|| Cold Coffe || Getting serious with caffeine in my system

[Suira]

JyonnyNovice: Thanks man! Yeah hard times are a necesary step, so it's all about just keep pushing no matter what or how hard it is :P The eternal struggle!

Rafa: Well, I'm going back to Spain!! I just can't wait, civilisation again! Lotta shit to handle still but it's close, it's close!

Heliux: Thanks man! I totally recommend you the asaro head, it's THE BEST, hard as fuck, but once you start realising a bit how it works it just opens a lot of hidden places for you to explore, I still have to work my ass off until I get some semblance of remote mastery but, it's worth the effort!

[u]Now, for a review on Sam Nielson's Lighting for Story and Concept Art[/u]:

First of all, the course is AWESOME, I've taken quite a few courses online, and this was one of the best. It focuses on what makes storytelling , it's elements, how it works, why it works, and how it is entangled in EVERY single aspect of your painting. How not only the design of a specific subject talks about its properties, but also how the colors and light you use to portray it influence your viewer's perception of it. All of this sounds like common sense, and I think most of us have it in mind to some extent, but let me be clear.

This course is an in depth dissection on this, on what are the limitations and contradictions in the narrative resources you can use, on how to make something subtle yet clear. I can tell that Sam put a lot of work and brain power into understanding all of this and much more, and how he effectively conveys it to his students in a very clear way that can be remembered.

Every assignment tackles a specific set of resources that you should use in your story telling for an illustration, but it's more than that. Personally I'm not aiming to become an illustrator, I mostly care about character design, and I feel this course is a must for anyone on my position. When you're focusing on environmental or character design ( specially on the later) it is my experience to focus solely on the shape design and the "flats" and surface properties of your character, but more often than not, the story of the character is of less importance than the previous mentioned in your approach ( at least that's what happened for me). This course really teaches you to be very mindfull on how the story of the character, the theme of the story he/she is involved in sould affect its design, and not only that but also the way such designs are presented to the art director. Introducing small hints of storytelling in the way you light a character ( even if it's on a white background) is key to sell your design in a believable way, and to be subtle about it takes not only a lot of practice but also knowledge on how thse narrative factors work, and that's what you get with this course.

Sam himself is an extremely helpfull guy, when you ask for feedback you get it almost instantly, I sometimes wrote him a messaghe at 3AM and got an answer at 3:25Am, which says a lot about his work ethic. Also loved how efficient his workflow is, he uses really simplified approaches and builts on complexity from there, one minute I was like: " I have no clue how he's gonna make this work with how blunt he's being" and a short while after I was like: "wtf happened? how come this looks so awesome!??".

Lots of gret lessons to be learned from him, and his course, really recomend it.

Now for the DISCLAIMER:
While the course is awesome and tailors to all kinds of levels of art mastery ( hell, I suck and I learned a lot with it) I feel that in order to really take full advantage of it you need a fairly strong grasp on fundamentals, specially regarding light and color theory, he provides you with lineart to paint on top of, and you can redraw it to suit your style if you want, so there's freedom. So overall I recomend this mostly for people who's , at least in the mid-tier of fundamentals mastery, otherwise, you'll be way too concerned with trying to get those down properly to pay close attention to what's being taught to you regarding narrative resources (which is the main focus of the course).

On the brightside , if you're like me and you pretty much suck balls at fundamentals in many aspects this course will teach you ( in addition to what I previously mentioned) what aspects of your fundamentals you need to focus on after the course is over, since it forces you to put to practise all you've studied and get out of the "student" mindset, in which you only study but don't really apply the stuff in a real way.

My rating would be 10/10 for this course, worth every dollar.

END OF THE REVISION

And now for another wall of text regarding my life developments and shit. I'll try to be brief, but I wanna explain my absence to you guys ( for those who give a shit hahaha).

I?m still in the process of moving, and I've been solving many issues regarding my documentation, finding a place back in Spain remotely ( a major pain in the ass) and , most importantly, find a decent place for my dogs here before I leave them ( which is proving to be the most depressing thing I've ever had to overcome).

Sum to that a profound feel of stagnation due to various reasons and a lack of motivation and you have my reason to not post shit. Recently I uninstalled all of my computer games and decided to just focus on my craft, even if I suck balls and I need distractions and whatnot, just fucking balls to the wall and do it. Still, the updates will be far and few in between until I am back in Spain and have stup my studio ( and by that I mean a table, a chair, a plugin for my computer and an internet conection xD).

For today I bring you some of the assignments I've been doing these past few months and some utterly shity and unfinished studies/warmups I've done this week.

Assignments: ( most of these are just painting on top of premade compositions and lineart, I changed the lineart only in the one with the explosion, the rest are basically untouched in that regard):

number 3.


number 4.


number 5.


number 6.


number 7.


And my brainfarts and shit:


this one I did for Dorian Iten, one of my ex-teacher, who gave me some great feedback via email a few days ago.

Of course, some fail heads from imagination:




And some quick skull studies I did using this AWESOME free app called SKULL SKETCHER, you can get it here .



Quick warmpus:


And experiments trying to apply various theories, mostly failed, but learned stuff, as usual:







And as a bonus, a warning ( and a screencap) : DON'T EVER PLAY FALLOUT if you wanna study intensely



Hmkay, bye!