Flo's sketchbook

[Flo]

this is one part of the second assignment for the Mentorship I am doing

arranging a still life, making a photo from it and do a study from it

8 h so far, only light objects, next only dark objects

[nutriman]

Are you supposed to make a still life from the foto? If so why not from the actual scene??
Looking great so far.

[Mechanizoid]

Hey Flo, thanks so much for your great feedback on my form intersections. ^^ It really helped. I'll get back with some questions I have soon.

The still life looks great. But I'm wondering the same thing nutriman asked, why were you specified to use a photo rather than the actual scene? Did it have to do with the light changing, or leaving the scene up being impractical? Or is it just easier to paint digitally from a photo? BTW, how is Darkaan's mentor thing? His tutorials are cool, that I know. : )

[Flo]

nutriman: you are totally right, I should be painting from life, in my opinion. But the assignment is to include the reference. So if I paint from life, then do a photo and send it as ref, mr daarken will have to totally different pictures. My study will have different light-information than the photo because cameras clamp certain values and can only focus on the light OR shadow side. At least with my camera and my limited photo-skills, both my still-life painting and my photo will look different. And then it is pretty hard for him to give me an accurate feedback on where I made wrong decisions, because I did all my decision from another source.
At first I didn't realize that, but then after thinking about it, it bugged me too. It feel like I can't go full throttle into this thing, because I have to work with photos. But then again, I am sure he finds a lot of stuff to correct, so I am trying to be patient and see how it goes. I didn't receive a feedback for the first assignment yet, so I can't really comment on his mentoring skills. His demos are okay, but then again he seems to think that people have already a basic understanding of stuff. For instance his value video was only 15 min, but then his demo of painting a photo-study was 1,5 h. It is cool to see him do it, and propably a good way to learn, but watching a dude painting a still-life for that look is also kinda boring. also I have now seen quite a bit of tutorials and it seems to me that everybody has their own take on things. Right now it is more like seeing what actually works for me, instead of copying everything he does. But he has a good philosphy, which is trying to paint everything with the hard round brush before using photo textures or textured brushes, because that way you learn how to do it the "hard" way. I like to work like that too, so we have some philosophical overlap there.

A-Star: no problem man, glad I could help. And for the questions: keep 'em coming, I try to knock them out of the park :D

practicing gestures for a bit

I am finding that if I do long continous lines through the body, the result is much more pleasing to me. It seems like those continous lines are essential for the gesture. Trying to get out of the habit of copying the conturs.

first try from memory


studies


second try from memory

[Flo]

more people from today's tram-ride

[Flo]

doing some figure drawing, trying to be more like Jeff Watts

aaaand character sketch, trying to be more like Anthony Jones

[KurtJeremy]

good stuff in here flo! keep it up with translating all of what you learn from imagination it will help you heaps!

[Flo]

Kurt: thanks man, that is actually the hard part haha, will try my best

[Mechanizoid]

That still life looks awesome man, has Daarkan gotten back to you yet about the first one? :) It looks like a good exercise.

What do you consider to be the relative importance of observational and constructive drawing? I've noticed that there seem to be to main approaches to drawing. You can observe everything carefully, trying to nail the angles, proportions, values etc. that you see. As in still life drawing and painting. Or you can construct things using your knowledge of perspective, basic forms, and the workings of light and surface texture etc., being informed by what you observed in nature. This is how you invent imagined stuff. If I understand correctly, LOL.

Obviously they are tied up with each other, because you need to study things in the world to understand how to construct stuff. But how much time do you think should be spent studying one or the other?

[Flo]

A-Star: Thanks for the encouragement, I found that painting dark (black) stuff is actually harder than light stuff. Don't exactly know why, maybe because it is harder to show form with such a limited value range and still make it look real.

Good question about the drawing methods. I don't have a final answer though, since I consider myself a student still. But what I thought for a long time, is that constructive drawing is supperiour and the way to do it. The more I learn, it seems that there is no such thing as a superior way to draw.

Maybe you shouldn't try to seperate them, since both of them leave stuff out of the equation? I feel like observational is good for correctly depicting stuff that is in front of you and constructive is good for making stuff up. But the you depict from life, the less you need to construct stuff. Marco Djurdjevic draws an arm in one of his youtube videos without constructing anything, that is impressive knowledge and visual library.

http://ryanlangdraws.tumblr.com/post/915...-an-photos <<< in this tutorial, ryan Lang shows his process on an amazing art piece, he constructs his figures from primitive shapes, so I guess we all should do the same haha.

Maybe try to see both of the processes as glasses that you switch. The abstract shape of a thing is equally important as the correct orientation in space. I would say you should practice 50/50 if you need a number. When you do observational to much, you will have trouble constructing something properly yourself in space and simplifying stuff. When you do constructional too much, you will try to make stuff correct instead of pleasing to much. So neither of the too should be overweighing the other. Hope that helps and everything I said could change depending on what I learn in the future :P

[Flo]

gestures and a quick still life

doing texture painting atm, not so eager to show

[Flo]

not to forget fundamental training

[Flo]

doing some exercises from drawabox.com and some sketches from life

[Flo]

Here are some people I sketched in the tram recently, a quick arm study of one of Ryan Lang's awesome gargoyles, some trees and the 2nd part of the second assignment for the mentorship

[BenFlores]

The gestures and studies are looking better and better!

Came across this Gurney post a couple days ago too,it might help some http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2016/0...faces.html . Going to be interesting to see how daarken's mentorship helps you out.

[Flo]

Thanks Ben and thanks a lot for the link to the Gurney post, I tend to forget about all the beautiful knowledge out there. I did some studies from his post and I found it hard to get them like he does. I tend to mess up the allignment of the facial feature on the vertical axis, so my faces are not looking up or down as his do. Next I have to try to do some of them from photos or from real life and try to retain what he talks about and what I learned.

I also hope Daarken can help pusing myself to the next level or plateau, here is what I learned from the light and dark still life

In light values: nothing except highlights are really white. It is enough to have light grays for the light side and a dark grays for the dark side. That way I have more room to go dark in the occlusions and really light in the lit areas/speculars
In dark values: modelling form in dark values is way harder than in light values. It seems too logical to be surprising but I never thought about it. Also it is important to keep the darkest dark (black in my case) for the occlusions. Going to light in the lit areas tends to make stuff look "shiny", like the inside of the cocktail dress (in the back, hanging from the cubboard in the middle)

And what I learned is, I can paint something looking quite photo-real in 8 hours, if the goal is not to be able to zoom in.

[Flo]

A study of the great Claire Hummel (schoomlah on DA)

(with German notes)
A study of the great Leyendecker



(with German notes)
A study from life

[Flo]

doing some b/w studies to learn more about beautiful linework from Vance Covacs

[Piotr Jasielski]

Nice studies. It's great you analize everything so much, that definitely helps with understanding how everything works and how to draw/paint it. Keep this up :)

[Flo]

Thanks piotr, I will. :)

quick portrait around 7 min. inking digital is hard, can't believe how much I suck at this haha