Darktiste Sketchbook

[JosephCow]

Sweet, it sounds like you have good ideas about moving forward. I'd be interested to see what you do next.

 As far as pushing thing and relying on texture that just a personal taste we don't share but i can try to work on that to close the gap in term of the style i can go into as not to be stuck with the digital trickery.

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Most of the challenge in this one was toward you guess it conveying the nature of the cauldron through texture rather than form but if i didn't succeded in the form i would perhaps say it because i am still not to strong in using my light source to help the form read less flat and sometime i don't push the perspective because i got to distracted by my rendering problem instead of working on more perspective heavy drawing

Yeah fair, I mean there are lots of different styles. If you were making assets for a mobile game or something, then something like you have would be appropriate. But in that case nobody would see the tiny details of the texture so it would be just a whole other conversation. 

I think I would push back a little on the second thing you were saying about conveying nature through texture rather than form. I feel that this could be part of what's holding you back. The two are completely intertwined so as to be practically inseparable. At least in the case of something metal, the form is being created by the shiny texture of the object. The object is like a mirror reflecting the room around it, and the reflection bends around the form of the object. The shape of the reflection tells you the form of the object, and how sharp or soft the reflection is tells you how smooth the surface is. Can you really show one without the other?  It could help to change the goal in your mind about what you're trying to paint. Bring it more toward "how does this material physically work"? Rather than "how to do I paint gold?"

Quick examples: 




Shows a polished gold metal. The reflections on it are integral to it, it's just how that material reflects light. If this is what you were going for, I don't really see how you could communicate that with just surface texture. What you have looks metallic, but it's not specific. It doesn't have the structure.




Shows hammered metal, more like brass. Works the exact same way except the reflection is diffused because it isn't polished. And there's like an infinite number of things in between these. You could render things in whatever way you want to, stylize it or make it super realistic, but you can't really change just the facts of how the eye interprets form and texture. So that's why I do recommend more study of fundamentals, and it sounds like you definitely want to work on lighting and perspective, so that's good. Honestly, It just makes it more fun. You can just paint whatever you want. And that's why I kind of keep harping on the same stuff all the time, because the fundamentals are in your way like a huge pile of rocks. So get them out of your way, one little boulder at a time! :)

I term of doing research the more the better but i try not to spend to much time on that as it doesn't necessarly benefit my skill growth i certainly get better at picking reference but it doesn't improve my drawing skill .Option are tricky as you want some but not so much that it become a time burden. Most of the time i want to be spending on research is on how the function affect the design. Because this result in more believable and coherent design.

Yeah for sure. I think it's kind of in proportion to how long you are going to spend on something. If you are going to spend 20 minutes start to finish, maybe do like a 5 minute google search. But if you are going to spend 20 hours, then you know, it's probably worth spending a couple hours collecting references and planning.