is so intricate and you really put time into good brushwork that I can understand it being harder.

One of the things I do when I start fucking up or am in a mess is just paint over it, simplify it to base shapes(for example if you screw up a mouth you paint over it with basic form strokes and you go again). In that way you are also constantly building upon the base sketch.

Also check this out, escpecially the 3rd episode :)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...0pfMiuir1u

Thanks for sharing those, I only knew the first episode.
Made me wanna know more about van Gogh's story, how he would only show his paintings to his brother and still kept his motivation, makes you ask yourself, would you still do it if you knew only one person would see it?

Unfortunately I don't go out to sketch as much as I would like, but that's about to change since it's getting warmer outside.

Lately I've been opened to observing the things I really enjoy doing, constantly asking myself what is it that I want to focus on.
Looking at a lot of old masters made me realize I'm all about things that look amazing, as in visually appealing. So I guess that's both design and illustration. But not the industrial design thing, I'm thinking more like composition design, shape arrangement and stuff like that. I don't think I ever enjoyed researching design and actually creating a costume or armor, it was all about how the armor is hit by the light, what shadows does it get.

But when it comes to designing shapes and twisting forms to match my composition, I am having too much fun.
I'm looking at Dean Cornwell right now and I find his work so amazing and inspirational, that even if I had 10 mil $ in the bank right now, I'd still want to paint like that.


---

Pinned things I need to keep doing:
1. continue practicing heads
2. draw - linework only, digital or traditional
3. paint - simplify a lot, observe the big shapes, mark making, negative space shapes

I'm gonna start studying old masters a lot. And not just comps and colors but maybe I'll get into doing a full rendered one. Mead Schaeffer and Zorn are on the list.

A friend pointed to an amazing artist called Walter Molino - (1915 - 1997), not exactly my style, but the flow and the dynamic poses are well worth studying.

Another thing that bothers me is that I am using the background a lot to add or subtract shapes from the silhouette of the character. I find it very hard to sculpt the silhouette using the eraser and keeping the character on a separate layer.

Been doing a lot of sketches lately. It's 1 a.m. now and I've been sketching since 11 a.m.
I also joined the Star Wars contest, which made me realize Star Wars is a huge design inspiration for me. Having a lot of fun right now.

So here are some sketches I did lately, master studies and other stuff:

[Brian Hermelijn]

It was, and still is pleasing to look at how you go about drawing the human body and other subjects. There is something of it that just stand out. Like the rhythm, flow, organicness of your way of practicing.

I do not have any words aside from always been in awe of the way you practice and do art. Look forward to see how you gonna apply all of those skills into the Starwars Contest.

Keep moving forward, really. Because I saw your story in Crackedskulls sketchbook, and it was really mind blowing to know what phases all artists go through their life, before they started investing in their art. Since we do not get to see like the behind the scenes of the person's life on how they got here.

So yeah, I will continue to follow your work. Look forward to see more.

[walent]

It was, and still is pleasing to look at how you go about drawing the human body and other subjects. There is something of it that just stand out. Like the rhythm, flow, organicness of your way of practicing.

I do not have any words aside from always been in awe of the way you practice and do art. Look forward to see how you gonna apply all of those skills into the Starwars Contest.

Keep moving forward, really. Because I saw your story in Crackedskulls sketchbook, and it was really mind blowing to know what phases all artists go through their life, before they started investing in their art. Since we do not get to see like the behind the scenes of the person's life on how they got here.

So yeah, I will continue to follow your work. Look forward to see more.

Hey, thanks. I was afraid my post on Crackedskull's thread was a bit too much, but I'm glad you found it useful. I was mainly trying to point out how much time I wasted, but then I realized it's part of our journey. I wouldn't have been here now if I wouldn't have tried out all those things and kept being aware of my feeling towards what I was doing.

Unfortunately, the star SW didn't work for me, but the good thing is that, since I started asking myself more and more questions, I'm starting to get a lot more answers. Researching the actual design language of this beautiful world of SW made me realize what exactly is it that I love about all those things that I found attractive in the past, like medieval castles, cliffs, rock formations or even some buildings.
It's the shapes, shape arrangement, size and elevation. A whole composition of boxes. That's what SW is. Damn, that was so obvious.
Kowloon Walled City is a great example of what drives me in terms of design.

Here's a sketch on the SW attempt:




Obviously I went with too much complexity and I can't handle that at the moment, I need to practice more complex compositions and shape arrangements.


Another thing I realized when working on the SW entry was that I if I wanna use less reference I need to practice more light changing. Because I may have a reference of Darth Vader with a certain light, but I may want the light from a different angle and that's pretty tricky for me. Another tricky part is placing the character on the right background. I found out that I love those illustrations that focus on the character, and the background is very simple and acts as a support for the character. Something close to what Leyendecker's work. Even Frazetta has simple backgrounds. Somehow I missed out on that, I was trying to put a lot of details in the background as well and it got too cluttered I guess. Or it was to much to render and I got bored.

I knew that you can focus on 2 things in an illustration: either the character and put a simple background, or focus on the background and put a smaller character. Somehow I forgot this when trying to build the SW entry, because they empathized on story and I got in the vibe of "oh, oh, I'm gonna have to do a story so let's show a lot of stuff in the background" but then the characters didn't stand out anymore. And they were so tiny, I had Vader's mask on 100x100px, that's insanely small to paint so much details. And my canvas was 6000px wide, I don't usually work that big and still it wasn't enough.
I know the only way was to just crop a part of the character, open it in another file, blow it up and work on the details. Then put it back in the main composition. And I did that, but I hate it because it's like working on 2 different things, you lose the energy of the main painting, you make a lot of adjustments on the cropped part without seeing the rest of it and you lose the flow and all that. For a more structural illustrator, someone who likes having everything on its own layer and moves things around and all that, it might work. For me though, it really doesn't. I like having everything on one layer, working on the rhythm of all the composition at once and the more complex it is, the harder it is to get right.

One thing that's been clear for me for a while now is I don't want to work in the movie industry. It's too much of a business nowadays, like a lot of other things, and in business time is money, so you gotta do everything you can to make it fast. I'm the opposite of that. I took the SW contest as a design and illustration challenge with hoping to learn from the experience. And I did. It did answer some of my questions. And I'm happy, I got what I wanted from it. I can move on with my journey.
I can't say the same thing about the other contests in the past years, where I failed and had no clue why. Or what exactly should I work on to fix it.

---


Again, a lot of things on my mind. I always though I should get to the level where I could draw and paint with a fair amount of details without having to rely on reference. Now I realize all the old masters that I'm studying had people pose for them, for every painting they did.
So basically they were painting what they were seeing in front of them.

I love painting what I see, because copying what you see might look easy, but it's not. Not if you're trying to show your version of what you see. As it happens, my version is close to what old masters like Mead Schaeffer used to do, meaning a lot of simplification, and that's not easy.
That being said, I could just sit and draw models all day, because it's a ton of fun for me. My problem is sometimes I feel like I need to design something. And drawing what I see, even if I design shapes, change things and draw my version of it, is still not enough. I need the actual design from scratch stuff. So no more taking a reference and filtering it through my vision. No, just start from zero.

But at the same time I noticed when I wanna draw something I'm a lot more focused on the actual angle of the character, the light, the shadow shapes, so I wanna make sure it looks amazing from that angle, in that particular pose. I guess that's very illustration related, since a concept artist wouldn't care about one angle only, but about every single angle and every single lighting situation.

When working on a single illustration, I can leave out design details. Like working on a hooded character, I can leave out some of the head details, because they won't be visible, and reducing the amount of things I have to consider is not a bad thing for me. The simpler, the better.

Conclusion is I love painting good looking things about 70-80% of the time and the rest is left for the actual design process. So I love designing, but if I have to spend a whole month designing one single thing, it might get boring for me. It would never get boring if I had to paint beautiful stuff though... Less design, more paint? Damn, I don't think I'll ever be able to solve this thing out. All I know is I wanna have fun.


Anyway, now that I got all that out of my head, here's what I've been up to lately:

[OtherMuzz]

Hey man, lots of really lovely work in here, and an impressive amount of it.

Thought i would just pipe up and mention that you seem to have a major problem with finishing stuff, and in many ways your brushwork isn't based around making finished work, but instead about rough painterly stuff.

I really think if you want to get to the next level, you really need to learn how to polish, and work out exactly what a polished walent drawing looks like. Way too many of your studies are abandoned in the first stages, before you are learning the lessons you need to on them. The things you mess up in a study are usually the things you need to learn the most.

But yeah keep up the crazy amounts of work regardless!

[walent]

Hey man, lots of really lovely work in here, and an impressive amount of it.

Thought i would just pipe up and mention that you seem to have a major problem with finishing stuff, and in many ways your brushwork isn't based around making finished work, but instead about rough painterly stuff.

Hey, thanks!
You brought up a good point, I'm using a brush that doesn't really allow me to work small, thus it's hard to detail stuff. But lately I've been alternating with a square brush for adding the hard edged stuff.

Now that I think about it, unfinished work has been my habit for quite some time now. I'm thinking mostly because I get bored fast or maybe I'm just running out of patience. But most of all I think I need a purpose, like why should I spend something like 5 to 7 hours rendering an artwork?
Money, FB likes and all that don't motivate me anymore, I'm way past that. So I'm left with having fun.

Like I said, you have a point and I'd better start spending some more time on my studies. I did that today and yeah, it's not as easy as I thought. But my main concern right now is the actual  beginning stage of the process, the ideation, the composition, the poses (where I really struggle)

Once I figure that out and once I get a sketch worth spending time on, I'm sure I can solve rendering as well.

[OtherMuzz]

Hmm not sure you 100% got my point.

"Once I figure that out and once I get a sketch worth spending time on, I'm sure I can solve rendering as well."

You are making all these little mistakes in your quick sketches that look fine on a quick sketch, but would break as soon as you take it further, and you can't learn what these are unless you actually take a few of them through to the final stages. Lots of little form issues; not having the face construction totally nailed or not drawing limbs properly locked into perspective.

Many people are worried about loosing flow from their gestures when they polish, but don't stop to ask why they lose flow. Usually it's because in the process of polishing you need to fix all the perspective and form issues with the pose that they messed up in the initial gesture. If you get good enough at finishing work, then you'll stop making these errors in the first place, and the amount of flow you lose is reduced.

I'm not really even talking about rendering.

Does that make sense?

[walent]

You're talking about a more rigorous construction and tighter, cleaner shapes/lines?

I believe losing the gesture is because you're focusing too much on form construction and you leave out the flow entirely...so you have to train yourself to consider both at the same time, that's how I see it.

[OtherMuzz]

Yeah that's what I'm talking about.

And yeah that is a good way to put it, I'd agree with that you need to be thinking about both, and practising one over the other wont get you to that sweet sweet end goal. Also thinking about gesture and flow as a 3d thing rather than just a 2d design element as well.