Ubem's Deliberate Practice

[ubem]

Thanks for the kind words Fedodika, I’m glad you respond well to the designs. These sketches are probably the best 2% of designs done over several months, there’s a lot of practice garbage that won’t see the light of day. Those are some excellent resources you listed, I referred to both heavily these past few months. 

Interesting you say that my design work is better than my illustrations, which I agree with when looking at my latest work. I haven’t spent more than a few days on any illustration in years, those character commissions were, sad to say, hastily done in a few hours to justify the low price I was charging. For context, the pieces in my ArtStation were all done in the span of 1-2 weeks, and hopefully I have gotten better since then.

The reason I haven’t made a refined illustration the past two years is because I couldn’t find a design that justified the time investment, holes in my fundamentals, and a general lack of purpose and direction. Because my art got so few likes on ArtStation and social media, I thought there might be several things I’m missing and that my skills just aren’t that good. That turned out to be true after getting more professional and community feedback. 

I’m going to keep my head down and work harder on my weaknesses, and disappearing from social media for the foreseeable future. Working as an artist is fun, but it is painful when underperforming to ones own standards, so I’m doing non-art jobs in the meantime as I continue to improve.

[Fedodika]

ya, likes dont mean everything; i mean once you do hit like a pro level its not guaranteed that youre pieces will suddenly get lots of likes. Likes are about your marketing strategy, how frequently you upload, what content youre uploading. Now yea when you post on arstation and get less than 2 likes theres probably something wrong with the picture, as people, funnily enough even the spam accounts have an eye for quality.

Theres a dude who racked up a lot of success posting pretty id say mediocre work each day, and he gets 1k+ likes per post and thats cutesexyrobutts. i could rant about him all day, i like the guy, alot, i like his work horse attitude, but hes just an example of how likes dont reflect quality per say, often they just reflect great marketing. and the quality of the likes is important too. Id rather get 3 likes from other professionals i respect than 100 faves from spam accounts who could care less about me;

but yea good stuff, im liking your attitiude, and keep truckin

[ubem]

That's a great way of looking at it, thanks Fedodika. I totally agree

-

I've spent the last year in hiding from all forms of socializing and instead have been working on my fundamentals. I might start easing back into making art and talking to people again. Unless I see huge glaring problems in my skills somewhere, then I'll put all my focus into that.  

Here's some of the abandoned practice pieces and studies. 

[ubem]

It's hard for me to tell if my art changed all that much. Everything here is pretty under rendered and sketchy though compared to my old "finished" pieces.

[ubem]

Here are some studies:
mostly focusing on value relationships and large shapes










I think one of the biggest things I've learned is to start from the most basic of ideas and and slowly build up each layer of complexity. For example, 1. Writing concepts, ideas, or story 2. rough line sketch 2.5 Perspective, anatomy, and gathering references 3. values and composition 4. color 5. rendering and detail.
I've only applied this with the triceratops piece and it seemed to work out smoothly and higher quality than my others.

The fundamentals I'll probably work on next is perspective, concept generation, and gesture.

[xelfereht]

Hey dude, you have allot of great things going in your work.
how much of an idea do you have where you would like to apply your work
the types of work or just type of images, story driven character driven, concepting, illustration
you've got lots of skill
It looks like more a lack of direction as you mentioned.
can be hard to know what to improve when you don't have that direction

if youre having pieces going without much of an intention it could be why they dont feel worth following through with.

might be less of a trouble if you had the more free approach but you look like youve got this kinda build a house with good materials but not specs for how you want it to turn out

hope you dont take offence to this,
your work is super capable, you might need to just imagine the end result then work back in terms of how to achieve it.

if that feels hard i suggest making a mock port folio of works you like and try and work out what kind of images you enjoy and want to make. you can take this idea to a really deep structured way depending on how you like to work.

I've spent so long trying to work this stuff out for myself and its come slowly
If you need a hand working it out, welcome to have a chat

be good!

[ubem]

Thank you xelfereht, I appreciate your kind words and fantastic critique. I completely agree with everything you said. It's also amazing how much you've grown and developed over the years into having a clear artistic identity and strong body of work. Keep it up!

What you said, not having a clear direction or over-arching consistency is almost exactly what riot concept artist Scott Flanders told me a couple years ago too.

Making a mock portfolio is a great idea. I don't know if this is just me not understanding the issue enough or just pure naivete but I'd be most satisfied having a portfolio filled with everything/anything but with strong fundamentals at its core. I.e. Characters, vehicles, environments, creatures, objects, concept sketches, detailed illustrations of all genres. I just don't enjoy sticking to one thing, I love jumping around too much, even at the cost of generic mediocrity. 

This chaotic variety probably hinders me as an artist, a professional, and having an audience. However, the joy of doing what random things that inspires me outweighs that, at least for now. Maybe once I'm temporarily satisfied with where my fundamentals are at, I can sit down to finish something without being distracted by the need to improve, and a clearer and consistent voice will emerge. 

Perhaps, what it may boil down to is that my ultimate goal isn't to be a professional artist or even a well-liked artist. It's just to improve in my craft as much as possible in the direction I'm most naturally drawn to, even if no one ever sees my art ever again.     

I would love to hear your thoughts or anyone's thoughts on these excuses. I honestly love being wrong in my beliefs and confronting hard truths, so please don't hold back. 

Thank you again for the comment, giving me this opportunity of some deeper self-reflection. I'm open to chat with you anytime my dude.

[xelfereht]

Thank you xelfereht, I appreciate your kind words and fantastic critique. I completely agree with everything you said. It's also amazing how much you've grown and developed over the years into having a clear artistic identity and strong body of work. Keep it up!

I would love to hear your thoughts or anyone's thoughts on these excuses. I honestly love being wrong in my beliefs and confronting hard truths, so please don't hold back. 

Thank you again for the comment, giving me this opportunity of some deeper self-reflection. I'm open to chat with you anytime my dude.

was gonna reply here but maybe more convenient to have a back and forth

PM'd my contact if you wanna chat

[Fedodika]

if you like quick conceptual work, focus on building your style towards that. Someone like Paul Richards from Autodestruct has catered his style to being very quick and focused on iterations of things as opposed to a well rendered illustration.

However, the focus comes from the subject matter itself.

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments...height=703

Like, a hill, a centurion, a cowboy; you know these all seem unrelated. Which... if you push them to their end with rendering can be appealing, but quick sketches of random things feels unfocused from an AD's perspective.

If for instance you took that same cowboy and just made 10 different cowboys with different silhouettes, that'd be more interesting because youre playing on the same idea (pardon me if hes not a cowboy lol)

same thing with these ruins you did, what would 10 different comps or different lighting/color plans for that look like? I mean if you want company work, that's tend to what they want to see in concept portfolios.

If you wanna do illustration, take that rider guy who was your first post, get some references and just push it as far as you possibly can. It wont take just one afternoon lol, truck that piece around to people you trust can give good feedback (not all of em are gonna be here) and keep tweaking the hell out of it.

You might get feedback to change the gesture/angle entirely, or add some different shapes. Maybe build a mockup of that dinosaur in 3d so it looks less like a flat cutout shape and you can get more drama in the scene.

Mock folio sounds good, pick one thing and for like a month or two just do that and see if it resonates with you. You might have to force yourself you know tough it out. I can 100% relate to the wanting to do everything mindset you know. Theres so much cool stuff on artstation and what not, and you wanna do all of it, i totally understand that. But you'd be suprirsed if you focus down on one thing, that'll level you up in many different ways and you'll be able to execute a wider variety of things better.

You dont have to do everything, and you will never have enough time to do everything. If you wanna do concept art, focus on building your visual library, make your studies about executing lots of iterations of silhouettes and shapes. Anatomy/rendering/composition is not as useful, so you can "shelve" those things for at least a little while.

For illustration, its more about quality and the impact of the image. Anatomy/rendering/composition is super important but having dozens of ideas and visual library can be substituted by just an afternoon of gathering reference and a few compositional iterations.

But you know check in from time to time i aint goin anywhere, and im interested tosee where you decide to try out :)

[JosephCow]

Whoa, you've really improved a lot. Those two value paintings of environments look fantastic. The cast study looks awesome as well, maybe a tiny bit blurry in places, but the overall effect of light on it is beautiful and well considered.