12-21-2012, 05:39 PM
Hi there! Very cool you want to improve painting and drawing skills. Everyone here has some really good advice I would definitely work on more studies both from life and photograph. I would also pick up a book on perspective or maybe check out a few tutorials online, its very important to be able to orient your work in 3d space and establish where the eye line is. As far as painting goes I think you may jump into unimportant details a bit quickly, something I like to do personally when I work from a photograph is to put a gaussian blur(maybe around 4.4%) in a separate layer on the photograph just so I can see values and shapes at their most basic level and keep myself from getting caught up in the little things. Keep it up, I hope that was helpful!