Dominicque's Sketchbook

[Dominicque]

Digital art can be a nightmare to get used to. From experience, it can be both physical and technical issues. 

It sounds like with your Clip Studio paint issues, there might be frustration in organization? (Please correct me if I am wrong). Its important that you take your physical environment into consideration. What kind of tablet do you use? is it on a desktop or ipad? Having navigation issues in a program can cause frustration in the learning process over all. I have some resources that may help you. 

As for your painting questions, have you ever watched Marco Bucci's 10 minute to better painting series on youtube? They are very well made and I feel like they will aid you in your painting process. 

Overall good starting point for digging deeper into digital art.

Hi, it's very hard. I have an idea of what I'll like to implement, but have no idea how to do it. There are other random frustrations, too. Like when I colour pick and it doesn't give me the right colour and I don't know why. I'm using a desk tablet, have no coin for a display one. I used Krita before, but got CSP for Christmas, so I'm trying to focus on that. It doesn't have the same brush I'm used to and I have to take a pause as my tablet keep on lagging. It would either do that or stop abruptly and then strike a line forward. I have looked up Ctrlpaint, but he uses PS and like 99% of digital painting tutorials. I get so far then get lost, because I don't know what the equivalent brush is in Clip/Krita.

Is Marco's the same? I'll look it up, though.

Hey, so glad they hung up the portraits you made of them!

I was referring to something you wrote about realizing that drawing from imagination is actually working from memory, which I only partly agree with: The extra bit is the exploration that you can make when drawing from imagination and still come up with convincing poses that you never studied, all that because your inner eye that knows more about the world than your educated self, guided you out of the fog.

I can't find any good reference on drawing water from above but Marianne Nguyen's painting that you linked to shows it all: See how the white areas partly hide what's below them, making things lighter. On paper you might be able to achieve this with some diluted white paint.

In the first digital portrait above you managed pretty well, especially the shadows around the shoulder area are very convincing. For hard edges the flat brush does work indeed, or just use a smaller brush when painting more precise details and edges, even if it's an airbrush or the old plain round brush with no effects.

I'm not sure what you mean by color blending layer and whether CS has it, but if you lower the opacity of your brush you will get blending with the underlying colors - whether on the same layer or the underlying ones. Can you clarify what you're after?

I think the Thea renders rather flat because you put too much highlight everywhere, as if she was surrounded by hard lights - but this may be what you want to represent?

Take everything I say with a jar of salt because i'm just an amateur.

Yeah, I though it would be in the gallery area, but it was in the bar instead lol. Still trying to crack coloured pencil. (Like how do you stop the 'tooth' of the paper doing through?) I mean that when you study from reference, then make up something creative on the fly. You are drawing something that doesn't currently exist as a whole form in 2-D or 3-D, but it's a composite of all the things you liked/saw before/know of/studied. You are pulling this amalgamation from your 'visual library'. Hope you understand what I mean.

I tried using Nguyen's drawing as a ref, but I probably got bored and wasn't too observant. (Didn't want to ape her completely, but I guess 'Hey ho, steal like an artist.'.   I might do some studies in the future. I usually focus on the face and ignore the neck collar bone/shoulder area, so devoted more attention to that area. Glad you noticed. Hard edges= flat brush. Noted. Most of the time in order to get details I will just zoom in and try to foreground the values of the area, while cleaning up the edges. I'm trying to figure out what the 'hard round brush' on Clip even is.

I was watching a Youtube short that talked about it. Basically AIA, you can create a line art layer as you would, then a layer for flats, then another layer, where if you set it to 'colour blending' mode you can colour pick and/or just blend out the colours. I could try lowering the opacity. I guess I just need to know how layers work. I can get the the part where I create a sketch later and the a flats layer and drag the colour layer underneath, so I can still see the line, but then I try and blend on another layer and then things don't go to plan. For example I try and colour pick on the new layer above the flats layer, but it won't let me colour pick. (Because, I guess it's on a new layer? But, then how to you colour? I just end up colouring on the flats layer in the end, whereas a tutorial doesn't show that.)

I didn't want to Thea to look like that, but even time I tried to create a highlight it wouldn't 'read', so I started testing out the brushes and the 'highlight' airbrush worked, only problem is it's too harsh a highlight. But, serendipitously it kinda works, her being an alien and all. Wanted to make her skin more blueish, but I don't understand blending modes or gradient maps yet, so didn't know how to maintain the right values. 

Thanks for the feedback.