ThereIsNoJustice's Sketchbook

[ThereIsNoJustice]

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Straight to color, no drawing, no values, hold my beer. I didn't merge layers, so steps.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

I've been thinking lately about graphical read / hard shapes vs texture brush / gradient. Partly because of Marco Bucci's youtube vids. Partly from reading Alla Prima. Like a lot of people, I felt the temptation to cover the canvas in smooth gradients. Thinking in terms of gradients, even. This approach nerfs the shapes. Probably I should've had this realization earlier. In hindsight it's obvious. Think not of gradients but of shapes and edges. They are intrinsically connected in that the edges modify the loudness of the shapes. 

Also was convinced by the recent Rigney interview to stop posting so much. Just to see what happens. If you haven't already listened to it, I'd say check it out. There can definitely be this appealing cycle of wanting to keep posting stuff all the time and it's a distraction sometimes, with a false sense of satisfaction. I know, maybe not the best idea to spread on CD to all ten of us who are still here.

Speed studies. 

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Got a bunch of sculptures/statues I want to draw. Work on accuracy and experiment with things too.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Rendering a bit.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Might need to upscale the canvas some more to do proper rendering with hard brushes, but that's the plan for this one. I think res is something I have neglected a bit.

Gray statue in the ref, but nowadays color is a lot less spooky to me so I thought I'd see how my color sense is doing.

Cheek value is looking weird to me now. Hm.

[darktiste]

My crusade against sketchbook who doesn't post there reference as begin.By the pope post the reference.Everytime it a study no more hiding we will put light on what really wrong.Help us enlight you.Post the reference.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Darktiste: Good idea. That would be a good habit. I'm doing good to remember to post here at all, haha.

I mainly just had to fix the cheek value and blend it a bit, then got sidetracked into changing all the feature areas again. It really is possible to endlessly move things around.

[darktiste]

Not much to say because to me that now a finish study you missing some of the fold and some of the parttern of light and shadow of the left also her left cheek could be brighter and the eyelid.Overall good study if you didn't intended to finish the fold.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Friend told me about this exercise of taking a bunch of images and taking as detailed notes as possible on them, and trying to apply those good ideas to your own work.

I ended up taking a few hours on the notes, and trying to break things down into a checklist: https://imgur.com/a/CjpxYf8

I didn't use the checklist yet. I'm rusty enough that I just wanted to get a warm up going first, and trying to apply things off the top of my head. I like the bottom left one, which was surprising.

[-echo-]

I think that is a great idea to really analyze art and get a good comprehension of it´s composition, values, colors etc. I might try that! Do you take these notes from artist at random or only artist that you really like? :-)

For critique, I think your anatomy is a bit of, especially the women. You draw them often very similar, big busted, big hips... which is fine, but I think your anatomy and general shapes would benefit if you would do more studies of regular-looking people, if you know what I mean.

This youtube channel is great for Crouqis and you could also pause the videos for more thorough studies. Also it comes with a bunch of different bodytypes and shapes:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAZZ8kX...SJS9LWNdEQ

Keep it up :-)

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Do you take these notes from artist at random or only artist that you really like? :-)

For critique, I think your anatomy is a bit of, especially the women. You draw them often very similar, big busted, big hips... which is fine, but I think your anatomy and general shapes would benefit if you would do more studies of regular-looking people, if you know what I mean.

Hey -echo-, thanks for dropping in. You're probably right that I generally go for the idealized figures. I'll think about mixing it up.

As for the note exercise, I went with images I liked, though not necessarily from artists I know well or had to have been following for a long time. I gave some thought before choosing them if I would want my work to look like theirs and if trying to learn from the image would be fruitful. There are some great images that I probably wouldn't want to study because I don't want my stuff to look that way. I also think there are good images which are pretty direct in their approach, like relying on amazing lighting and rendering which is mostly pointless for a note taking exercise. But yeah, give it a shot. I'd love to see anybody's notes if they do it.

[ShinOkami]

Yo, tnx for checking out my sb :D

Really nice stuff here, keep on working on forms and stuff. :) Small tip- As for the anatomy, I like to have a 'base' figure in mind, something that I can twist here and there so I could get various models of it cause in the end, every variotion is the same thing, hope that helps~ :)

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Some stuff after a chat with Jet Jaguar on the discord. Below isn't the best process. JJ advised to pay more attention to edges and work softer right away with the lines taking into account edges.

Coming from the hard edge simplification idea that seems wild to me and a lot to think about all at once. I feel like I fall back into copying mode too easily.

Last image is a second retry trying to mix edges and shapes from the beginning.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Another one. 

[darktiste]

I really understand what you mean when you say edge is important with the last example.I feel like the tissue is more soft than hard edge probably as something to do with how it reflect light.What is suppose to create an hard or soft edge ?I think if you didn't answer this question yet you don't getting anything out of those study.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Back with an idea of how I'm going to get some use of this sketchbook.

The real problem I've always faced is "productivity", so this is going to be more of a productivity log. What I'm trying, is it working, etc.

What I'm trying:

• Plug in tablet right after finishing eating. 
  
• ColdTurkey to block all politics related subreddits (reading/participating in arguments is a huge timesink, and mental poison for mood).
  
• Set binary benchmarks for success. This means setting a time to work on something or number of drawings, etc.
  
• If I'm not sure what to work on, set a short timer to make the decision, and go.
  

Crimson Arena is now doing spooky October themed pieces. I'm going to do one, and use it to figure out this productivity stuff. 

Below is a simplification exercise, and changing the amount of texture used on my old friend the ear cast. I've been trying to find a balance between that pure digital look and overly textural sloppiness. I think even the bottom ear has too much texture to it, still.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Productivity report: I blocked reddit, twitch, netflix, and youtube entirely for a week. That wasn't intentional but it might work out fine.

Plug in tablet right after finishing eating. -- This was immediately not a worthwhile idea. I need a recovery time after eating. So I'm switching to setting a countdown timer after eating to starting drawing/painting.

ColdTurkey to block all politics related subreddits (reading/participating in arguments is a huge timesink, and mental poison for mood). -- This has been great. Better mood in general.

Set binary benchmarks for success. This means setting a time to work on something or number of drawings, etc. -- Still early to tell. 

If I'm not sure what to work on, set a short timer to make the decision, and go. -- I haven't run into this yet.

The more important idea I've added into things is to just not think of the big picture and instead the next very smallest step. This is hard to explain but my previous default mode is to think of the entirety of anything, a project, a painting, the whole day, and this leads to bad mood, procrastination. The ajatt guy sort of explained this next step thinking in his timeboxing posts: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...t-and-why/

So here's my spooky painting composition, before and after crit. I hunted down refs for everything here as well, as per Jet Jaguar's suggested rule.

[ThereIsNoJustice]

Productivity: blocked everything but music player for most of the day.

Avoiding the figure and skull thus far. Kept to JJ's rule of staying zoomed out, but I think now I'm at the point where it's necessary.

[ThereIsNoJustice]