What ImSkeptical learnt this week (Sketchbook)

[ImSkeptical]

So inadvertently took 3 months off posting. I think I was out of state (for PAX australia) and then out of country (for Bali Illustration Workshop) most of November. Also for a while I thought I would have a job doing color boards for all of 2015, so ended up playing dota again for a bit. That fell through though :( , pro tip, don't spend money if you haven't signed anything yet :p.

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Anyway, still been busy practicing art. I think I have something cool to show though. It's me discovering a problem I had and then hopefully solving it somewhat.

So for awhile I've been annoyed with color. When I was doing super bright colorful images, although it would sometimes take a bit of struggling, I would eventually find something i liked. In the last year or so I've been trying to move away from it because when I show people my work, a lot of the time the only comment I would seem to get would be "nice colors". I'm not exactly sure what else I was wanting them to be saying, but I did think colors was probably my strongest point, so I was motivated to move away from it try and practice more subtle color schemes.

At the start of November though, I did this art test for some color scripts



In the process of doing it, I started to realize something very important about my understanding of color. Like usual, with some of them I struggled while others came easy. But at the end of it, yeah they might be passable (I did pass the test), but comparing it to Dice Tsutsumi, something was just off about some of them. I don't think I figured it out exactly what was wrong at the time, but I do think I started to realize that I was only comfortable with doing direct sunlight, and skylight in the shadows. Any time it deviated too much from a daylight to golden hour to sunset sort of lighting, not only did I enter struggle town, I would always leave it somewhat dissatisfied.

This became even more apparent after doing these











The first was just a copy. But the rest I was trying to apply that subtle brown school lighting like Rembrandt, Sargent and Zorn. There was just something a little off to me, specifically about the color in these. Especially the one with the hands in the lap, it was really bugging me. I think it was here that I decided to focus a bit more on color and painting again, whereas most of the year was spent focusing on drawing. So here's the studies i started to do to help fix the problem.









I was still strolling through the streets of struggle city at this point. Especially with that abandoned still life right at the end there, why didn't it have that grey brown mastery excellence. Why were the masters just so damn masterful?

I think it was around here when i stumbled across some videos on color by Nathan Fowkes. Surely a god of color such as him would be able to enlighten me with epic art secrets. Well, as with all art tutorials after you've been at it long enough, nothing really new was taught. Just those fundamentals that everyone knows like vibrate contrasting colors; variety in saturation; you can get more color out value schemes that have lower contrast; warm light cool shadows or cool light warm shadows; etc.

But what a minute. That was the issue. Cool Light! Warm shadows! Something I already 'knew' I just didn't 'know'. Like every discovery you have in art, it's something you've read on the internet and been told by everyone and anyone repeated time and time again. And if you don't already know exactly what I'm talking about; don't worry, work on this shit long enough and you will.

So with that I entered a frenzy of studying that subtle overcast grey brown masterful and probably most importantly cool light I was after.























Simultaneously with these studies I was 'applying' the learning into these quick sketches. A lot of them are just abstract color blobs trying to find harmonies. But in my mind these were just as important, if not slightly more so as all the master copies.



Also, not part of the story, some studies on texture





And here is the end of the story.








Okay that first painting was already kind of figured out and I just cleaned it up. It looking somewhat close to good is probably both a fluke and me applying the little drawing ability I've gained through the year. It was done before my realization around the time of the first few studies where I was figuring out the problem. But it needs to be put at the end for dramatic purposes! Screw chronological order :p. Anyway those other two I think are directly influenced by my newfound knowledge and practice of something I already knew. And that is either pick warm colors for your lights and cools for your shadows; or cool colors for your lights and warms for your shadows.

As always, its all about the basics. So go back, learn what you've already learnt unless you havn't in which case do. And you too can make paintings that for once you don't immediately feel like deleting and only show out of pressure to attempt to persuade people you actually are doing something all those hours of the day alone in that room. Other than playing videogames.