Lyraina's sketchbook

[Lyraina]

Trying to be more lose and let brush strokes show through:

Portrait from photo, still life from life

[Lyraina]

Trying to steal skintone secrets from Bouguereau:




From life:

[Jaik]

dayyuuummm that purple skin-ish girl on the last page is amazing :D And the first experimentation is also very cool. As much as I do enjoy the female form and it is much prettier than the male form, I think you should try painting some more male figures. I am guilty of this as well. Oh and your skin is coming along great.. Well that sounded creepy........ ...

[Lyraina]

Thanks for the reminder Jaik, I started drawing more guys right away after reading your comment. I always tend to drawing girls if I'm not consciously studying men. Bad habit :P Glad you like the skintones. If only I could reproduce them from imagination!

From photos (yikes, girls again)






Sacrificing accuracy for dynamic (or so I thought)








And Bammes

[Lyraina]

Male (!) portrait from photo and personal piece :)

[Toxicpanda]

Really impressive sketchbook. You have some beautiful studies and portraits here :)
Keep up with good work and have a lot of fun^^

[Lyraina]

Toxicpanda: Thanks a lot! Yes, I'm having fun! :D

More anatomy - including guys! It's harder for me than women... (no pun intended!)

[Lyraina]

So much to do and so little time ;_;
Why do I need so much more sleep than others? Not fair

[Lyraina]

Back to the basics

[Lyraina]

Oh my, university is really beginning to drag me down again.. why the hell can't anything just work out for a change

skin



Banshee WIP - I hope I'll be able to make the face look not ugly

[Jaik]

WOW, I have no idea how you are able to juggle uni as well as outputting all this art. Good to see you are doing more males :) And those perspective exercises look... fun... I hated having to do them. I should probably do more.
Your figures that you say you sacrificed anatomy for dynamism. I can see that they are more dynamic and until I look closely here and there they don't look off anatomically. So I would call that a success. I was watching a vid the other day and he said that if you are going to lengthen the body, you can lengthen the lower legs and lower arms without it looking too strange, but the upper legs and arms should always remain close proportionally with the rest of the body. Has absolutely nothing to do with anything I see here, but was a neat bit of information I thought I would share with you :)

Oh and the new VL thingy is up :) http://crimsondaggers.com/forum/thread-3068.html Join in if uni allows you to have the time.

[Blewzen]

Yeah it must be a pain to go uni and study art by yourself, that shows your passion and is great. Also I see your anatomy studies really good and definitely I need to put myself on working alot of anatomy and character design stuff, anyways keep the hard work and thanks for coming to my sb!

[Lyraina]

Jaik: Now that's a very cool bit of information indeed! Definitely needs a spot in my "useful stuff that needs to get tried & applied". Thanks for sharing.
Haha yeah, you really got me with the not-enough-male-thing... I could bet I will need a new reminder in a month or so, when I'm back to girls only ;)

Awesome new VL topic, I love cats, but almost never draw them! I need more hours in one day plzz! Over the last weeks I could not do much for uni because the stupid long winter here completely ruined my time schedule, but that is going to change now... /sadpanda

Blewzen: Thank you :) Yeah, it's not easy, especially since my mind can only progress art OR science at one time, and it always takes a while to turn that switch. Thanks as well for stepping by :)

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Beware the wrath of perspective basics... part #2! Yay! ;) The boxes are drawn from life, it's supposed to give me a feeling for 3d perspective.













And a WIP, so you won't die of boredom!

[aangkat]

SO cool sketchbook!
Inspiring ^_^

[Ursula Dorada]

Lyraiana, I actually have some useful advice for you with perspective and cubes hehe ^^
This was the 1st exercise we worked on over at imaginism workshop - and they had some eye-opening advice about it.

1) Do your cube looks like a cube? Make it look perfectly like a cube. If you look closely you will see its easy to spot when we have made it not symmetrical, and thats the first thing to fix.
2) Work ignoring perspective so you can practice your shape perception too. Make all edges perfectly parallel, and make all appropriate edges the exact same size for practice purposes.

It is, indeed, a nice perception exercise.
(for curiosity, here was my result after 3 passes of revision: https://www.dropbox.com/s/o3f6h0haxszb53t/07-C.jpg )

And about the cube! We even used that same photo as reference hehe.
The values are off and the contrast in edge individual face is too high. I know we see the difference in tone when we are painting it, but realism is captured with subtlety. If the tone only varies a mere 2%, we should try and vary only that much too. Make sure to not leave it as flat color, but take extra care to not heighten the contrast when its not there too.

Its very surprising how your picture happens in the midtones, and how often they are very gray even if they look very colorful.

And oh, don't forget the contact shadow under the cube :D

Keep up the great work!

[Lyraina]

aangkat: Thank you! :)

Ursula Dorada: Man, thanks so much for your advice! I went and drew some more cubes, and this time double-checked if they really look like cubes, and corrected them. I'll also do some more with parallel perspective. I'll keep practicing, even if I don't scan all of them, so thank you! It is interesting what you say about being more careful with contrast, now that you mention it, I think this is something I am doing wrong more often (in my last Bouguereau study for example). I will keep an eye on this as well. Thank you :)

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I'll skip the university-eats-my-time excuses and just post what I've got:

[Lyraina]

Although I don't have the time to join Noah's artcamp this time/until I finished my master thesis, I hope it is okay to be inspired by all of those lovely homework assignments everyone is posting... they really made me want to do some, too!

[Ursula Dorada]

Oooh Awesome job, keep it up!

[Lyraina]

Thank you Sula. Also thanks for the inspiration! You're working so hard, you're a great role model ;)

Another batch of master studies - this time, it's all about color. I feel like the value studies were more valuable, even though the color ones were harder to do. Not to say I didn't learn anything though!




What did I learn:
- Figure out why skintones look so ugly and digital when using certain reds, yellows and oranges (even thogh the original seems to use them, too)
- Find a way to paint with a different base color showing through (resulting in 2 colors at the same spot, refreshing the eye)
- Practice low contast/low value range paintings
- Rotate and re-use colors within one painting
- Be more bold with color choices
- Careful with choosing blues (violet-blue vs. cyan-blue)

[Lyraina]

I'll consider this one finished (Banshee), not too happy, but I also don't know what I could change, so... I'll move on.




Visual library: