StardustLarva's Visual Explorations

[JyonnyNovice]

Hey man, the oil still life is looking good so far. I don't know much about oils but contact shadows and dark accents are a good way to make everything feels like it's sitting together (around the bottom of that bug type larvae thing on the VHS).

I think maybe you don't need to keep hammering at perspective specifically, you've picked up enough for the kind of things you paint. I think more you could benefit from working on 1) form, getting those shapes to look like they are more 3D. Instead of spending time on a single painting, you could try just knocking out quick drawings in pencil, so that you practice that stuff specifically and get even 20 drawings in an hour instead of one painting. This book can really help you:

http://desgraff.com/downloads/prestonblair.pdf

It's ok to download this online (I believe), since it's so old (I know you have issues with piracy XD ). He draws cartoon characters but the principles apply to everything, and this kind of training would be great for your bug-type-monster characters. Just flick through and copy anything that interests you.

Second thing that I think would help you is design. Just simple things like using big, medium and small shapes within a composition, in a character, then within the parts that make up the character. E.G that old skool VHS tape has a pleasing look because within its shape there is a big flat plastic area in the middle, two medium sized transparent windows either side and the small strip at the top that protects the tape. Or in your fox above, there is the big shape of the body, the small shape of the face and the legs / tail fill up the rest sort of medium sized.

Stuff like lamps, vases, cars, humans, animals, cartoon characters all have different arrangements of big, medium and small shapes - think of the typical 'snowman' with small head, medium body, large ball at the bottom. (another design principle is using straights on one side of a form and curves on the other side to get some rhythm going on). All the stuff in that book above has that kind of stuff going on. I think if you absorb those principles and play around with them, you will get results you'll find much more pleasing.

(but do study the perspective again at some point, I just think it's not your main area you need to focus on).

Hope there's something useful in there!

[meat]

Your oil paintings, abstract as they are, can still benefit from better choices in terms of carving out their 3D forms, especially when there need to be separate of, say, hands from shirt, for the simple sake of identifying the shapes we're seeing. To do that, you need to do more still life sketching to learn forms, and also to simply add a dark line of shadow at the... uh, shadow side, of things. This require you to know or have decided where in your painting is the light source coming from?

[StardustLarva]

Jon-Thank you for the suggestions, Jon. Funny you recommended that book, as I actually have a physical copy of it. By your suggestion I have started working through bits of it, which are displayed below. Design is something I want to get better at, not just for my paintings but also for the comics I have planned. 

Meat-Hi Meat, I agree with what you have to say. Thing is, I don't always intend for my stuff to appear as abstract as it does (for example, my first painting of this year), I guess as well as what you're saying I probably need to slow down and spend more time on refining (as has been discussed previously). May I just ask, what specifically should I do in terms of still life drawings to understand forms better? Are there any particular exercises I can do?

Anyway, as I said, after much delay I've started working on the Preston Blair book. I don't have much to show so far (well, I've produced a bit, but a lot of it is crappy, so I won't show that stuff), but I have a couple of pages of basic form practices and applications. 

[meat]

There are many exercises described in many books, blog posts, and Youtube videos, and they all work. The only question you need to keep asking is, "How do I make my drawing/painting look 3D?" If you're drawing a fox head, and you have a plastic fox model to study ear shape and snout shape from, that's great! Do it over and over, and keep asking, "How do I make my drawing look and feel 3D like what I see?" If you don't have a plastic fox model, then this is when you have to think about which primitive shape represent the fox's ears or snout best, then find those objects to sketch, and keep sketching until you achieve that 3D feel and look.

You can't just do it once and be like, "I clocked in. Okay.". Look at what you produced. Is it good? Does it capture that 3D look and feel? If not, you have to do it again. Do a whole page, do a whole sketchbook if you have to. Any one specific technique or method will do, multiple ones will do too, but the best technique is repetition in pursuit of quality.

I need to do that same thing too. It's so much easier to know than to practice, lol! Earnest, respectful, arduous practice will get you where you want to be, no matter if it's art, job, social reformation, religion, girlfriend, etc etc.

[StardustLarva]

By your suggestion, I've been working on simple shapes, starting with spheres. I have been doing it in pen and ink, which I've recently started using. I can see why they look three-dimensional from the images and objects I've been observing, but I'm struggling to render sufficiently. Any tips?

(The top left one was done from imagination, the other two from a not-so-spherical polystyrene ball.)



Also, here's an illustration I did to try out my new pen and ink set:

[meat]

HOw to render better with pen and ink? Try out cross hatching, or have your stroke be shorter, but follow the form of the object - as if you're chiseling the object out from stone, and your pen(cil) is the chisel blade. See if those methods help :) 

Some visual examples! The second one is very, very likely done with a pencil under-drawing that looked just like the finished ink drawing. 

[StardustLarva]

Thanks for the resources, Meat, I've been practicing what you have suggested. 

Not too much to show today, just more form practices, which I still don't think look too three-dimensional. I also know the line weights aren't consistent, I'm still getting used to how to control the dip pen. Any further suggestions or advice from anyone would be welcome. 

[StardustLarva]

More practice of basic forms. This one is pretty messy and I can't find the reference image I studied.



Also, here's a plane study of a nautilus shell. I'm probably not doing this correctly...



I should probably try to apply this stuff to my personal work when I've done more of these kind of studies.

[StardustLarva]

More spheres, today. Sorry these aren't that interesting to look at. I still don't think they look 3D enough...



As well as this, here's a personal piece.

[StardustLarva]

Here's a painting I had lying around unfinished that I decided to finish. Anyway, back to work on form studies and such...

[StardustLarva]

I really don't think I'm getting anywhere. 

[JyonnyNovice]

I think it's hard to see the benefit of those kind of studies, but each one you do is further ingraining those principles into your head. You could try things like (I dunno if you are doing these from life) putting a cone on top of a cylinder, to see how the core shadows don't line up, or setting them up so they cast shadows on one another. Personally I found doing little quick sketches of this stuff more useful than doing fully rendered stuff, but that's just me.

They are looking really solid and 3D, in my opinion, since you said you had concerns about that before. Just watch the reflected light on the sphere - where the form is nearing the contact with the ground and the cast shadow, there shouldn't be much / any reflected light and it should be a darker occlusion shadow instead (try to observe this in life on a ball or an egg or whatever and you should see it).

[StardustLarva]

Thank you for the feedback, Jon, I'll keep in mind what you suggested. Admittedly I'm a bit lost on what to do, I want to improve my understanding of form and rendering but I don't really know what exercises or studies I should do for that. I guess that makes feel like I'm not getting anywhere...

Also, it's not much, but just so I'm not posting only text, here's a still life painting I've started working on:

[JyonnyNovice]

I saw this website just recently, drawabox.com, it's a whole course that deals only with form. That'd be a great place to work through. Also your preston blair book, just practice copying those drawings and making your own is a good exercise - aim for accuracy!

About rendering, I'm sure you are familiar with all the lighting terminologies? passive / active highlight, core shadow, shadow, reflected light, cast shadow, occlusion shadow. A good exercise is to do your still lifes, but try to ignore the colours and draw them as volumes and observe and draw where those different light / shadow parts are. Proko has some great stuff on shading, so does Sycra, check those too if it's a bit hazy.

[StardustLarva]

Thank you for suggesting the DrawaBox website, Jon. I've been working through the first couple of lessons and they're great. I haven't quite grasped all that was taught, so I intend to go over the exercises again. Anyway, I have quite a dump of drawings to post that I've been doing from the website. I've pretty much gone through a whole A5 sketchpad with these, so I'll only post the highlights. 

These are from lesson one:









Here's a couple of the more interesting bits from lesson two:

[StardustLarva]

Been working more from the DrawaBox website, I really don't know if I'm doing the exercises entirely correctly, so if anyone who knows this stuff could give me some pointers, it would be very appreciated. 

Here's the exercises from the third part of lesson two:



The first of the two, I really struggled with this one. 



Here's the second exercise. Again, I probably did something incorrectly, but this one was actually quite enjoyable to do.

[StardustLarva]

More DrawaBox studies. I feel I'm struggling a bit to get the "feel" of the subjects as objects in three-dimensional space.

[JyonnyNovice]

Did you do the intersection exercises? Keep doing those, everyday! I think those will really help develop the feel you're talking about - since all the objects we draw are intersecting primitives really.

[Flo]

Hey man, I like those fundamental studies you are doing. Try not to skip them too much, you will have to go back and do them anyway. I get that you don't want to draw boring boxes all day, but they really help so stick a bit with them until you feel like you have a good grasp of the subject.

Cheerio

[StardustLarva]

Jon- I'll try them again, yes. I really don't know whether I'm getting it though.

Flo-Yes, I know. The problem, I think, is that I just can't stay focused...

Came to a bit of a dead end in the DrawaBox exercises, so I'm taking a very brief break from doing them. I studied a segment of this still life painting by Harmen Steenwijck, mainly to practice rendering in oils and such.