10-16-2018, 08:19 AM
There's some nice looking stuff in here study-wise. Your head constructions are looking fairly solid (especially traditionally).
That said: I'm totally going to rag on you for painting with a soft brush, though (sorry in advance, lol) -- don't do that. You want more hard edges than soft ones when painting, especially if you're trying to be 'painterly'. Think of it this way: it's always easy to go back and smooth something out (smudge, lose the edge), but it's very difficult to work the other way around and make something that's initially soft-appearing into something more solid-feeling. (You will essentially have to entirely paint it over to achieve the hard edge.) Most pros will tell you to mainly paint with a basic hard-edge brush and use an airbrush (or similar soft) brush very sparingly. The reason your traditional portraits feel more solid/finished than your digitally painted ones is due to them having more defined edges -- you rendered them with a hard pencil, then blended where you needed to to achieve smoother plane changes. (Not the other way around, like you're doing in your digital work.) Look at how much more solid your noses feel on any of your traditional pieces, then compare them to your digital ones. Those softly painted edges are making it feel like you're unsure of exactly where you're placing your marks, when you clearly do know where to put them via your traditional work. The wings of the nose, the folded edges of your eyelids -- you leave them all hard in your traditional pieces, but they soften and (almost) disappear entirely (in some cases) in your digital works. Harden those edges up! Be deliberate in your mark making! Don't blend everything and kill all your edges because it'll (unintentionally) boot the feeling of realism out the window.
Look at how your latest digital piece with the scary old woman has the top lip pop forward so much more than the rest of the face because you used a hard brush there. Imagine getting that solidness into a few other selected places (like the eyes!) it would make the piece pop and feel so much more intentional. You put all this detail of veins into the skin, but they're getting lost because everything else is so mushy. The hair and edges of the face/features have the feeling of pulled cotton in this piece, not solid objects (or even receding-into-darkness objects), so it makes the texture you so worked hard putting into everything else sort of superfluous because it feels like a bit of a mismatch.
You definitely understand how to render, so that's not the problem -- I can see it in your traditional work, previous digital portraits, and even in the choices of values you're using in your pieces -- just swap out the soft brushes you're using for harder ones and the quality of your digital work is going to jump forward immensely. It may take you a bit of practice to entirely get the hang of it, but you'll find it so much easier to work with in the long run. Your digital portraits on the first page of your sketchbook aren't far off the mark, just harden up those solid/defining features and you'll be good to go!
That said: I'm totally going to rag on you for painting with a soft brush, though (sorry in advance, lol) -- don't do that. You want more hard edges than soft ones when painting, especially if you're trying to be 'painterly'. Think of it this way: it's always easy to go back and smooth something out (smudge, lose the edge), but it's very difficult to work the other way around and make something that's initially soft-appearing into something more solid-feeling. (You will essentially have to entirely paint it over to achieve the hard edge.) Most pros will tell you to mainly paint with a basic hard-edge brush and use an airbrush (or similar soft) brush very sparingly. The reason your traditional portraits feel more solid/finished than your digitally painted ones is due to them having more defined edges -- you rendered them with a hard pencil, then blended where you needed to to achieve smoother plane changes. (Not the other way around, like you're doing in your digital work.) Look at how much more solid your noses feel on any of your traditional pieces, then compare them to your digital ones. Those softly painted edges are making it feel like you're unsure of exactly where you're placing your marks, when you clearly do know where to put them via your traditional work. The wings of the nose, the folded edges of your eyelids -- you leave them all hard in your traditional pieces, but they soften and (almost) disappear entirely (in some cases) in your digital works. Harden those edges up! Be deliberate in your mark making! Don't blend everything and kill all your edges because it'll (unintentionally) boot the feeling of realism out the window.
Look at how your latest digital piece with the scary old woman has the top lip pop forward so much more than the rest of the face because you used a hard brush there. Imagine getting that solidness into a few other selected places (like the eyes!) it would make the piece pop and feel so much more intentional. You put all this detail of veins into the skin, but they're getting lost because everything else is so mushy. The hair and edges of the face/features have the feeling of pulled cotton in this piece, not solid objects (or even receding-into-darkness objects), so it makes the texture you so worked hard putting into everything else sort of superfluous because it feels like a bit of a mismatch.
You definitely understand how to render, so that's not the problem -- I can see it in your traditional work, previous digital portraits, and even in the choices of values you're using in your pieces -- just swap out the soft brushes you're using for harder ones and the quality of your digital work is going to jump forward immensely. It may take you a bit of practice to entirely get the hang of it, but you'll find it so much easier to work with in the long run. Your digital portraits on the first page of your sketchbook aren't far off the mark, just harden up those solid/defining features and you'll be good to go!