Walent's sketchbook

[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.

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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: