Coinhero's sketchbook

[Coinhero]

mapcrunch study + I did some things to that fat bird painting from yesterday

[Coinhero]

did a lot of little things with the background and spend a long time painting stuff and then deleting them and then making 3 different figures and then going back to the original one just stuff like that



house. Going out I'll finish the figure from the forest painting when I get back

[Coinhero]

If anyone knows how the absolute mad man Karl Simon painted his Beauty and the Beast concept art hook me up because I've got no idea. 
Example: 




fanart I started today.

[Coinhero]

-,- I hate how oil paintings look in photos. The canvas size is too small for a full figure so the feet are stepping on the edge of the canvas so I'm not even gonna bother showing that.
I did a bit of work on that sketch from yesterday, its a real shitshow it has a long way to go and its very difficult but I'm sticking with it till it works, I can't keep painting the same easy stuff over and over

[Coinhero]

This image is so fucked I don't think I can unfuck it anymore feelsbad

[Coinhero]

I wanted to do much more today but I had to finish a some graphic design things for university and then make motion graphics of a little UFO making some letters appear (super mega ultra cool dope stuff like that) and it took me 3 hours longer than it should x.x. I have my hope back for this image tho, I think I'll make it work eventually.

[Coinhero]

this is pretty cool

[Coinhero]

this is the same as yesterdays painting
https://youtu.be/hpjjerivujk

[Coinhero]

Changed up the pose a bit here are the lines because its too hard to read when all the color is on





the background made everything look super flat so I re-painted everything and I think it looks much more dynamic now. I struggle with making images look flat a lot, I think its because I used to paint only landscapes and the way you get depth in a landscape is a lot more different that in an image like this one where its more character focused. I'm having a lot of fun painting this. That hand is bothering me, something about the elbow area idk

[Coinhero]

this looks like 2 different people are working on it

[Fedodika]

karl simon probably used a bunch of photo textures, knocked em down with some blurs to make it look painted, added some glowing yellow light in the corner and used some overlaps and well placed light and dark shapes.

I tell people this all the time, but I dont think doing splash paintings like this are going to help you improve quickly; If anything you might be satisfied and get a few good reactions from people on social media or something, but you could get sucked into doing these all the time and your drawing skills will not progress to meet the immense amount of time you spend rendering them to keep up.

If youre having fun and could care less about improving fast, disregard what i say, but i've seen too many people get sucked into just painting all the time and it costs them years of their lives as far as being employable. Drawing well is where its at, and painting just naturally follow appealing drawings

[Coinhero]

karl simon probably used a bunch of photo textures, knocked em down with some blurs to make it look painted, added some glowing yellow light in the corner and used some overlaps and well placed light and dark shapes.

I tell people this all the time, but I dont think doing splash paintings like this are going to help you improve quickly; If anything you might be satisfied and get a few good reactions from people on social media or something, but you could get sucked into doing these all the time and your drawing skills will not progress to meet the immense amount of time you spend rendering them to keep up.

If youre having fun and could care less about improving fast, disregard what i say, but i've seen too many people get sucked into just painting all the time and it costs them years of their lives as far as being employable. Drawing well is where its at, and painting just naturally follow appealing drawings

What do you think I should be doing to improve then? I like the stuff I'm doing now because I feel its varied and not just what I'm comfortable with, its forcing me to think a lot and I'm doing a bit more drawing too, I think for this Guilty Gear fanart I made a pretty tight sketch before getting into painting. When it comes to doing studies I just keep painting until I come across something I have no idea how to make, for instance the foreground hand, I don't know how to draw a foreshortened hand so I watch a video or two, find some reference, draw the hand 20 times and eventually I get something. Much more fun to do things this way. 
I just like how challenging my current approach is but I'm open to ideas, do you think I should focus on doing drawings more or maybe do some more design oriented stuff?

[Fedodika]

well, what you're doing is one way to learn things, but you're learning things a little bit each time of many different skills, like hands, or posing, or composition, and backgrounds, and material rendering, and foreshortening, and anatomy, and faces, and gesture, and movement. So lets say thats like 10 things. You'll get a little better at those 10 things doing this approach. My suggestion, which is totally subjective, and based on my experience, is this is a slow way to learn the, but you do learn things regardless.

So much of what makes a great image is the foundations its set on, the drawing underneath. Watch the Critcast series by One Fantastic Week for example, this one being my favorite at 48:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI1cQxb9je4

Its like, you know have this dynamic pose and all these advanced concepts youre trying to show, but it you dont get them at a really basic level if you were to single out those issues. Like how you drew the legs for example, they're anatomically wrong in your sketch so you hid them behind a cloud. And despite the foreshortening of the hand, the body is in a perfect 3/4 pose, and the face is in profile making the image very flat. Then youre doing all this stuff with color and value and the anatomy and drawing just arent gonna be saved by that stuff.

It's entirely up to you, but if you want to make images that are great of figures, you have to be able to isolate the individual parts of what makes figures look great and do that right before you try to juggle knives which is what splash art is. many people i've talked to in a mentoring way have used the juggling analogy, you know anatomy is one ball, value is 2, color is 3. Just do one for a while, throw and catch, get that down. You can juggle 5 balls but its gonna take you longer to do that and do it all at once than if you started with one and got comfortable enough to move onto step 2.

So my advice, take it or leave it. Pick ONE thing, and get great at that. Don't paint for as long as you can until you get the drawing/value foundation part right, then you can mess with color, but this will be after years of effort; I gave ubem a similar critique, and he thanked me for it and hes a perfect example of what happens when you get carried away with the icing;

http://crimsondaggers.com/forum/thread-8330-page-2.html

I made that same mistake, i did what you're doing, you can go through my old sketchbook stuff, its just ALL over the place, color right away, no focus on getting the foundations right, its a huge time suck dude. If you have fun and you have all the time in the world, fuck it do whatever you want, but you know, say you struggle with hands, bite the bullet and just draw hands until they're fucking beautiful with just line and a little tone. Doing that makes everything else a million times easier since you understand the foundations of how to create just ONE thing and make that one simple thing beautiful, you will be able to cut out the idea that complexity makes stuff sellable or good or whatever

[Amit Dutta]

@coinhero.

Drawing foundations will help you improve overall a lot for sure. Drawing well is the best thing you can do. But I disagree pretty radically with Fedo's take on it. I would say don't do one thing over and over and over until you "get it perfect" before moving on. This isn't how learning works most efficiently. Research in education has clearly shown for a long time that changing up tasks in a focused consistent way over time and having time between different learning tasks helps retention improve rather than cramming one thing. It is also this idea of "making it" that is an attitudinal bias at work. If you think you will "nail it" at some point...you don't really get it at all. A skill like art is a constant evolution no matter your skill level, and the best artists never feel they have nailed anything. Everyone has a subjective opinion based on how they personally feel they learn better, so there is no single way but I feel a smart balance is always better.

You seem to be doing art in Uni so I don't know what other exercises you are doing and maybe not posting. I think you are improving and learning a great deal by attempting full paintings because they are so challenging. It's not WHAT you do only , it's HOW you do it that is more important. How actively engaged and critical you are in your own learning process. You seem to be approaching things fairly well, by studying things to apply to problems you have on the fly. This is great. Many people on the study grind school of thought don't do this enough. Hell that was the whole point of the Bloodsports when it was running! I can see general improvements from that for sure. However, you are probably erring too much on the side of invention and not doing enough foundational studies in order to be DIRECTLY applied to these pieces. Go a bit further with this idea. After every piece, identify what issues or gaps in knowledge you had with each piece. Study some foundational things to fill in the gaps. Attempt to apply these learnings again. This will be less boring as you say and solidfy those study things into your working knowledge much better.

In terms of depth. You need to apply more consciously the idea of value contrast (or the effect of atmospheric perspective) and overlap. You seem to not control value contrast as well as you might for a good depth read. Everything is similarly contrasted and instead you use high chroma to create the contrast and don't really use value to help. This can work but it's only one factor of it. Things further away tend to get much lower in contrast. It's such a simple concept, but a few studies of this effect with intent and then applied with intent will help you "get it".
Understanding the words of a sentence or art concept for example, doesn't mean you automatically become a master at it. To be able to apply that learning and make it intrinsic, it needs many rounds of conscious intent driven practice and application. That is what effective study is.

[Coinhero]

So I read everything that Fedodika and Amit Dutta and I really appreciate the effort in those posts, getting feedback like that is why I made this sketchbook so thanks! That being said I'm not the best at putting my thoughts into words, especially in english, so here is a "quick" responses:

Yes I agree that I'm mostly making fancy rendering over shitty drawings or "polishing turds" as I prefer to call it and it's something I'm consciously thinking about but I still prefer my current way of dealing with it as opposed to what Fedodika
is suggesting. I think it's just a "different strokes for different folks" thing, I'm doing the same approach to learn how to paint that I do when trying to get good at a video game and that's jumping right in the deep end and trying my best not to drown. It's more fun for me

and for the value comment by @Amit Dutta yea I really struggle with values, I just get this misty look over everything and the only way I know how to fix it is by doing this high chroma thing I have going on in all my images, it's a nightmare to deal with. I'm just not putting in enough effort in to getting my values right honestly. Also I only have 1 class once a week in uni that's related to drawing and that's my figure painting class where I do those oil painting I upload from time to time, I used to have a perspective and nature morte drawing class but now everything if design and photography oriented stuff.

Anyway here is what I worked on today:



I deleted the face, torso and arms (exept the hand) and just did them over again this time trying to twist the pose a bit more and making it just... work... better idk. I still couldn't get the look I want and the face is just fucked, I'm covering the legs because I think it helps put him more in the midground and they don't crop out of the image as awkwardly. Having that extra smoke there helps with the flow of the composition too. Made the light smaller because it was like everything in the image is pointing towards a wall not a point if that makes any sense, it just looks better this way. Overall I'm happy with this image all things considered, I haven't done many images like this and I expected it to turn out way worst that this. Tomorrow I'll probably try to fix the face and some small things.

 
also spend a long time just sketching different images and I'll go with this one to actually turn in to a painting

[Amit Dutta]

If you're struggling with some aspect that you are aware of, Do Some Studies on that specific issue. You'd improve a f&ckton more. Jumping in the deepend is cool, chopping off your legs before you do it, is just counter productive.

[Coinhero]

study of a painting by Joaquin Sorolla called Itallian Girl with Flowers that I really like. This is my second time doing a study of this painting but this time I painted it instead of just doing a ink sketch, I don't remember if I uploaded that ink drawing. I really like this painting (the original not my study), I keep coming back to it, there's a lot that can be learned from it. I wanted to copy it because the values are much closer to what I want to achieve and I can't paint faces from the side. Face looks more like a boy that a girl and I couldn't capture the expression and now looking at it with fresh eyes the neck is pretty messed up too.



I'm treating this image as more of an experiment type of thing. I'll probably add butterfly and caterpillar going towards the mushroom like its attracting them or something like that.'
I wanted to re paint the fast from that one image with the red dude but ran out of steam, coming home from lectures and trying to be productive afterwards is hard, I can only imagine how difficult it is for people that have a full time job to do art after work.

[Coinhero]

So I re-did his face but I don't want to just keep uploading the same image again and again so I figured its more interesting if I show the way I have my photoshop UI setup so here it is



I have a million brushes but only use like 3 or them, old crappy painter wheel instead of coolorus, everytime I make a big change instead of making a snapshop in the history pannel I duplicate the layer and end up making my psd file 10x times as large, blalbalba



Just a mushroom painting nothing more and that's the way I like it
I wanted to do another study today but I just didn't have the time, I'm making a logo book for uni and its a huge pain in the ass.

[Coinhero]

Joaquin Sorolla study

[Coinhero]

man that looks tasty