09-24-2016, 08:30 AM
First of all, great job with the water dynamics.
I remember having the exact same problem you are having right now last year. What you're experiencing might not be a problem with the program, but one of mentality. Basically, when starting out painting you slowly develop a feeling for the 'relationships between individual values' that you need to have to make something read, but you don't know how to translate that into the whole spectrum of values yet, so you subconsciously stay in the midranges, where you know what you are doing. You already posted some studies in the notan group a while back, so if you're afraid of contrast you know what to do - start some paintings from black and white and work your way back toward the midrange from there.
Since you're also asking for crit on this individual painting, I'd say that in terms of colour saturation you can get away with a lot more, and use shockingly highly saturated colours in your darks and midtones even in an image like this one that is supposed to come off as grey and stormy, if you restrict yourself to using them as accents, only pushing some areas while leaving 90% at low saturation. You'll have to experiment a bit before you figure out what works and what does not though. I tried doing a paintover... I think I may have destroyed some of the motion you had going with your water, and I'm pretty sure I made the dudes hair look like a wig, but maybe you'll get something out of it anyway.
I remember having the exact same problem you are having right now last year. What you're experiencing might not be a problem with the program, but one of mentality. Basically, when starting out painting you slowly develop a feeling for the 'relationships between individual values' that you need to have to make something read, but you don't know how to translate that into the whole spectrum of values yet, so you subconsciously stay in the midranges, where you know what you are doing. You already posted some studies in the notan group a while back, so if you're afraid of contrast you know what to do - start some paintings from black and white and work your way back toward the midrange from there.
Since you're also asking for crit on this individual painting, I'd say that in terms of colour saturation you can get away with a lot more, and use shockingly highly saturated colours in your darks and midtones even in an image like this one that is supposed to come off as grey and stormy, if you restrict yourself to using them as accents, only pushing some areas while leaving 90% at low saturation. You'll have to experiment a bit before you figure out what works and what does not though. I tried doing a paintover... I think I may have destroyed some of the motion you had going with your water, and I'm pretty sure I made the dudes hair look like a wig, but maybe you'll get something out of it anyway.