Salamitrain - Thanks dude, will try and keep it up!
So Good news, last weekend I was at Shoolism Berlin and had the chance to get some of my work seen by Karla Ortiz and Westley Burt Which was awesome! The main advice I got from them both was to push my drawing and particularly portraiture. I feel I have been slacking recently, so I have put myself a schedule that ive managed to do for a whole week so far! I hope I can keep it up! Im thinking to maybe pursue this for 2 months, then switch things up for another month, before having a go at some more portfolio pieces. My Schedule is like this:
Sat: Portraiture (Facial gesture, expression. Work on tilted heads! Get one painted face a week)
Sun: Environments (Work on composition/master studies/own pieces using online tutorials)
Mon: Free Sketch/Still lives/draw items to increase visual library.
Tues: Day Job (12 Hrs)
Wed: Gestures/Anatomy
Thurs: Day Job (12 Hrs)
Fri: Day Job (12 hrs)
Hopefully in a year I can have a worthy portfolio together!
Tryna level up my drawing and spatial awareness. Interestingly for drawing the head i find it way easier to start with the eyes. A lot of folk talk about starting with the head as a whole, but i find that as long as you know what tilt/angle you are going for, it seems to help with feature placement for me. Anyway, heres more stuff!
Last one is looking cool. Is that a warhammer drawing I see up there? Looks like a chaos berserker of some sort. Anyway, these line drawings are lookin sweet, keep it up.
Dennis - Thanks buddy. Yeah it is indeed a warhammer drawing. When i was younger i was totally obsessed with warhammer - my love of fantasy art spawned from Adrian Smith, Karl Kopinski and Paul Dainton's stuff. Ill do my best to keep this up. I suppose its all just training to become a better painter. I hope it pays off!
This week i was hiking so im afraid a lot less to show, just some Davinci copies. Ill be off the radar for the next two weeks, but ill try and keep sketching!
Also i bought these nify little posable figures from Japan. They look like they will be quite handy for figuring out poses.
Some torso studies and some selfies. More to come this weekend, after which i plan to do value studies and still lives and such. Hopefully will hit the portfolio work in August again :D
Also finally got my hands on Alla prima by Richard Schmid. Definately a must read if you get a chance! It mostly focuses on observational art, but there are lots of useful concepts in the book despite of this.
So, got bored of studying and working on a new piece.
This time some MTG fan art - Liliana :D
Spent some time on this sketch, trying to get the perspective right. I've also included a value thumbnail too. I tried to get the composition to pop out at a distance. Still some anatomical issues with lilianas shoulders, and will give the skellies some armour or what not. Any feedback greatly appreciated! :D
Fedodika - Hehe you are totally right, needed to get some cooler designs. I left the design prcess till alter as i knew that it would be heavily silouhetted, and lines are different to tones when it comes to that kinda thing :D
Piotr - Hey dude sorry for the late reply - you can get those figures on ebay - they are made by a comany called bandai :D
So Finished Lilliana - hope y'all like it. I'm happy with the result, but with time i always grow to hate my pieces :)
Awesome work, your lineart and explorations look great!
I'm also thinking about "art gods" from time to time lmao
As for the last piece, probably making some edges softer and that foreground zombie a bit darker would make it even better, but anyway good job, congrats on finising it!
2. Abuse those hotspots, just using some overlay really punches up the lighting. Especially on metal, magic, light sources, rim lights, etc. I know you're going for a photoreal look, but it's okay to sacrifice realism for illustrative quality. People actually like that more.
3. Don't BS anatomy especially figures up close and front. Remember the chest is round and so is the collarbone. feel your collarbone and feel that there is a space between that and where the trapezius meets the neck.
Fedodkia - Thanks for taking the time to leave some feedback, i appreciate it :D
So i have a subject matter in mind for my next painting, which means i have to learn to draw horses....meeeeehhhh. So with the experience of learning human anatomy, instead of dicking around painting them, im going to dive straight into proportion/anatomy, before diving into gestures and form. Im gonna focus on horses first, then get into carnivores later in the year. This will hopefully improve my dragon drawing!
So I thought I'd do a paint-over/critique thing of my own with your illustration because it brings an issue to attention that I rarely see addressed thoroughly. I touched on this recently in a critique thread so you might want to look for it there as well.
So the issue I want to bring up is a lack of hierarchy in values. Values exist in relation to each other. We can differentiate between values by their contrast to each other and with this we can then say one value is lighter/darker than another. This is a core principal we need to establish in images when we work. We need to be able to clearly say that one thing is brighter/darker than another however there is a problem with doing so. We do not have the full value range of real life to work with (as well as the exposure to light our eyes adjust to through the iris.). What we need to do is to find a way to compress values into a scale our medium can use. This is a somewhat complicated subject so I'll present a basic version of it.
What we need to do is to first establish where our lightest light and darkest dark is in our subject/scene and then we need to assign these points with a certain value. Normally a variation of white and black (unless you're using limited values like the thing in my profile pic, but that's another story). This is called a key. So when we have these two points, we can start finding additional points and compare them to our key. Let's say we find a medium grey and it looks like it fits just about in the middle of the brightest bright and darkest dark. We paint that into our image and then on to another value, this time we find a light grey that is closer to the brightest bright than the darkest dark. We paint it in and what we can do now is to compare it to our medium grey. If we're fairly sure that our medium grey is correct, we can compare the contrast between our medium grey and our light grey and if the contrast is for example too low, we can know that it needs to move further to the brightest bright for it to be correct.
This is more or less what you do all over the image while working on it to see if the values are correct. This can be really tedious but the more you do it the faster you become with it. You can also create shortcuts like finding two points of equal value in the subject and ask the question, are they of equal value in the painting.
Things get a little more complicated when working form imagination but all you have to do is ask, is X brighter or darker than Y and you can go fairly far by doing so. There is something that happens when working with a medium where the values of the subject is wider than your available value scale. The short answer for what you do in this case is not to reduce the contrast (like many many people do) but rather to compress the ends of the value scale so the brightest bright in the subject and the next to brightest bright both become white (and then vice versa for the darks). This way you preserve your contrasts while painting something with a wide value scale.
This form of keying can be used to create some very impressive effects and moods in a painting if done with a sense of design. Look at Rembrandt paintings as an example. If you see them in real life, they're actually fairly dark but this is so that the bright points are in comparison very very bright.
I would caution you about some of Fedodika's advice. Those "hotspots" can only be hot when things are relatively "cool". Back to the Rembrandt example, if everything had that very bright light on it, nothing would because these values are relative. It's like balancing an orchestra. If you can't hear the violins, instead of increasing their volume, maybe turn down the cello.
Anyway, apart from values, the image holds up fairly well :)
I'd agree with Tristan...keying and setting the value range is very important to get your entire hierarchy to read.
I actually quite liked your lower contrast version. I think you managed your hierarchy quite well. It has a somewhat less digital feel to it because it is subtle. I like Tristan's PO; after a certain point it becomes personal preference what key you choose depending on what feeling you want to achieve with your piece but he brought the lower values into submission to work overall and the stronger lightsource makes her pop out a lot more.
For me though, the worst thing, isn't the value structure....it's a "minor" thing; the hands of the main character. There is so much great stuff going on, but when I see those long skinny sausage fingers it brings down the level of the whole painting imo. AD's will tend to see things like that and ask themselves "well can they just not draw hands or were they too lazy to get it right?" Given how most of the figure is pretty well done, I decided it was laziness. Great piece in general though :)
Hey guys, really appreciate the crit, means a lot!
Tristan - Hey dude thanks for the feedback. Yep i get the whole thing behind relative tones. I think i read Richard Schmid say that Colour and tone is relative in a piece, but the drawing of shapes is not. These are fairly recent realisations for me, and i am trying to put them into practice. Particularly in observational painting it requires constant comparisons with the model and around your painting, and an awareness that what you are painting might have tones outside the tone your pigment can allow.
I think what is important is to have a vision before you start an imagination piece, and to end with the fulfillment of that vision. As you say, i think its is massively easier to get the correct relative tones in observational drawing, but in an imaginative piece, its not that easy. You don't have the 'truth' of a model. You have to pull it all out your ass!
I suppose whats tricky - its to find an arrangement that is most appealing with a given drawing you have. I mean you can give that drawing to a million artists and you'll get a million different variations of colour and tone back. But which is the most appealling? There might be 500 that are very appealing. I suppose you can go round in circles at the end of a piece and never finish trying to make adjustments (which i have been doing!).
I hope that makes sense. I am very interested in your theory on Rembrandt pieces and the brightest and darkest tones being compressed - do you have any examples of his paintings so i can make an analysis?
Much thanks for the paint over, ill give it thought. I think its a bit late to put all that into the painting now without having planned for it. But thanks none the less. I could so a little tweaking maybe...
Hey Amit! thanks for coming by. Thanks for the feedback - will make some changes and fix the sausage fingers before sending off to an AD :D
Also, horseys! Before yall but my balls about gestures - there is a gesture under each horse, they haven been erased.
