Lunatique's Sketchbook

[Lunatique]

Hey, late welcome to the forum!

I'm not really much into landscapes myself but I'll share some thoughts when I was reading what you were saying about portraits vs. landscapes. Your portraits are really good, but the approach you have to portraits doesn't work for landscapes. It looks to me like you tend to go in and render everything evenly with about the same amount of focus and detail, going for realism mostly. For a portrait, we're just naturally drawn to the face. It's like you're saying, you have a natural interest in portraits, in looking at a human face, that you're not going to naturally have with painting rocks, trees, etc.

Treating things equally in a non-portrait, larger image breaks down, IMO. The artist has to build an interest where there isn't anything special (unless you have a really awesome ref image, I guess). Composition and artistic choice matters a lot more. The landscape images that really appeal to me are more like the artist is just playing around with the art fundamentals. Things are really abstract. They're pushing interesting shapes, colors, textures, contrast until they have something cool. If I were going to dive into landscapes I would try that more.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/VYVwZ
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/N8dWq
https://www.deviantart.com/mr--jack/art/...-435264105

Thanks for the welcome! 

I agree with what you said about landscapes, and when I look at landscapes by painters I love, those are the things I notice too. My favorites are painters like Richard Schmid and Mark Bodges. Schmid is my ultimate favorite because he's a master at portraits, landscapes, and still life, and paints them with the same amount of passion and was very prolific in all of them. I have all of this books and DVDs and IMO there has never been a greater painter--perhaps not even Sargent, Zorn, and Sorolla. 

I'm familiar with the artists you linked, and I look at studies like that a lot, including ones from artists like John Park, Robh Ruppel, and other well-known concept artists and traditional painters. BTW, I own all of Greg Rutkowski's brush packs (and a bunch of other artists' brush packs. I've spent several hundred dollars on them). 

But as we all know, being able to analyze and appreciate the qualities of other artists' work, doesn't meanto n you can just apply them to your own. It takes a lot of time and effort to incorporate the qualities you admire in others into your own work, and art hasn't been my main creative focus for more than 15 years, so in order to develop more in the area I'd like, I'd have to steal time from writing novels, and I can't really do that because becoming a full-time author is more important to me than becoming a better artist--at least it has been in the last 13 years or so. Whatever amount of time I do get to spend on art, I just gravitate towards portraits because I simply enjoy doing them more and want to get better at them more. Maybe at some point I'll get more excited about painting landscapes and do more of them.