Yesterday, 03:20 PM
(Yesterday, 01:16 PM)JosephCow Wrote: Wow love how the dragon one turned out! Beautiful, firey sunset light on it.Joseph, man, this is so awesome. Thank you for this paintover, it looks so much better, I better start learning from you. So, I have a couple of questions:
On the boar one, I like the concept of the painting, and overall the vibe is cool. I think you could spend more time on the big picture stage with the values and colors before detailing, though. On this one I see a lot of smaller details, like the gun and the wallpaper pattern, which while interesting, kind of draw my attention, meanwhile the lighting feels a bit unfocused. With the color, there's a bit of murkiness to it around the walls.
Just since you said you want to improve color, I did a bit of a sketch over, kind of going back to the big flat shapes stage to see if the color relationships can be more powerful. I liked in yours how there were touches of blue mingled with the yellow of the wall around shadows and edges. So it's starting to look interesting, but the 'rules' of where blue should be and exactly what color and value everything needs to be to read, are maybe a little shaky. So idk, I'm sure it's not exactly what you're going for but my suggestion is just to play around with each piece of the image, and figure out what reads, and if you start to get something that works, keep going to see if there's any adjustments to an area that work even better.
Once you have well established what color each different thing is in light, and what color it is in shadow, you can paint really powerfully. Like here, I think I have established pretty well what the color white looks like in this context by playing around with it and getting it consistent across the image. So if I wanted to add another white object, or start detailing his tusks, for example, it would be pretty much guaranteed to work out.
And then another suggestion is try a filter or something to reduce the values to masses. Mess with levels in photoshop, whatever works for you. But like side by side paintover with filter, we get a pretty good 3 value comp, though could maybe be better if the dark shapes on the wall in back were lightened.
Original: wallpaper pattern sticks out a lot, mass of the boar feels like it's fighting the gradient on the wall behind a bit. And yeah it's just a filter, so it can be flattering or unflattering, but I do it a lot just to look at it a different way and get an idea of what could be stronger.
Keep it up though, I'm honestly loving all your sketches!
1. You mentioned color murkiness on the wall. How do I avoid that altogether? You seem to have a very coherent palette for this piece, it all works together, seems like all colors share something. Is it just that they are all close-ish on the color wheel? I usually try to keep the palette limited and not go too far unless there is a need for it, but that seem not to be the rule at play here. So how exactly do you harmonize colors?
2. Those sparks of blue I have are an interesting subject. I noticed that adding these sorts of elements almost "burns" an area, in a good way. However, as you mentioned, the "rules" of where to apply them are shaky. So what do you think a rule might be here? I see that the edges between light and shadow are places where you would want to add the poppy color, but is there anything else?
3. As I understand, you are suggesting that I should play around and find consistent value-color combination for each color that is present in the painting. Does that mean that you group your colors mentally by proximity? Say, if the tusk is some desaturated yellow and the wall is some beige they are in the same group and would obey the same value-color structure? It seems like you have groups for these things, and I know about value grouping, but I am not really knowledgeable on color grouping. I suppose this question is a lot like the first one, phrased differently, but if this is phrased better, it works too.
4. Finally, how do you practice color and value relations? It is clear to me that not everything we do in a painting is a conscious decision and a big portion of it is our eye just knowing what do as a result of repeated practice. How did you practice it? And while practicing, what questions were you asking, what answers were you looking for? It would be great to know since I am realizing that for me, there is still a lot of work to be done on a macro level - composition, color comp, and big picture value. Even though I am quite proud of some of these sketches, I am not consistently hitting that level I would like to be at.
Again, thank you very much for this paintover. I hope I will be able to give you a feedback with the same level of gravitas soon enough