Jh's Sketchbook! Study. Practice! APPLY!

[Adam Lina]

Great design studies! I found doing this kind of form language studying a lot of fun. I find myself losing patience too quickly as well though. You're really working hard at it I see. Its definitely paying off!

[Alexey Savchuk]

Great studies, really inspiring, huge respect! Keep it up!

[Bjulvar]

Yo man!
Impressive and profilic sketchbook you've got here! All pages are littered with solid designs and studies. Especially like those Dustlands concepts! I think that they're really imaginative and believable. Interesting silhouettes going on too. Would love to see more of it, maybe an illustration or two?

From the looks of it you're focusing a lot on industrial design and mechanical objects. Would be nice to see even more humans or creatures! Fleshing (pun) them out some more aswell. I know it's the same crit you gave me, but feels like it would apply here too! :P

Keep on being awesome!

[PointFiveBlue]

This is some great stuff, man Your approach to the Peter Han workshop gave me some ideas for creating some exercises and challenges of my own to further apply those principles.

[Jaik]

Ahaha, Mechanika? Love that book, I did those exact same studies about a year ago, they help so much with learning how things work. I really really need to get back in and study that a bit. Can't get enough of those designs. Those perspective ships are also looking great.

I wish I wasn't so rusty on my hard surface stuff so I could really try and give you a good crit like you gave me.

You have a few notes which sort of point to this, but I think you could make much better use of negative space and silhouette, which I know Chang uses his Post-It sketches for. For example, the application of the one wheeler bike thing, that silhouette is basically just a square with a bunch of small pokey bits (check the grey line you drew) if you opened it up a little with some interior holes (nothing screams robot like gaps in the body). The robot person is a bit better on this regard, some more interesting shapes. I think thats what Chang keeps in his mind during the markers as well, the little bits that wont actually be filled in.

Sorry I couldn't help more, I'll be checking in more often to see your work :D

Keep on keeping on. Great work so far.

[LongJh]

Mariyan-Hristov - Haha, thanks man!

Hypnagogic_Haze - Thank you! Yeah it's a lot of fun. Challenging too, especially if you use a permanent medium like a pen. Gets kinda scary to put down some marks sometimes.

Alexey Savchuk - Thanks! That's really kind of you to say haha.

Bjulvar - Thank you! Haha yeah, I'll definitely start working on figures and organic stuff soon. I must admit I'm one of those guys who doesn't really like to render haha, but still! No excuses!

PointFiveBlue - Thank you! I'm glad it helped.

Jaik - Thanks! Yeah, the negative shapes thing was really a huge new piece of information to me. Before studying his works I didn't really pay much attention to it, but those negative shapes really help make a silhouette design look much more interesting.

Ok! Just a tiny little update here.

Godzilla fan art! Tried a few new techniques with this painting, mostly practicing how to better use photo textures and figuring out how to add more "VFX" elements to a scene. Looking back at it now I feel like it didn't come out as exciting as I wanted, feels like a very forced "posed" scene. Maybe it's the composition or perspective or something, but I feel like it lacks the movement or craziness that you would expect from a giant monster rampage, I dunno.

I kinda like how the head area turned out, but towards the foreground I think it starts to become boring. Probably could have spent more time integrating the foreground elements better as well. I'm pretty happy with it overall, just, feels like maybe it could've been better, haha.



Stepszilla!



Another Doug Chiang study. Feel like I still lack the proper drawing technique in order to fully understand and learn from his works (I always get lazy and end up with wobbly lines). Will have to the basics (yet again) to improve my line control and confidence.



Some cockpits from imagination after studying Doug's design. The first one was too similar to the study so I did a second one with a slightly different form language (more squarish and blocky).



Quick digital b/w render of the second cockpit. I was originally supposed to use markers but I didn't want to ruin the drawing so I decided to scan it and do it digitally instead. The rendering is definitely an important step for these type of drawings especially since the line art was a rather detailed and "busy"? Adding values helps to re-establish the forms.

[AngeliquevdMee]

I see some awesome designs here... great sketchbook!!

[Bjulvar]

Hey man!
I think that Godzilla piece came out really cool. You nailed the VFX elements that you were aiming for, especially with all the lightning going on. Dig that hot rim light. Cool that you went ahead and did a more rendered piece :D

But you've nailed the problems with it too! The foreground distracts quite a bit from the cool action. Look at how some of the compositional parts point kind of weird, like the street light and the building it's leading to. The building is not letting Godzilla breathe like he deserves! I think that you could move it down, or even remove it. Instead the street lights could point more in his direction!

Otherwise great job on the mechanical stuff as always, it makes me all dizzy. That means you're cool! Rock on dude! Hope you don't mind the crit! :D

[Adzerak]

Oh man, like so many others here I gotta say that your designs really kick some ass. They look both functional and cool. Detailed without feeling cluttered.
Well, you've heard this before but it doesn hurt right? xD

So here comes a bit of an attempt at some more constructive critiscism regarding the Godzilla piece. The head turned out really cool, looks powerful with that rim-lightning bolt going of behind him, overlaps nicely I think.
Maybe it's just me but I think that the image has lost some dynamic since the first value sketch. Hard to put my finger on why exacly though. In the first one the rim lighting creates a nice overlap with his neck and shoulder muscles, where as in the final piece it's gone, so it looks a bit more flat I think. (might be because the angle on the head changed as well)
Overall a cool piece tho, got that orange and blue contrast going in a good way. Will probably kick the new Godzilla's movie poster in the arse since it's most likely to have Bryan Cranstons face floating about with a vague Godzilla silhouette or some such.
Keep kicking!

[LongJh]

AngeliquevdMee - Thank you!

Bjulvar - Thanks! I must admit there was gratuitous use of photo textures haha. So probably not the most intensely rendered piece (yet!). Yeah, also the street lights kind of bug me now, it's like... really random in the context of the image lol.

Adzerak - Haha thanks man! Now that you mentioned that rim lighting on the neck and shoulders, I get what you mean. The final render lost that high impact lighting and extreme angle on the arm. I think its cuz I was trying to figure out the foreshorting and anatomy of that arm-to-should-to-neck area and kept redrawing it until it lost all that energy.

Landscape studies from photographs! Wanted to practice to Shaddy Safadi's (amazing) youtube tutorials on landscape painting. The first study didn't come out too well (I wasn't able to properly control my brushwork and ended making a mess of the textures and forms on the mountain), but I think the subsequent studies came out nicely - especially once I got used to controlling the textured brushes. Of course, there's still much more to improve upon (for example I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to paint trees and foliage that doesn't look like a mess of custom brushes)







Steps! Plus an attempt to distill what I learnt from Shaddy's tutorial into words. It's a really effective tutorial series (he goes into way more detail that what I'm putting down here), I highly recommend anyone who wants to learn how to paint landscapes to check it out on his youtube channel. It's structured in such a way that is really useful for studies. You learn to separate the process in different stages with each focusing on an important topic, from composition to rendering.

1 - Analyze the reference, study the image right down to its details and figure out how to simplify the shapes.
2 - Blocking out and separating the major shapes, focusing on composition and "flow".
3 - Painting the inner shapes, separating areas of light and shadow and/or different materials.
4 - Crazy colour underpainting. using complementary or exaggerated local colours as a base.
5 - Painting and rendering, focusing on choosing more accurate colours and communicating the forms.
6 - Continue refining, focus on unifying the image as a whole.

[LongJh]

Hey all, here's an update! Trying to ramp up my consistency (we'll see if it can sustain itself! Hopefully.)

Here's a painting I finished recently. I wanted to "test myself" on what I learned from my previous landscape studies. Slightly inspired by the backgrounds in Shadow of the Colossus. Wanted to go for that moody, sorta mysterious vibe. I'm kinda happy with how it turned out, although the subject matter is pretty simple (like... fantasy rocks). Hopefully I can come up with some slightly more interesting stuff in the future!

Stonefang Valley



Also, steps! Might be useful - it's the same as my previous landscape studies.



Cheers!

[Adam Lina]

Awesome looking landscape man! I think it definitely looks mysterious. Maybe work on adding some lost edges in there. Right now everything has really hard edges. Adding some more fogginess with less defined edges in the background will give it even more mystery I think.

[constructicon]

Amazing studies man!

[Lyraina]

Lovely landscape, that last one! :) Those greens are so nice <3
I agree with Hypnagogic_Haze though, some lost edges etc would help for a more natural feel. I think Shaddy does that by going over the more unimportant edges (at the outer parts of the image, and non-focal areas) manually in the end. Also, I think the strongly saturated parts in the foreground (especially the blue) kind of distracts the attention from the midground/rest of the image, because they keep pulling my eyes back to those rocks in the foreground.
Still, turned out really cool and very magical, I would love to travel there!

[LongJh]

Lyraina - Thank you! Work on my edges, no distracting elements from the focal point - got it! Haha I guess I did start to zone out at the end of Shaddy's tutorial series. I'll have to check it out again and see how he works those sweet edges of his.

constructicon - Thanks man!

Hypnagogic_Haze - Thank you! I'll definitely keep those edges in mind more for my future images. Part of the downsides of working with a lot of masks haha.


So I thought it was about time to stop messing around and start focusing on one of my bigger weaknesses - characters. Or more specifically, figures, faces, hands, anatomy, costumes, etc, etc. Even more specifically I would like to get better at drawing/sketching them on paper. Whenever I paint digitally I'm always a little... reckless? So I'm hoping to start to get back a little more control and carefulness by making myself draw more. I wonder if that made sense.

To get started, here's some head studies after Loomis! I think the difficult part would be to remember how to apply this to more imaginative works instead of just simple disembodied heads - for example with the proper expressions, head angles and how the head itself integrates with the figure as a whole (along with body language, etc.)

[Adam Lina]

You should use the new pixelovely head drawing tool. Apply the same head construction you've been using to some quick gestures. Hogarth's book Drawing the Human Head has some good methods for drawing the head from different angles that work well when combined with Loomis. Also studying the bones of the skull and their relationships along with the muscles of the face is very helpful.

[LongJh]

Hypnagogic_Haze - Woah, I had no idea pixelovely has a head drawing tool now, thanks a bunch man! Yeah I'll definitely be studying some Hogarth soon, I'm just plowing through Loomis right now haha.

Was browsing Pixiv the other day and was really inspired by the background art there, Particularly those bright, lighthearted, fantasy-ish scenes - like with a couple of characters in the foreground just chilling or doing some random stuff against a big, epic backdrop. So I tried to do a painting along those lines.

The rendering was really challenging for me in this. Honestly, part of the reason why it's a more stylized image is because I wasn't very confident in making it look "realistic"? I definitely still lack a lot of knowledge in areas like material indication and design (as evidence in several parts of the painting). For now, I'm pretty drained out in this image so I think I'm just gonna call it done (and move on to something new to draw!)

Afternoon Tea



Plus steps! The detailing stage was quite a struggle for me as well. Definitely an area I need more practice with (as usual).

[Cricketts]

Great sketchbook

[LongJh]

Cricketts - Hey, thanks!

More head studies after Loomis. Trying is to aim for minimal construction and more "intuitive" drawing. Of course practicing construction is still highly important, just that sometimes I would like to draw without them (especially for the easier and more common head angles) as I feel it's a little cleaner and gives the linework much more fluidity.





Head studies in charcoal! I'm kind of a fan charcoal life drawings, especially those beautiful, painterly ones. From what I understand, many of the artists that draw this way uses an abstraction technique for constructing heads (the Reilly head abstraction, I think it's called.) So lately I've been trying to learn from (by which I mean imitate) artists that draw using this particular technique. Thankfully, Stan Prokopenko has an amazing youtube series devoted just for that! I've also been supplementing what he teaches along with whatever infomation I can scour from the net regarding this method of drawing.

That first drawing is terrible portrait from imagination, in an attempt to figure out how to use the damn charcoal pencil. The rest are studies of head abstractions I could find off the internet. Done on A4 copy paper.

[LongJh]

Mariyan-Hristov - Thanks man! Gotta keep motivated!

Ok! So here I am studying different versions of head abstractions I can find off the net - mostly from artists demos where they show their step-by-steps. Trying to find out which "method" or which particular abstraction lines make the most sense to me. Also at the same time practicing my line control.



Also some (pretty bad) studies from photo references, focusing on constructing the heads using the abstraction. The more I draw these the more I start to see vague connections between certain abstract lines and the muscles of the face, which is quite interesting.

Areas I want to work on: line control (or more specifically learning how to use the charcoal pencil), understanding facial muscles and bone structure (I think the abstractions would make much more sense if I actually took the time to learn the underlying anatomy) and specific facial features (eyes, mouth, nose, ears, etc.) Definitely still struggling with the features especially - I keep feeling that I still draw them really "flat" looking.