Heya! I gotta say the character pencil poses are looking super-good! Very dynamic good sense of depth and variety, the last battery are the ones I feel I like the most, maybe you are getting back on your zone? The couple of women with the perspective grid were looking really good! I would say the interaction was a bit static on those though, and the camera angle puts things far away, so maybe a different framing, more up close, would feel more engaging.
The painting you were working on, I'm not grasping what are the issues you are having or the approach? For instance the hands you went back on them? Is like you are painting things out? I read is 3D/photo bashing or so? I haven't used that so I don't get the process.
The cars and planes were looking good also, it's alright to take a few days brake to let your head get in place, but if you are trying to learn something new, repetition is important, else you will forget about it. But you must set your goals! So ride what you feel is right!
Thanks! im gonna do some imaginative stuff tomorrow to test out somma these figures
For the piece im shelving, i was using 3d (Daz3d) and photos but id rather A, build the whole scene in 3d so i can light it correctly, or B, take reference of models in that pose with lighting and materials just right; for photos and 3d you literally just crop it into the image and move it and paint it to the correct lighting; Its like taking an eye, for instance from a magazine, then applying effects to make it fit into the rest of the image. You gotta know how it all fits together though to pull it off, i just dont think im mature enough yet
thanks im glad somma this shit looks right! and super good! I dont get that alot!
Ridin out the bumps on these crooked ass head lay ins, bout 20 minutes on most of them
Figure quick sketches looking good. I see you're working in Jeff Watts' style, so I assume you have a Watts Atelier subscription? I've mostly used NMA myself so I am more knowledgeable about Huston's approach. The Reilly approach seems to create instantly aestheticly appealing figures though. Which one do you like more?
I can't pass two much judgment on those portrait drawings because the quality is kinda a bit too low to tell the quality of your hatching and values, but the proportions seem to be mostly correct.
Considering you've been posting pieces and studies in this thread for 6 years now I really have to ask... Do you yet have an online portfolio of "finished" pieces? What do you want to accomplish with your art? Is it just a hobby or are you working towards becoming a professional?
If you want it to be your career, what kind of art do you want to make? Do you want to be a fine artist, illustrator, concept artist, do you want to do most of your painting digitally or traditionally? I've seen you draw some sci-fi, is that the type of art you want to do for a living?
If you decide on the type of job you want as well as your genre/subject, it becomes a lot easier to focus on what your portfolio should look like and what skills to focus on that are most pertinent to our goal... and will possibly allow you to sooner land real jobs and commissions.
Sorry if you have already answered these questions before. But I know from experience it is easy to become so obsessed with studying that sometimes you lose track of what you're studying for, thinking you HAVE to reach a certain level before your skills are marketable. I have to provide myself answers to these questions all the time to make sure I'm on the right track.
Nature yea the camera doesnt hit a lot of the values right thats on my end and yea nma is fantastic and i love theirs and watts equally. As far as my career yea i def want to be a professional.
Only thing is idk what field i want to do since i feel they all appeal to me. Conceptart fine art illustration 3d. I will be getting a new computer soon so i can run 3d more efficiently which will allow me to make more finished and vibrant pieces.
I also really love working with traditional media so im just doing that. I feel like once. Other artists are asking me how i do thingz ill be ready to put more effort on finished stuff. Its more a reaction i want.. Like my work to stand out and market itself. So many ppl i admire say just incubate and get really good and the work will follow so thats what im doin for however long that takes
Fedo, this thing about making more refined stuff once you've hit a certain point doesn't work. You're only as good as the drawings and paintings you make. If you make a bunch of sloppy sketches, you can't pretend like you're secretly actually really good, it doesn't work like that. You are only as good as the drawings and paintings you make. If you for example draw a bunch of drawings with bad proportions, you can't pretend like it taught you how to draw proportions well. You learn proportions by drawing them well, there's no way around it and if you think there is, you're only fooling yourself.
All this stuff really breaks my heart because you're clearly dedicated to art but you don't do what you have to do in order to improve. You seem happy to make the same drawing over and over again and it's like you expect that somehow through magic just by drawing a lot you'll improve. That's not how it works, you need to take the time to make a good drawing, putting all your effort into making the best thing you can, then you can learn how to make that difficult journey easier for yourself by repeating it through practice. You don't have to spend a month making the most perfect drawing in the world, but just make a drawing that is better than anything else you've previously done, and then repeat that process to make it easier for yourself. If you repeat those two steps, making the best thing you can through a lot of effort, contemplation, work and experimentation, then repeating it so it becomes easier to do, you will consistently improve as an artist.
All these online courses and stuff you take, you have to understand that the way they remain profitable is by giving people what they want, not what they need. They give you the flashy stuff so you can have all kinds of fun playing with highlights, wildly swinging your arm around to get gesture, render a bunch of half-tones and so on. What you need however is just someone to slap you on the back of the head, tell you to remove all the bullshit and help you to get things right. It's less fun, it's more frustrating, more difficult, puts you in an emotionally vulnerable position where your errors and weaknesses are confronted, but doing so improves you more than anything else. I don't mean to tell you that there's only one way to draw because I don't believe that, there are tons of different approaches but if the end result isn't a good drawing, something has to change.
I've been frequently checking in, hoping that you will just try something different but it's always more of the same. It's difficult not to voice my frustrations because I know art matters to you and I value the people who really care about art and I want things to go well for you. I just don't know what to do or what to say, all I can do is just try and call attention to it and hope something resonates with you.
Nature yea the camera doesnt hit a lot of the values right thats on my end and yea nma is fantastic and i love theirs and watts equally. As far as my career yea i def want to be a professional.
Only thing is idk what field i want to do since i feel they all appeal to me. Conceptart fine art illustration 3d. I will be getting a new computer soon so i can run 3d more efficiently which will allow me to make more finished and vibrant pieces.
I also really love working with traditional media so im just doing that. I feel like once. Other artists are asking me how i do thingz ill be ready to put more effort on finished stuff. Its more a reaction i want.. Like my work to stand out and market itself. So many ppl i admire say just incubate and get really good and the work will follow so thats what im doin for however long that takes
The thing is, the art that really makes people go "wow, how did he do that?" ARE the "finished" pieces or pieces with a really unique idea or aesthetic behind them. Finished can be many different things, usually you get that reaction from fully rendered drawing/paintings with full color, high levels of detail and polish, but you can get reaction that from simpler graphite/ink drawings carefully executed with finesse and subtlety especially if youre just masterful at drawing like Claire Wendling or Kim Jung Gi.
And in my experience, forcing yourself to take the time to complete finished pieces in which you pour every single drop of blood, sweat and tears into it to make it look as good as you possibly can are usually what makes you surpass your barriers to the next level of skill. Why? Its hard, you push your knowledge and skill to their absolute limits, therefore you will grow the most doing it.
Don't get me wrong, being better at simply sketching is priceless, and you clearly are putting in the amount of time and repetition required. My point is if you rarely push anything past a rough sketch stage, you will not really be good at creating a high quality piece of art that will wow people simply you don't practice that a lot as well. You're only good at what you take the time to practice.
Don't kid yourself and say you're not ready to start making finished pieces as well. How many longer studies of figures like this Watts drawing have you done? These are the exercises that prepare you for making finished pieces of your own. By this time you should be able to move past just laying in the figure with simple shadow shapes. Take your time to try to render them as cleanly, realistically and accurately as possible in graphite, and don't stop before you are certain you got all the values and proportions as accurately as you can.
I've also heard many artists that I admire that the key to success and and efficient growth is being prolific. Prolific as in FINISHING many pieces, not just doing many sketches. Hope this helps you my man.
I think the problem of most artist is we don't polish were work because we are not getting paid to do it when we are training yourself.But we won't get paid if we don't show we can get to a certain level of polish it a trap.We have to invest time in piece that are portfolio worthy but there also a question of what do we want to show people we can do.
I think the problem is we often wait to long to start to think about what we want to do with were art we are lost exploring but also mostly sitting in were comfort zone.
We project for some of us to work professionally but we don't really give yourself milestone to reach we become more absorb by the artistic journey.We should be creating a map for yourself but instead we end up look around to much and at one point we realize we lose sight of were focus we don't want to be limited yet we don't set realistic limit.Even worst sometime those limit limit us it an extreme balancing act.
I have to agree with the group repetition is not gonna make you a great artist it how you observe and render that will produce great work of art.But more than this you have to have something people want to see.You don't necessary need good look stuff you need something that resonate with a public.You won't be able to please everyone and that ok.I think in general a good indicator of sucess is when people goes like i wonder how he did that or i wish i could do that or waw that cool i want to show it to someone or hang it on my wall.
I just hope i bring something of use to this conversation if not i am sorry.
I think signals are getting crossed here... It seems like most people's understanding of what makes a good drawing is either how many detail and half-tones you can cram into it or how well you round off every corner and transition. This isn't what makes a good drawing, I was just talking about getting the important stuff correct. You know, get the drawing accurate, make the form and light impression read well, having a good (and accurate) sense of gesture and weight, this kind of stuff.
Sure there's value in refining all the small stuff far because it can help you learn about what makes a drawing or painting click together well in all its qualities. Getting a sense for what small shapes contribute to the sense of form can help when starting the next drawing to know what information is more relevant than others, but just getting the big impression and big sense of form correct is much higher as a priority. If you can't do the big stuff well, I'd really suggest avoiding going too far into the detailing because at that point you're just distracting yourself from more important things that NEED to be fixed before getting there. The most valuable stuff is the big impression, the larger sense of form, gesture and design. The details, small half-tones and all that are always secondary. This is my main criticism of Watts (and many other modern artists), he doesn't don't seem to care about fundamentals of just drawing accurately and instead just focus on fancy bullshit that seem like just ways to distract you from an awkward drawing.
Focus on the big important stuff and work to express that the best way you can. The details solve themselves and come easy to just about everyone.
thanks for all the input yall, the past few days ive been at a workshop for amaya Gurpide, who is a florence academy instructor. I was modeling for them for 3 days for a portrait class and made quite a bit of money from it so i will be investing in a new computer so i can competently do 3d stuff with a more powerful machine.
as far as what i learned, well i didnt get to watch it, but heard her insights. She uses shellac to prime her paper and uses rather light graphite pencils which, due to the paper will make darker marks. She emphasises slowly building forms with light and focuses on the harold speed notion of paying more attention the overall value structure as opposed to likeness or the structure of individual features. She was overall an incredibly genuine and kind person, would always answer questions without even the slightest condescension and was overall a humbling person to have met.
For these things, im trying to put more effort in on stuff since that seems to be the consensus in here lately. I spent about 5 hours on this jeff watts study which ill include the references for. I think i got a few things right but im going to go and redo this very same drawing tomorrow where I will try to correct the head size/likeness, make the torso feel a bit bulkier and make the leg feel like its long enough. I didnt draw anything the past 3 days since posing for 8 hours a day is extremely draining.
I know i dont learn art very efficiently, ive come to terms with the fact it will take me several times longer than other people who even work half as hard to become a professional. I do have some fun plans for some oil paintings ill be able to enter in a show in january, so i will be doing lots of prep work for that soon. I'll be doing small gouache studies for ideas, highly refined preperatory pencil drawings, mapping out the colors on small oil canvasses and then spending a week or 2 on each of the 2 oil plantings i have in mind.
Also it'll take a while for me to get my new computer, but it'll be a huge investment and i am excited to build some robots and pose them. This will be extremely helpful for building a portfolio and will probably give me exactly what i need to become hireable.
Don't beat yourself over the head your doing illustration, portrait and anatomical work some of the hardest art subject.Your even doing some of it traditionally it not easy.As we progress the plateau become increasingly frequent so it important to mix it up and try new thing as much as possible.
Tried the study again and fixed a lot of the proportions that were bothering me, also learned a lot about how to hold a pencil and shade with like a splintery feel... bout 4 hours on this, so total like 9 hours on this one reference. id drawn the calf too small and the head with a bad likeness. it looks closer now i feel, tomorrow im gonna start prepping for this oil painting i have planned
Good to see you taking more time on a single study and its lookin better. There are many inconsistencies of proportion between yours and Jeffs, it will always be most noticeable in the facial features. But comparing the two I notice that the left arm should lean inwards more towards the body, the back should be more slanted, right trap should be raised a bit more, hand looks like you didn't put much care into drawing it yet compared to the rest of the drawing.
Line quality. Note the direction of Jeff's hatching lines, when they curve a bit to wrap around the form. Try to emulate how he changes the direction of the hatching to suggest the turning of the forms of the figure. Also how often are you sharpening your pencil? I find that my hatching gets messy and blurry if I don't keep my pencil sharpened to a fine taper.
Nature: hey thanks, redid it again today, i feel i nailed the knees and hands, i got the face to look a lot more naturalistic, however, i think i flunked again on the shoulder region and the head/neck size. But ive been looking at it all day, so i could be wrong about these things, maybe its fine. Gonna take a break from it tomorrow and do a preperatory charcoal study for my oil painting, which i'll probably do several times as well.
If i do another figure study ill probably do a different one, same book since it has nice closeups and stuff and i'll just take multiple attempts to correct it more and more. This one was about 3 hours today
now beginning the journey of trying to draw a charcoal portrait with neat shading and accurate proportions. The first one i used very soft charcoal and a pretty loose approach. the problems with it are the values are too light and the contrast is quite low. This causes it to look faded, but i think it has the best proportions of the 3. The second uses a rather (my mistake) dulle conte, which gives it quite choppy shading. The eyes are lopsided, and the jaw was skewed. The forehead also is hideous with the way i indicated the bone from the skull going near the temporalis.
Of course, i dont really notice these things until i take a photo, i think i shoud do that more in the process to see it in different light. The third, i was noticing how choppy my shading was and tried to do a cleaner form of shading. So i sharpened my pencil a great deal, and got a rather clean hatching pattern. However i wasnt getting much of a kick so ended up using a blending stick as an experiment to see if i could get a smooth edge and look. It kinda looked cool for a bit and these look much better in real life, but yea. Its forehead is skewed, and i cant lean into that small shadow on the forehead right. it always looks very just punched in and not natural. The lips are too small and the jawline is too heavy. i could go on and on, i'll try again tomorrow
I'm gonna keep studying this image, and experimenting and trying to push my accuracy. I spent about 2 hours on each and despite taking breaks and coming back to look, was convinced my proportions were right. I think the camera will serve as a help going forward and all i can do is keep trying, despite how frustrating this is. i feel like my eye has leapt forward and i can barely keep up, i guess its a good thing
Great to see these studies, Fed. Nice work! I have to agree that image 1 has the closest proportions to the reference. A couple of things for the next round - take closer observation of the proportion of her skull/hair; the hair/top of head goes back higher than what you've made it in all 3 attempts. Also, I know they aren't a main focus, but you've squared out her glasses a fair bit in your images. The frames are a lot rounder, especially at the base, so squaring them out changes the feel and 'essence' of the character
Not sure if you do it already or not, but you can always try holding your images up to a mirror and see if any mistakes jump out at you while you're working on it.
Looked through your entire sketchbook. Holy shit man, you have grown so much. Can't wait to see what else you cook up. What kind of job do you want to focuse on with your art? Conceptual, Illustration, etc?
