I'll keep this sketchbook updated with work in progress stuff too.
I just tried out my first environment piece ever, trying to create some depth with values and some basic shapes.
This was like a very quick one hour sketch, trying to get out of my comfort zone and it was really fun.
Yes, I probably could of corrected a bunch of things like the character, the pose, the house and so on, but I wanted to post this here as untouched as it was, to get an early and good feedback on this thing.
Would like to hear if this is basically going in the right direction, what I could tweak or maybe change before I start my next environment sketch.
Hey Max, Welcome to this forum ! It's really a good start, especially if you never studied artAs for critics on how to improve your pieces it's a bit difficult to know how to give you advices since we don't really know where you actually want to go art related So i'd suggest you to study the fundamentals like anatomy, values, colors, composition, storytelling, etc !
For the environment painting, you should really go for more contrast in your values ! Go for darker darks especially ! You can actually use 4 main values (black, dark grey, light grey, and white ) and play with those 4 values to create different kind of shapes and designs ! Here's a pinterest board with tons of black and white enviro studies and pieces that you can observe and analyze to see how values are being used !
Nice going Max, as I already said in your intro thread - I love the attitude and character in your paintings.
If you don't mind me giving you some critique though - one thing I noticed is that the way you construct your eyes doesn't fully take into account the 3D form of the eyeball when viewed from the side. The eyelids should wrap around the sphere of the eye and the far corner of the eye will be recessed back a little.
I took the liberty of doing a paint over for you to illustrate my point:
Some photo reference should help you fix this going forward:
Also, I like your enviro piece, the atmospheric perspective works well i.e. the way you fade the values as you move into the distance. I agree with wld.89 about pushing your darks a little more - in particular the trees in the foreground could be darker. This would help you make the sky a bit darker as I believe this piece would work better as a night-time enviro - then you could make the sky darker and have the candles pop out even more.
Hope all this helps, if not please ignore.
Good stuff so far though dude - keep going :)
“Today, give a stranger one of your smiles. It might be the only sunshine he sees all day.” -- H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Nice. This is already helping me out a lot, getting good feedback from you guys.
@Artloader, thanks for pointing that out. Tbh, I'm sometimes still a bit shaky when it comes to the eye area.
@wld, I was really unsure if I should go full white and full black in certain areas, or if that may ruin the values completely. So thanks for your reply and the pinterest board. Tons of help.
So i have a small critic about how far you have put that ears almost to the back of her skull.So i had a lil laugh at it and putted her 2 pair of ears one where it should be and why not a new pair in the back for extra creativity point...remember reference is your ally.But even good reference will never surpass studying your fundamental such as anatomy.
(11-30-2020, 09:43 AM)darktiste Wrote: So i have a small critic about how far you have put that ears almost to the back of her skull.So i had a lil laugh at it and putted her 2 pair of ears one where it should be and why not a new pair in the back for extra creativity point...remember reference is your ally.But even good reference will never surpass studying your fundamental such as anatomy.
Took the ideas you guys had for the quick environment sketch and combined it with a quick color overwork
(Also the nighttime idea really did change it a bit).
Nothing that took me too much time. Instead of diving completely into this and overworking the piece, I thought I might keep this a quick and rough colored sketch and see what you guys might do differently before I start the next environment sketch.
I might get deeper into environments, even though they are miles away from my comfort zone, this quick thing was tons of fun and I'm not really having too much trouble with staying loose and keeping the perspective intact and so on.
As I said, this was my very first environment piece, so I'll use this piece for collecting feedback.
Just started this rough environment sketch after hours of studying environment values on pinterest boards.
This is really just the first rough idea, although I kind of couldn't resist and already got into a few details in the foreground.
So these first 2 hours were only about quick values from foreground to background and getting the first part of the basics done.
So before I start adding characters, details and so on, I wanted to see if I missed anything here, or if the values and the composition are heading in the right direction.
He mixedmax, I'm kind of late, but welcome to the forums! Looks like a great start so far, you see to have a very good grasp of color and lighting. Love your textural painting style. The caricatures are also very nice. Are some of the portraits original characters, like the gril with the clenched teeth?
If you are interested in improving your anatomy would definitely suggest trying to paint figures from photographs. Your faces look really good but for example marla's collar bone reads a little off, seems to stick out a bit too abruptly without blending into the rest of the chest smoothly, and also look a bit too uniform thickness (possibly these things are your exaggeration as well). Hope these comments help.
(01-12-2021, 10:40 AM)tchangchang Wrote: He mixedmax, I'm kind of late, but welcome to the forums! Looks like a great start so far, you see to have a very good grasp of color and lighting. Love your textural painting style. The caricatures are also very nice. Are some of the portraits original characters, like the gril with the clenched teeth?
If you are interested in improving your anatomy would definitely suggest trying to paint figures from photographs. Your faces look really good but for example marla's collar bone reads a little off, seems to stick out a bit too abruptly without blending into the rest of the chest smoothly, and also look a bit too uniform thickness (possibly these things are your exaggeration as well). Hope these comments help.
Great working, looking forward to seeing more!
Cheers man, nice to see you here and thanks for the feedback and the comment!
I don't know if I can go so far and say few of them are OC's, as I always had some sort of reference, but tried to do something on my own from imagination after the basic sketch.
Yeah, I'm actually on some full body gesture sketches right now, working on my lack of anatomy skills. I kind of noticed how I'm always using the same framing and not a lot of movement/gesture, that really bothered me.
Thanks for the Marla feedback too, unfortunately all that wasn't exaggeration, she was the first sketch I did on the iPad Pro that I got myself over the holidays, so I actually had a bunch of struggles during the whole process :D
I really like your art! I think there are some improvements already in a short time! Well done!
One thing you should keep in mind is to separate your shapes and values more. I think that is something that is lacking a bit in some of your pieces. Always make sure to turn them black and white to see how the shapes and overlapping shapes read!
I made a small overpaint of one of your artworks, hope it can help in some way!
(01-13-2021, 05:46 PM)Zorrentos Wrote: I really like your art! I think there are some improvements already in a short time! Well done!
One thing you should keep in mind is to separate your shapes and values more. I think that is something that is lacking a bit in some of your pieces. Always make sure to turn them black and white to see how the shapes and overlapping shapes read!
I made a small overpaint of one of your artworks, hope it can help in some way!
Thanks for the feedback and the kind words, always helps a ton.
I actually took the reference exactly from the movie. The lighter covered the cigarette completely, which I thought was kind of nice. But still, thanks for your feedback!
Heres some DnD inspired evil mage.
Had a ton of fun with this one, but still kept it a bit more sketchy, as I didn't want to overrender this (I think I kept this thing around 3,5 hours).
Actually felt a lot of studies finally paying off with this evil dude, getting way more comfortable in certain areas and not overthinking everything, which I tend to do sometimes (Like hands! I usually just hate hands, because I just couldn't do them correctly, and now I kind of think they are really fun to do!).
I'll be moving on to some outfit and outfit-designing stuff next, I still don't really like my outfits, they always feel kind of rushed and boring.
Hey Max
Really digging your evil dude - his expression is great and those hands are bloody brilliant. Just be careful of small anatomy things that throw the image off. For example, the back of his skull/neck. Follow your eyes from his occipital and notice how it's not connected to the back of the neck in anyway? It kinda looks like his neck sits in his jaw, making the back of his skull protrude out and giving him a floating mandible
Looking forward to seeing your clothing designs next!
![[Image: d4555bb55bde2e5dd8d71f024079f48a.png]](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d4/55/5b/d4555bb55bde2e5dd8d71f024079f48a.png)
