Isra's sketchbook

[wla91]

Great studies and works man, your thumbnails and silhouettes look very interesting!

Congrats and good luck on the 3 weeks at FZD!

[isra-ac]

@Piotr Jasielski
Yep, the 3 certificate courses at once, if you live in Singapore they recommend you to only take 1 or 2 but for international students considering you move there and it's expensive it's fine because you're suppose to be there only for that :P Btw, june is the last time they do those courses, they're going to replace them for cheaper workshops.

@Ninja, thank you and yeah, need to give more variation moving the position of the horizon line ^^

@wla91 Thank you!! Actually the 3 weeks thing is the project I'm working on to get ready for the school, but I do that here at home, the thing is I only livestream 1 hour a day (instead of the several hours I used to do before) to keep focused. Then in Singapore will be 6 weeks.

And heres a wip? with the design of the statue for the bloodsports. Not sure if I will finish this because as said I only work on the bloodsports on live (1h a day) and it's kind of relaxing time for me so I have to manage my time and maybe tomorrow I work on the comp again to start the illustration on Monday. I maybe change the design on fly while working on the illustration but this gives me a solid idea of what I want.

[kidult]

looks pretty cool so far, the dragon's head (mostly the top bit) is slightly out of perspective looking.

[Piotr Jasielski]

@Piotr Jasielski
Yep, the 3 certificate courses at once, if you live in Singapore they recommend you to only take 1 or 2 but for international students considering you move there and it's expensive it's fine because you're suppose to be there only for that :P Btw, june is the last time they do those courses, they're going to replace them for cheaper workshops.

I wish they had online courses. Moving to Singapure is way too much in terms of expenses. And by the time i have enough money to afford it, I probably won't need any courses anymore. Ah, the irony of life.


Also I let myself do a quick paintover of your statue as an exercise. Hope You don't mind. Maybe You will find something inspirational in it. If you're going with a black/white silhuette for a sketch, I'd also advise You to watch out for the contrast and reduce it a little bit (or just use a thinner but strong black line for contures). Also it's always good to make light and shadows consistent and include some bounce light.

[brenthollowell]

sweet dude

[isra-ac]

Thanks for the help guys!

Of course I don't mind! I appreciate you took your time for it! It looks good indeed, too many blurred areas for my taste to be honest though hehe. I'm just wondering, did you use photo textures or brushes? Because as much as possible I'm avoiding textures because first I want to be able to paint with only brushes (I used textures in the past and got good results bud felt like I wasn't learning well), let me know please.

I was going to paint it dark gray in my illustration taking as reference some real statues, but this golden color is more challenging for me and looks sweet, I'll give this direction a try :)

About the silhouettes, it's true that I use the charcoal brush I use for sketching and almost everything reason why the contours don't look too sharp :|

Thanks again!

[Piotr Jasielski]

Thanks for the help guys!

Of course I don't mind! I appreciate you took your time for it! It looks good indeed, too many blurred areas for my taste to be honest though hehe. I'm just wondering, did you use photo textures or brushes? Because as much as possible I'm avoiding textures because first I want to be able to paint with only brushes (I used textures in the past and got good results bud felt like I wasn't learning well), let me know please.

I'm glad You like it!

I quite like the bluryness and softness of illustrations, but, unfortunately I tend to to over do it pretty often. That's one of many things I need to work at.

As for your question. It's a little bit hard to explain actually. I'm not sure if I provide a good explanation, but I'll try. I regret not saving layers for this one, but if i find some time I'll probably use this method on something similar soon and compile stages in one image.

I used a method i invented myself a while ago, which was inspired by Feng Zhu's method of using photo scraps as a palette (that one in "Smoking Bug" episode). I took 2 random fragments of 2 photos. Firstly I reduced the contrast of your image and made it a little brighter (IIRC)then I placed one fragment of a photo on a multiply layer. On the same multiply layer I employed the clone tool (I used Gimp, clone tool works a little different than in photoshop) to just create a random variety of colors and values over the first layer. The layer itself didn't make any sense, but it's purpose was to, as Feng says "give it some teeth". I could actually just use one color to overlay the image, but I prefer this method becouse it provides a slight variety of colors and values meaning it doesn't look like painted plastic but a bit more realistic (of course it can be done without using photos, but it's a great time-saver).

After that I created an overlay layer and placed a photo scrap on it, then used the clone tool the same way as before. The purpose was to get a color I wanted which was this copper/bronze (or whatever it is called in english) one. I'm not sure what level of opacity it was, just went whith what seemed to be closest to what I wanted.

Lastly I merged all layers and started to refine it. This phase was by far the longest one because the image was very messy from the randomnes created by this overlayed chaos.

I don't think I used any custom brushes. When I wanted to save the texture (created by previous actions) I used multiply (to create shadow) or soft light (to make it brighter) [everything on one layer, just brush mode]. Most of the time, though, it was just a soft round brush with low opacity. To make some more texture I used a very small brush in soft light mode (bright and dark).

If I did it in photoshop I'd propably rely more on custom brushes, but those in Gimp suck, so it's definitely better to just utilize some photo-randomnes.

I hope I didn't mess up my explanation too much. :)

[wla91]

Oh i get it haha, sorry man my english betrays me sometimes haha, well i can't wait to see the results of those 6 weeks!!

Also the statue looks really good, its a very interesting concept!

[Kike Rdz]

wow! its awesome how that study you were doing in livestream was mixed in your mind and turn into that , congrats, looks like a good creature- statue

[isra-ac]

Thanks a lot you guys for the comments again!! :)

Piotr, you did it well, it's a good explanation thank you. I know the video of Feng you talk about hehe, it's one of the approaches he uses throwing pictures to set the colors, and it's a great approach (I used it in the past too) but as much as possible I'm gonna stay away from it for a while because if I always use it I will never understand colors or learn how to paint those, so I'm saving it for the future or deadlines in which I need to save time and get good results quickly :)

And here are a few more thumbs for the illustration of the bloodsports and the big one is the chosen one. I will need to work on it a bit more before start painting it though.

It's not too much for 2 hours of livestream (1 yesterday 1 this morning) but I was helping other daggers as well ^^

[Jaku]

I found this idea of the dragon coming out of the lions mouth really bizarre and cool.
Are you going to make the people fighting against the monster or running from him??
The silouethe in the middle-right looks like a kind of ninja jumping over the dragon.

[isra-ac]

That's the idea Jaume! :D

Some random portrait painted from imagination I was updating my iPad, just trying to have fun for a few minutes

[Piotr Jasielski]

I know the video of Feng you talk about hehe, it's one of the approaches he uses throwing pictures to set the colors, and it's a great approach (I used it in the past too) but as much as possible I'm gonna stay away from it for a while because if I always use it I will never understand colors or learn how to paint those, so I'm saving it for the future or deadlines in which I need to save time and get good results quickly :)

Well, to be honest when I first used feng's technique, I failed miserably (and i really thought it would solve my problems). The truth is it doesn't compensate for one's lack of ability. Just like custom brushes doesn't. Of course You have a good point saying You want to stick to the basics to master fundamentals, but I believe it's very beneficial to experiment with various techniques once in a while. I learned a lot while experimenting - probably more than I gained from painting photo studies (for example I didn't know how light affects color until I used soft light brush).

Anyway, I really like the angle of view in the 8th thumb. I think it makes the statue more significant. I'd, personally, utilize it in the 10th comp, which is very good action-wise, but of course it's all up to You.

Good luck!

And I'm so jealous of this FZD course...

[Othrandir]

dude , I really like the gold color you put into that dragon. Great job , man! :)

[wla91]

Those roughs look really cool man! ill go with the 10 too, cant wait to see the progress of the piece!

[Flo]

Really cool work, mate. Keep up the good work.

Cheers,
Flo

[isra-ac]

Thanks a lot guys for all the comments! I really appreciate them

Here are a few words.....

As you may know I'm working on a little project to reinforce my design skills before going to the FZD school so I reduced the streaming time to only one hour a day working on the bloodsports challenge while streaming.

Last week everything was fine, but this week's been pretty bad. Yesterday I was sick the whole day (I called it 3 weeks of death for some reason and yeah, lack of sleep and other shit made me that). I didn't stream yesterday and this morning for that reason. And now I feel totally fine but I could only draw these gesture drawings today. There's more stuff happening but I'll write about it in another moment, now I'm going to go out and do some exercise.

EDIT: I forgot to say I drew each one in 50-100 seconds

[isra-ac]

I drew a bit more detailed sketch for the bloodsports, gonna start adding color tomorrow

[kaji02]

so cool!!!^^

[wla91]

That is looking gooood man!