Need Some Direction

[GenesisLoop]

Hi everyone,

I've been doing Dave's realistic orc painting tutorial and have gotten quite stuck. I'm very new to digital painting and the lack of knowledge has left me clueless about what to study to improve my rendering skills. I somewhat understand where to put the mileage in drawing but I'm lost when it comes to digital painting. This has left me unmotivated to render out the rest of the piece as this is maximum quality I can achieve currently. Any and all critique, criticism, guidance etc. is invaluable.

Thank you.

ok, some goals to work towards.
where do you want the viewers eye to start, then how do you want it to travel around the image, are you keeping the eye form going off the page
*use contrast in value, colour, detail level, and so on to achieve this
use visual shapes to act as arrows to lead the eye around as you decide

are there a good variety of visual shapes types and sizes
are there moments of detail that make the image worth more than a glance
Is the lighting serving the image as far as story and displaying the forms that best show off in this case, your character

as well as that stuff theres also more things specific to the type of illustration and purpose so i reccomend having an idea of where youre shooting for subject matter, purpose and quality of finish

for this i reccommend making a mock port folio, fill it with a bunch of images from artists you like but also closest to what youd like to be able to paint like.
once youve got that in front of you. you may have some clues as to what particular things you need to study.

if you want some help with that, make the mock port folio. maybe 20- 30 images, make them into a pic, show here and maybe i can help you figure out some things to work on and how to do it.
for making the mock folio, the program pure ref is great, can download it for a once off donation,  super useful for reference boards

hope that helps

Thank you for taking your time to reply, I'm extremely grateful. I'd very much appreciate the help if you are able to, I've made the mock with 20 images. However, I'm unsure if it needs to be more focused on a specific style of painting.

ok cool, thats not too far off what my board would look like 
So style wise, maybe youre looking at being proficient in 2-3 ways. realistic render, line with strong colour, and some loose expressive strokes stuff. cool

thematically weve mainly got varying depths of fantasy, definitely character first work

and function wise weve got
portraiture, bit of full body concept, character illustrated in context with environment, bit of hero shot kind of cover or poster work i would put the frazetta stuff in and story driven illustration.

now having broken that up a bit, maybe from here you can think about those and which ones you have a currently stronger desire for..
do you have some direction as far as current goals for your future work wether thats dream jobs at certain companies or developing something for yourself or being freelance or book covers and so on?

from there we can go towards portfolio planning and work back from there
but if you can give me some thoughts so far that might help. maybe let me know what about some of the images you chose appeals to you and how attached you are to certain subject matter, what else you have a joy for
(for me i worked out for instance, id like to be good at painting girls and dragons)

if you were to be great at painting some particular subject matter what might it be?

I'd say I have a desire to do more story driven illustrations involving characters with some environment. Future goals wise, I'm aiming to pursue a freelance career in concept art but with an illustrators' toolkit so to speak. I'd also like to do some comic related things mostly just for myself.

On the topic of image choice, I lean heavily towards  character illustration as I highly value the capturing of human emotion.Specific works like Moebius' Hendrix and comic stuff appeal to me in that they are bizarre concepts illustrated uniquely. Dave and Frazettas work is very visually appealing to me as Dave has detailed rendering and Frazettas' story is immediately noticeable. The portrait work I've chosen appeals to me as its done uniquely and is more focused on style than realism.

Regarding subject matter, exaggerated expression in poses and faces is something I want to be able to do well. To complement that I also want to be able to paint clothes and armor well.