Tyger sketches

[Adzerak]

Welcome back to the Daggers, Tygers!

Inspiring to see you tackle perspective in such a step by step, constructive, fashion.
Looking foreward to the "cathedral" part of this ;D

[kikindaface]

great perspective study ! wanna see more stuff applied ! keep it up !

[Tygerson]

Thanks!

I realized about halfway through on this that I should have put the horizon line lower.  Better yet, off the page.  I've got it so that the base of the building is getting bigger as it recedes from my eye!  Oops!  I'll look out for that next time.

[Tygerson]

This was an attempt at a smiling face.  It just wasn't working out, so I settled for a slight smile.  Maybe Davinci had that same problem...

[Yumi]

Smiles sometimes can be tricky. Often the problem is in the whole eye area and eyebrows too. Sincere smile engage a lot of muscles and it's often hard to make this smile looking believable and not fake while drawing eyes and brows. I don't know how your earlier versions looked like but I must say that you've done a pretty good job capturing a slight smile c:. The only thing that bothers me is her eyes. I have an impression that she look at me with her left eye but the other one is looking slightly behind me but I might be wrong since I myself have problems with it :/

[Triggerpigking]

Yeah as Yumi said smiles are difficult.
I think the main things to focus on with them is squinting the eyes and puffing out the cheeks a bit, it might be an idea to focus on exaggerating it as much as possible first(to the point of sillyness) then scaling it back.

[kikindaface]

Hey, your last painting isn"t bad in terms of colors, very good skintone. My critic is really about values. It seems the overall tones are way too light to look realistic. Try to always paint slightly darker than what you think you're seeing or what you're imagining, in reall ife you have lighter values that white, you have any kind of light that is more bright than the white of the paper. in painting you're limited since the white is your lightest value. The best way to make light looks like light is to paint everything else slightly darker. it'll make the form more readable. 2nd thing is that your light area has actually too many highlights. you should really aim for 2-3 different values in the light area and then put your highlights carrefuly at the right place. It seems you don't really know where the light comes from, you can pinpoint the area but not the exact location, and it's something you should aim for, try to stick to your light source throughout the entire process ! One trick i use that ain't easy to to see my object from the point of view of the  light. Everything you don't see from this angle is not litted, so it's the shadow. It helps to set up the separation between light and shadow, then you have to understand the volume to give the exact tone without messing with your main light/shadow separation ! here's a quick overpaint if you don't mind, trying to emphasis everything i said above ! far from perfect but i hope enough to give clarity to my critic ! keep it up !

[Tygerson]

Wow guys, really helpful!  Kikindaface, that paintover is exactly what I had hoped to do in terms of values, but couldn't pull off.  I'll give a better response in your sketchbooks, since you'll see it there!

I tried drawing some gestures a few weeks ago, and they looked like the walking dead.  So I'm trying to reclaim good gesture drawing now.  

There's so much, I don't want to get scattered with each new shiny thing, so here's the current plan of attack for art time, on a weekly basis:

Priority one:  Finish the weekly "cube to cathedral" assignment.  Once this is done, go to priority two.
Priority two:  Watch one Proko figure drawing class and do the exercises for that video, progressing in order.
Priority three:  Watch one Proko anatomy video and do those exercises.
Once those are done for the week, it's free choice!  Painting, portraits, idea sketches, museum visit, or another youtube video, or whatever until the next week starts.

When the "cube to cathedral" class is up, Proko figure drawing moves to priority one.  Once that is finished, the anatomy videos more to priority one (except maybe do 2-3 a week, since there's a bunch).  

I'm currently on the proko structure video.  Here's a page of animals drawn as spheres/cylinders/cubes.




Some mini gestures of Tess Kielhamer (martial artist on youtube).  

[imPhelikz]

Hi Tygerson!
Really nice sketchbook!, I think on your last portrait the mouth is a bit to big but you have really neat rendering abilities and good eye for color, just keep an eye for edge control and values like kikindaface said, also you might check the muscles on the neck there are tons of muscles there and you just render it like a tube.

I really like the idea of structuring your goals and studies, there LOTS to learn and you can easily get off track, discouraged etc. Ive been there :(

Anyways hope this helps :D

[Artloader]

Hey Tygerson, I'm loving those structure studies, I had no idea that Proko had some structure videos :) I've been following drawbox.com for that kind of stuff but Proko is awesome!

My two penneth on the smiling face would be to a load of studies from reference or from life. I find that I can't make anything look realistic until I've done a few studies which then furnishes me with a visual library to draw upon. Just a thought for you, please ignore if not appropriate :).

Anyway, good luck with your priorities - keep it going!

[Tygerson]

Thank you imPhelix and Artloader for the portrait advice!  I'm totally going to go back to it once I finish this week's cube to cathedral (priority one) and proko figure vid (priority two).  More life studies, that proko vid on how to draw necks (a weak point for me for sure), and some bolder value choices...

Cube to cathedral progress.  I quickly redid last week's 3 point perspective study, but and old west building, because I got the horizon placement wrong.  I'm way faster on paper, although not as accurate.  I'm now cringing at some of the eyeballed perspective lines, but the next try will be better.




Also, I did my best to figure out what makes an old west town look "old west-y," since the cube to cathedral assignment is to make up your own town and draw it.  Reminds me of one of my childhood playgrounds, which was a mini old west town.  You could run along the tops of the roofs, as they were packed together so tightly--it was awesome.    

[Tygerson]

Cube to cathedral week 4 assignment. 

I tried printing out some perspective lines and putting them under the paper.  It worked pretty well.

Things learned for next time:
Plan the image better--draw the closest things first.  Start with boxes.  Use a better pen (it started gumming up about halfway through).  Listening to the Firefly soundtrack while drawing old western towns will result in a minor anachronism.

[Tygerson]

Cube to cathedral week 5, hero path with curved objects.

[Tygerson]

Proko figure series, some mannequinization exercises.




So after floundering about for years, I feel like I finally have a pathway to learning perspective (Robertson's How to Draw and the Cube to Cathedral homework), and a pathway to learning figure drawing (Proko vids and assignments, and "Force" by Michael Mattesi).

The area I'm still floundering is value/light/rendering.  I've tried painting from life, from photos, and reading "color and light," various tutorials, studying the work of people who can paint, etc, but don't have a clear path to follow.  Does anyone know of a series of videos, or a book, that walks you through the process?  I really like the structured format of lesson + exercises to do, like Proko does.  At least to get started.

Edit: I just heard of Ctrl+paint.  Has anyone tried it out?

[Triggerpigking]

Ctrl paint is really good, I'd highly reccomend it myself. I haven't tried all of them but schoolism also has a bunch of classes that could be useful, though it's a 15 usd per month subscription.

[kikindaface]

Yo tygerson, sup ? one exercise that i'm trying recently is to take a photo, simplify the volumes, and then trying to draw the same simplification from different angles by visualizing the complete thing turning in my head ! i find it mentally exhausting since i'm really bad at it but hope to see some progress, hope it might help you too !

[Tygerson]

Triggerpigking, thanks, I think I'm going to work on cube to cathedral, proko, and ctrl+paint each week.  

Here's a simple ctrl+paint brush control exercise I tried.  Copy the shapes and colors. It was nice to do something besides line drawing!  I could only get the colors right when using the color picker, but baby steps.




Kikindaface, thanks for the idea!  That fits perfectly with this week.  This week's cube to cathedral assignment is to draw a bunch of curved objects, so I think I'll try making a few batches the same thing from different angle.

[Artloader]

Hi Tygerson, nice going with the exercises here :) I think I've actually done that Ctrl+Paint Brushwork exercise myself - it's a great site in my opinion.

Regarding the values and rendering, one resource I keep going back to is this tutorial by Dorien Iten:

http://www.dorian-iten.com/howtodraw/

Hope it helps you as much as it helps me. You should also check out his other articles if you haven't seen them already - he is an awesome teacher.

Keep it going anyway :)

[Tygerson]

Thanks for the link, Artloader!  Half the battle is finding good resources.  I like that one's methodical approach to both drawing and shading.

Week 6 of Cube to Cathedral perspective work, draw 10-15 items, including curved ones.

I need to take a closer look at the "How to Draw" section on cross sections, as I ran into some tricky patches.  It must take practice to keep 3D objects straight in your head.

[Tygerson]

This isn't a painting, it's a chop, so I hope it's okay to post!  

My sister had the idea to do an Instagram comic called basic_britney, about a diy/pinterest/instagram zealot who tends to miss the mark.  It sounded like a fun project, so she mailed me a doll and off we went!  



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I don't plan to post too many of these here, since it's kinda off of the usual crimson daggers style, and I don't want to mess up the vibe...