ThereIsNoJustice's Sketchbook

[ThereIsNoJustice]

A few random sketches. I really despise photoshop and all its (lack of) blending abilities today. I feel like when I watch people use it (ie ctrl+paint's matt kohr) I'm watching someone work around the program rather than with it (temp layers, switching to erase all the time, then back to brush). Whereas someone like Sinix uses painter and it's like he can forget about tools for the most part. 

[dodeqaa]

Cool stuff man!

I know that pain of blending in photoshops, you can check out John Silva's smudge brushes

http://johnsilva.deviantart.com/art/John...-457146526

Or Ryan Lang talks about getting painterly brush marks by customizing a default photoshop brush with the texture function in the Brush Panel

http://digitalbrushes.tumblr.com/post/13...d-to-share

Works super good with the mixer brush :D

Goodluck!

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Hey dodeqaa, I'll look into those things more soon. I have a better tablet coming in the mail w/ twice the pressure sens my current one has, and a lot more room to draw. 

Some put-the-muscles-on-the-3d-mannekin studies, and the mannekins w/o my lines in case anyone else would like to use it. These are just general placement, so I have a better idea for interpreting mysterious muscle lumps in figure drawings soon. 

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Getting used to new tablet. Huge difference. Seems possible to use sens to blend now.

Leg and arms. 

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Better tablet is a gamechanger. The wacom bamboo is shit... I should've upgraded sooner. 

Value study from monster statue. 

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Mostly a bunch of hands, which I haven't studied in a while. A lot of these are from imagination.

I figured some stuff out today while drawing heads and figures. 

A few things that make life easier:
- drawing a tiny sketch silhouette will let me get proportions more correct, both from imagination and from ref. Increase the size and draw over it.
- silhouettes make more sense for me in terms of gesture. I only figured this out after drawing the hands so don't know if I'll hit a wall with all those fingers flying around. I still feel like I don't understand what the great artlords mean and are doing with gesture, but this is something.
- the best way for me to build a head from imagination is to start with 3 parallel lines for the tilt of the head. Cap off the round top and add the jaw. This makes turning the head in really extreme angles possible for me, and even clarifies if I'm seeing the underside of the jaw. I don't know why this works so well while everything else fails miserably, but it does. 

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Back to gesture. Looked at the FORCE idea again, because it reminded me of my shape observations yesterday. Straights vs curves, avoid symmetry. More of a design idea. 

[tinDeer]

I like those gesture drawings! They look really fluid.
I've had a similar situation. Before my Huion right now I'd been using a very old Wacom Bamboo. Huion might not be the greatest, but it's still better than that old thing.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

tinDeer, thanks for stopping by and the friendly comment. 

---

I'm always coming back to proportion solving when I try figures, and I've finally come up with something workable. Spheres. The simultaneous advantage and disadvantage of spheres is that they're always the same form in every view. So for proportion/construction purposes I've figured a beginning of a way to use them. Stacking spheres feels very much like modeling, combining form and perspective intuitively right at the start just feels right. 

The danger is ending up with a snowman. When I take the construction further I have to remember to leave out/shave off some fat bits, or only use the spheres to put boxes inside. 

Right now the constructions aren't characteristic enough of real life. I'll develop them some w/ hampton and then see how it works in simplifying vs a ref. 

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Continuing with basic figure construction. These are either from Krenz or no ref, with and without the sphere idea.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Developed the sphere torso construction idea by adding a smaller sphere which modifies the spine's curve and makes things a little easier to build. Two examples at the bottom of what I mean.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Value, color. There's so much to learn and so little time.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Trying to figure out a color process and studying some arms along the way. 

[ThereIsNoJustice]

still life

[alexdanila]

Interesting concept with the spine modifier. Care to elaborate the subject?

[ThereIsNoJustice]

@alex, thanks for stopping by. I'll do my best to explain. The image below is basically what I'm thinking. Apologies for my hand writing.

There are two things I've left out. One is that this spine modifier idea doesn't have to be a mass, or even start with a sphere. It could be a single point in space, or even 2d, only a gestural idea (bottom left ref, went with a 2d gestural idea). But I'm usually imagining 3d spheres, the lines wrapping and touching points along those spheres, and chopping off parts and carving them up. 

It may not be clear what problem I'm trying to solve. My figures would often have this disjointed look, like torsos and pelvises just happen to be wrapped in skin without a feeling of attachment. That feeling of attachment comes from the natural motion of the body. If you lean your hips forward, your torso tilts back. If you lean your hips back, your torso comes forward. The same goes for side to side, etc. To a lesser extent this happens with other body parts, but it's very noticeable in torso and hips. That's the thing I've been lacking, and this is how I make sure to think more about it. 

[alexdanila]

Aha, interesting. Kinda like how Proko does with the Bean. It acts as a gestural joint for the 2 spheres defining the ribcage and pelvis.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Necks and red pandas. 

[neopatogen]

Red pandas and boxified humans is always a good thing to do :)

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Been meaning to get around to painting this scene from the movie The Revenant. It had very striking colors and values, but it's also very complex and would require simplification. I think I could have further simplified the image on both attempts but got distracted by the water and some small shapes here and there.