Hello! Haven't really been drawing alot since the beginning of high school, but since a couple of years I've slowly been getting into it again. Might or might not post alot here since I'm sort of an ADHD kinda person who don't keep up with interests for too long, generally.
Here's some stuff I've done lately that turned out pretty good(for me)!
Hey there, new blood! Welcome to CD! Nice stuff so far, make sure to keep posting it! It looks like you could use some work on drawing from imagination, so be sure to be studying the proportions and underlying construction of all the figures and faces you see.
Hello there. I really like those pen and ink drawings, particularly that first one, it has quite an old school illustration feel to it. I'd say from your life stuff you have a good eye for analysing shapes and such, as Zombie said, perhaps you could study stuff like proportions and such more.
Thanks for the encouragement guys!
Had to resize the images, I hope it didn't fuck them up somehow... Anyhow:
Tried out some concept art stuff. In a way, I'm pretty happy with the result since I expected it to be much worse, but I'm not really happy with how it turned out from a concept art perspective.
I got the idea from the character generator on this side to make an occult rat summoner kinda dude, and actually had a sketch i was really happy with. He had a couple of pretty dope ghost rats ready to help fighting whatever he's fighting, but unfortunately they got sucked into the PS layers vortex, never to be seen again. After this I sorta drifted away from the idea, but kept some design choices i sort of don't like in the (un?)finished drawing.
I think the skull mace turned out surprisingly cool(maybe lacking a few more details to make it more interesting) but since he kinda got a more rouge like witch hunter kind of design in the end I'm not sure I like how it fits with the character overall. Same thing with the (very sketchy) beads thingy.
In other, more technical news the left foot looks like shit and I couldn't figure out the shin guard at all. He seems to be slightly out of balance and his back looks a bit crooked i think? I just recently picked up muay thai and quickly got to learn that bending your back in weird ways and being out of balance are perfect ways to set up for defeat.
I'm probably not gonna finish this one, but if anyone have any tips on resources on basic painting and workflow in PS that would be greatly appreciated.
Speaking of which, second picture is a try at painting from yesterday. Painting in photoshop has like the best fun to looking shit ratio of all thinkable activities. I see alot of newbies(including myself) get this sorta dirty look on their PS paintings and I really hate it. I just have no idea how to blend smoothly.
thxbye
Nice work! One tip I can give is to watch your line work, especially with the latest piece. You tend to scratch and draw your lines over and over, giving your piece a very messy look. Try to do more confident lines, getting it down in only one or two motions.
(07-01-2015, 01:15 PM)ZombieChinchilla Wrote: Nice work! One tip I can give is to watch your line work, especially with the latest piece. You tend to scratch and draw your lines over and over, giving your piece a very messy look. Try to do more confident lines, getting it down in only one or two motions.
Yeah. I think this mostly apply to my digital stuff, but watching my traditional drawings there is a certain scratchiness to them to. At least the outlines. Not at all as bad as my digital drawings though. I have like 0 accuracy with the tablet(and I have used it quite a bit over the years, I've had it for like 7 years or so). I've basically adopted this technique where I just doing a bunch of random lines and then use the eraser to clean it up. Maybe it's the tablet I'm using, but I think I'm just bad at doing basic lines with it. Especially in certain angles.
Alright, so made this sketchbook and it never really amounted to anything haha. But I still draw from time to time and I might as well upload something right?
There is this swedish band that announced that they are breaking up and that the next album and following tour will be their last and they released this really cool video in which a skeleton girl walks about playing a snare drum. I thought the video was really cool and I got inspired to make a drawing of her.
Here's the vid:
And here's my picture:
I tried to make the image smaller by changing the size in photoshop, but it doesn't seem to work... Guess you'll have to get used to my huge ass images...
And here is the reference(ripped from the video):
Someone commented on an earlier post that I have pretty sloppy linework. Guess that still goes haha. I find it really hard to do solid, controlled lines on a tablet. And I literally cant afford paper to draw on right now. So tablet it is.
I'm setting up a challenge for myself to draw everyday for a month. I have huge problems with motivation with just about everything I try to do, so I thought a mission with a clear time frame might help a bit. I'll make sure to upload some of it here.
Started of with a sketch I was really happy with, which made the painting process that much scarier since I knew I would fuck it up. "Kill your babies" is the name of the game.
And here with like a couple of hours worth of painting.
It felt alot like I just wasn't doing anything reasonable and just kinda splashed on paint left and right just for the heck of it, but it actually did start to look pretty decent after a while(for being me). It was fun to see I was actually making progress with the painting even though it didn't feel like it. I watched this person(who I think have a sketchbook here?) called OatmealMu do a portrait to sort of get a feel of the process of painting in photoshop. It's so weird how something that looks so easy can be so hard. Copied this guys brushes too and even though I know it's just dumb I couldn't help to feel that I would have done better with another brush set haha. Silly me.
It's still a work in progress though so hopefully it'll come out relatively non-shitty.
Here's the video by the way, in case someone is curious. It's really cool.
I also kinda think that my monitor is fucking me up a bit. I have to come really close to the screen and kinda just stare into it for a while to notice small shifts in value sometimes.
Oh well. Thanks, bye.
PS. If someone could teach me how to make the images smaller when I post them in the thread that would be greatly appreciated.
Here's a study(wip) I spent the night/early morning doing. 1.5 hours in or so.
Good: I think I pretty much nailed the colors. Starting to get blending. Good rendering. I like how it looks stylewise.
Bad: Started rendering too early and will most likely have to redo most of it.
EDIT: Well here's the finished picture. It turned out way better than I had expected. Experimented some with rendering. Some things worked some things didn't. In the end I think I overdid the details a bit. There's a bit too much going on with the texture.
Ahh nice shark man! Lovely textures! I think what would help your art a lot is trying to reduce the number of brush strokes you put down, especially with your lines. Take your time and make long, smooth strokes as confidently as you can. You can always undo if the first line is wrong! At the moment, it's messing up your edges to have so many brush strokes. Keep up the great work! (:
I'm not sure if I should be posting this here since this is supposed to be a sketchbook, but whatevs. I'm currently live streaming an attempted self portrait in case anyone wanna tune in. Cheers!
twitch.tv/jonatansleiers
Alright so I decided my self portrait is done. I could definitely have refined it quite a bit more, but I worked like 12 hours or so on this in total so I'm getting a bit sick of it. Some dude hopped into my stream the other and offered to do a paintover, which helped A TON! I felt like I really learned quite a bit from this one.
I discovered some issues with the line drawing while painting, but I couldn't really be bothered fixing it so late in the process so I just let it be. Also, I didn't do my line drawings on a separate layer from the background, so I didn't know how to get rid of them but to paint them over. So it still looks a bit sketchy. Will make sure that doesn't happen with my next piece.
(03-24-2016, 03:51 PM)Eristhe Wrote: Ahh nice shark man! Lovely textures! I think what would help your art a lot is trying to reduce the number of brush strokes you put down, especially with your lines. Take your time and make long, smooth strokes as confidently as you can. You can always undo if the first line is wrong! At the moment, it's messing up your edges to have so many brush strokes. Keep up the great work! (:
Thanks!
Yeah my brushstrokes are really sloppy whenever I use small brushes. I try practicing proper brush strokes(sometimes), but I just don't really seem to get the hang of it haha. Idk, I guess I'll just keep trying and if God wills it I'll improve little by little.
Alright so here's what I've been up to.
Bulldog: This one was fun. Did a really quick sketch and then tried to establish some value and stuff. I soon realized that I have no idea what to do after value is established. This got pretty frustrating, and my go to solution when things gets frustrating is to just go ham and see what happens. So I just splashed some colors on there and went to town. Turned out pretty alright!
Took so long to do this sketch, and while I could develop this one alot farther I'm just so sick of it I'm just gonna throw it up here and call it a day. Perhaps I'll continue some other time.
I stumbled upon a picture online of a guy with a dragon mask made of paper. I though it would be fun to make a study of to sort of practice some 3dimensionality. Turned out well I think!
Thanks to the people who have watched my sporadic streams. Some of you have really helped me out! Cheers!
The dragon mask looks nice man, I'm guessing you used the lasso tool a lot there? The edges are clean and crisp.
I'm just going to echo what Eristhe said about brush strokes; you'll get a smoother result if you use fewer. Something that can help is if you squint, you'll see simplified visual information of shape and mass. If you establish those major shapes and value masses with fewer lines and big brushstrokes early on, you'll have a cleaner picture overall. You'll also save time that would have been wasted fixing mistakes and from there adding detail is easy.
Remember, work big to small. Broad to specific.
I actually didn't use the lasso tool at all I think. Just used the brush tool and eraser. Alot of people have told me to squint, I just don't feel it helps that much. But since everyone is telling me to I guess I'll keep trying it out haha. :D But yeah, I think I haven't really got a good feel for the workflow yet and I definitely start doing details too early. It's something that gets me in trouble in pretty much every piece I make.
Haven't been doing much art at all the last two weeks. Started working full time again in a new workplace so energy levels have been pretty low. Starting from today though I'll go for another month of painting everyday.
Hello! :)
The exercises from this video (down) really helped my linework. I had a similar problem - it was really scratchy and unconfident, it's still not the top of the tops but it got a lot better! So, check it out if you want. :)
You really got a lot better since you've started your sketchbook. I like your animal studies a lot. <3
And don't let the job anger you or make you sad because of the lack of time - it's better to make one study in which you fully understand what's happening, than 10 brainless ones. Just keep going, I hope to see more of your work.
