Pfff, yesterday I was rambling on about all kinda crap and today Chris Oatley posted this on twitter:
Quote:All things considered, good is way more important than fast. Don't worry about fast. Don't worry about anything, actually. Just practice.
Dude reads my mind.
Anyway, I tried to turn this into something more realistic. (Which I planned from the start, but couldn't achieve because of lack of skill+poor reference choice)
Ahh, my old nemesis, the skin tones....
I'm leaving this as it is for now, and will look at it on the weekend again. I'ts still finishing week, so tomorrow I'm either gonna dig through my I-will-do-this-later-or-not pile ore just work on that traditional thing that I started on a whim.
edit: I just noticed smth. What's it with my monitors? The shadows and her shirt looks almost completely black on my other screen. On my laptop it looks like crap. What is this all of a sudden? D:
@missimoinsane: Hey! Thanks for checking back here! :) I'm not sure about the headpiece really. I planned to leave it as it is, but I'm unsure...doesn't look as good as I hoped. Maybe some basic coloring would help. What do you think?
Yesterday, I wanted to do a quick life study of an onion as a warm up. In the end it took several hours with the result of a lot of failed attempts. Dunno why I couldn't do it yesterday, it just didn't work. I saved one page of failures to laugh at them later on.
Today I tried again, and it went okay. There's room for improvement, of course, but this time my thinking/rising anger didn't get in the way.
Quick thumbnails today.
Will be brainstorming ideas for a new piece tomorrow on the way to school. I am pretty clueless about what I want to work on, but I'm still already excited!
The last few days I was busy with schoolwork and exploring Berlin a little more. Today I did some digital sketching and tried to do some landscape with perspective and stuff. It's not quite presentable yet, sadly.
I'm not making a lot of progress, but at least I'm enjoying myself. xP
Serious studies again from tomorrow on.
I finally worked out an idea for a new piece/mini-project I will be focussing on in the weeks to come.
I'm gonna do a fully finished, thought-out, multi-figures piece for my portfolio (that I don't really have, yet).
And because I'm a projectmanager in training, I'll give myself a deadline: November 30th.
I already have kind of a hunch that I'll be pushing that deadline around. A lot.
very nice sketchbook :) keep up the stuff from imagination and real life stuff!
got one crit though... The lady in profile that you are painting, seems a little 1D.
try to make her eyes a bit darker and the highlights a bit brighter.
get a little bit of reference from google for faces to see how the light falls over the forms of the face.
keep on painting!! I shall be checking back :))
Instead of studying or scribbling while you commute, you might try really intensely observing things, and consider your sketchbook as a notepad for any realisations or questions you think of regarding materials, anatomy, lighting, etc.
Think long term, because your sketchbook is just going to end up as a record of scribbles that you've made, but your visual memory and sense of 'correctness' will be at hand permanently.
And going off of what Marjorie said, the profile painting could use some more interesting lighting, think about maybe placing her face in deep shadow and have the light hitting the back of her head.
@marjoriedavis: Thanks for the hints! I'll try to work them in. I actually based that on a reference photo at first, but because I chose a particularly bad one, it didn't work out too well (the skin was photoshoped to one basically shadowlass mass). I'll look for better examples though.
@Finnjamin: Hm, I understand what you're saying (I think), but I don't know how I might do that. I mean, to intensely observe my surroundings, I kind of need a moment to process what I see. But on crowded, shaky subway trains the scenes change surprisingly quickly, I sometimes just get a glimpse of something before it's blocked/changed/gone.
Also, staring at people on the subway could get me into trouble...D:
I'll try it out nonetheless and see how it goes. And thanks that you took the time to comment, I appreciate it!
I'm preparing the new piece by studying fighting people.When I've collected enough gestures and reference I'll arrange all the people into the scene. Hopefully I can do that in the course of the next week.
Thought I'd start posting again. It's really easy to trick myself out of posting regularly when I've missed a week, and so a couple months went by.
I'm still struggling with scheduling my painting time. But on the plus side, I now feel a lot more comfortable with landscape paintings than before, if nothing else :)
And I've been taking up master studies! I've posted a quick one of one of Sargent's paintings + a quick sketch and a half-baked piece (I am thinking about re-doing the figure, but am not yet sure in what way. It looks so out of place and stiff).
Really the best thing you could do for your skills right now is use references and practice. So long as you learn and develop, posting and reflecting are of minor relevance, at your current level, your art might even discourage more practiced artists from commenting.
We're all afraid of our past, I guess.
Anyway, the figure and landscape need to be planned out more, and you need to display perspective and depth, it's scary for a couple months, then your work quality skyrockets. So next time, take a simple brush and plan out the horizon, the figure, the other layers of the scene, make eqch object quite distinct (use edge lighting and backlights to do this). Black and white are all you need for planning, use reference photos to gather ideas.
On the master study, it's a good show of your brush control, but you're still afraid of colour. I am too, I just hide it better. Check out some of the portraits at cghub, the pros in particular may jnspire you.
@Finnjamin Thanks for checking back and for giving me advice again! My intention when I started this sketchbook was to post regularly, so as to keep myself in check and also write down whatever comes to mind and to refer to it later. Kind of a "what I did today and what I learned from it"-thing. I agree though that actually drawing is way more important than posting and writing about it as if I knew what I was doing. I don't get what you mean with discouraging others from commenting. Could you explain that a bit more?
You are right about my perspective illiteracy and you are also right about my color issues (+ value issues). A lot of work on that fields is long overdue.
@Finnjamin: I see. Okay then. :) Btw, when are you gonna update your sketchbook dude? You should show your awesomeness off more often!
I haven't been working from life/ref enough. Faces look really cartoony. Maybe another try on a schedule is in order.
For now I am going through the Art Camp assignments again. (Or rather, for the first time, since I gave up on them last time half way through.)
You can always choose picture less difficult for now. Take another one with only one character for example.
I know I like to increase the difficulty step by step. It gives me confidence.
Put the reference next to it next time so we can judge and give you advice (:
I really liked this one. The colors and the contrast are good.
