The best of the CHOWs will be picked by an anonymous poll in the Finals thread and the winner is given the opportunity to pick the theme of the next CHOW's design, as well as becoming the title banner for that week! So go hard, design something interesting and unique!
Rules:
You must post at least one WIP in the WIP thread to be accepted into the final poll.
Finals must be posted in the finals thread before the deadline.
At least 3/4 of the character must be visible (minimum from the knees up).
Only ONE submission per person in the finals thread.
No fanart. We want to see your original, unique interpretations!
Voting will be held for 5 days after the deadline.
In an event of a tiebreaker, a winner will be chosen through a randomized name picker.
great painting skills for the faun, and the fairy has some excellent rendering. Only thing I'd say would improve it would be a very simple background , or at least a non white solid colour one as she's very saturated.
got a pen display tablet and this thing actually makes rendering fun, so here's my twee little mushroom dude. I bet he tastes delicious. He's made from chanterelles, puffball mushrooms , random brown mushroom for the head ( I don't know what mushroom is brown, conical and speckly), and baby portobello mushrooms for the buttons. A veritable feast.
I did come across the earthstar and bridal veil stinkhorn mushrooms late into the process and I'm gutted I wasn't able to incoorporate those in. Feedback is welcome, and I'm happy to give some back as well although I don't really have anything for what's here so far as they're all solid paintings
also @publicenemy, what canvas size did you use for that rendering? I've heard various things from other people but those sizes would cook me poor laptop
EDIT and I've just realised your username is actually pubic enemy which I love
I just remebered last minute that today is the deadline for this CHOW. I am glad I still barely made it.
I don´t really know if I am happy with this or not, it has been a long time since I last painted a face and considering that it turned out ok, but its not really a style I like.
I really like the bold shadows that JosephCow used.
PubicEnemy, the fairy looks awesome! The first thing I thought when I saw it was "shiny". It definitly shows that you put a lot of work in it, like that you used green and purple reflections in the shadows.
That is such a cutie Skeffin :) Also your earlier desings in the WIP thread look great. You are really creative and have good ideas when it comes to character development. If I was looking for something to critize, it would be that the background could be alittle more detailed. Like putting some grass that covers his shoes so it looks more natural.
Wich tablet did you get? I am also thinking about buying a new one and am always grateful for feedback on tablets.
@Jana, deadlines utc midnight tho, so you would have had like another 10 hours, unless those translate to sleep times where you're at.
your mushroom dude is frickin adorable, although that cap marks him out to be deadly poisonous. I think the face turned out pretty decent, esp when considering you havent done faces in a while. Thanks for the crit too, I'm currently donking some grass blades on the floor, cos yeah it's a forest so the grass is going to be loooong
I upgraded from an intuous to the xpen 24 pro. The 22 pro e has lower resolution but is half the price. I'd say that increase in screensize is 100% worth the price, and that combined with drawing on the screen itself is actually the closest you can really get to feeling like you're working on a big a3 canvas/paper traditionally, but with the benefit of layers and undo. It's a lot more natural than scribbling on an intuous or on a small surface pro screen with its shitty pen, and I wish I got this sooner. I think its made my workflow a lot faster as well
I was a bit worried it wouldnt be as good as a cintiq, but the pen works nicely, did have some weird driver issues , but none since I deleted my wacom drivers and reinstalled the xpen ones. So yeah, I'm happy with it. And I was dumb and didnt realise there was a second protective film I had to peel off after the first, so I thought it had a weird rubbery texture until I peeled that one off. One thing is I did miss touch display, but I got used to not having that in 2 days. And going from keyboard shortcuts to express keys is a bit annoying because they won't cover everything, but I'm planning on buying a wired keyboard I can plug in so I have my opacity and flow shortcuts back.
Another downside is that this thing is so large I can't really use a second monitor as I'd have to twist my neck to the side to look at it. But this thing is so large you can your references on one side of the tablet and your work on the other and its fine. One last thing is that Ive heard of people having bad experiences ordering off the official xpen site, so you might want to use a trustworthy 3rd party retailer instead. Anyway if you have anymore questions go for it
Zizka: Thanks! I'll keep those in mind if I have to choose another.
Skeffin: The rendering and color choices on your mushroom dude feel very naturalistic. Regarding size, the original of that one is 3984x7299 pixels. I normally don't go bigger than 8k pixels in any direction. Also, glad to hear you like the username. I saw somebody misspell "Public Enemy No. 1" as "Pubic Enemy No. 1" in a track listing and I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen.
Jana: Your little guy is very charming, so that face turned out OK in my book.
Ditto, I found the Xpen felt a lot more natural than other display tablets I've tried. I don't remember there being a second screen protector on mine. There was one plastic sheet with a pull tab, and the book makes it clear you don't need aq screen protector, but iunno. I will have to check that I have removed the wacom drivers now that you mention it, because it just doesn't work on my CS6. I also think I've already mentioned that but I don't remember where.
I love the ruffled mushrooms, I've done aristocratic mushrooms in the past and it's just a fun theme.
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@Jana
The idea of little forest people is really cute, and he is very adorable. I will say though I wish his outfit was a bit more handmade or rustic, the white T-Shirt just looks very civilised.
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@Pubic
The bird is beautiful, really well done and I like the depth put into the leaves, not something I remember to do often if at all. The painting of her cheeks and nose is really well done, I do like the mischievous look she has even if the scene and pose indicate this is her in a placid state. Very much Tinkerbell telling the lost boys to shoot down the Wendy-bird. ---
@JC
It looks fantastic, it's very traditional but we've seen you work, your strengths, and it's really well done. I have no other input.
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It's a dump and run for me this week - I injured my back falling on my tailbone so I'm going to take it easy the next few days, also may not make much sense I'm a bit foggy.
I think my mind married up whimsy and hippie and ended up with a pot smoking weed fae. My other half keeps calling her Mary Javiary for the bird legs so lets roll with that.
Sorry to hear about the injury, Rotten. I hope it'll heal up fine.
Thanks for the feedback. Trying to add depth to things like the leaves is something I completely neglected until recently (despite the advice of many patient people on this forum), so I try to add it whenever possible. Probably will be over-doing it for a while.
The pot smoking fae looks great. The legs and face are particularly nicely drawn, as are the weed flowers on her head and the textures on the legs. The color variations in the face make her look a lot more alive. She looks like she would be equally at home in the deep woods or at Woodstock 1969.
@rotten
Yea I think you mentioned it on the discord ? The pull of tab one was what I meant by the second screen protector (the first was the super obvious plastic wrap around the whole tablet ) I'm just inobservant
Great weed fae, she's hilarious . Hope your back heals up soon too, sucks that that happened
@pubic cheers for the answer , 3 data points makes it good science , so it does seem like 8 to 10k is the ballpark
Does everyone just have 32 gb ram on their workstations or something ? My cow dragon started slowing down at 6k(brush was okay but some tools were unuseable) and my laptop was making enough hot air to power a blimp.
It did have like 30 layers though , I had a lot of adjustment ones as I realised I was drawing on a shitty monitor and had to fix it when I checked on the calibrated laptop screen
Skeffin: I have 8 gigabytes of RAM, in a gaming PC that is mid-range by the standards of about 8 years ago. I do have slowdown with large brush sizes (>500px) in the programs I use, mainly when doing fast strokes, but it's not enough to bug me.
CPU (and/or GPU if the program uses GPU acceleration) power is probably the bigger issue. Another big factor is how well-optimized the program you're using is. Still, if you haven't already, try googling "optimize Photoshop (or whichever program you use) performance" and you may find some tweaks that you can apply. You probably need a beastly desktop to work at high speed on a 30 layer file though, depending on the program.
Vote for pubic enemy if only for the effort put into the rendering.
She looks like she intends to harm/eat the bird? Was that intended? If so, that’s cool because it gives her a cute but dangerous vibe.
It was a close tie with RP but the pasted marijuana leaves felt distracting to me and out of place considering the rest is carefully hand painted. I found the idea very original and interesting.
Thank you, Ziz. The mischievous look is mainly due to the fact that I still have difficulty with drawing genuine-looking smiles. But I decided to keep it, because fairies have semi-sinister natures in most folklore anyway.
(04-20-2021, 08:31 PM)Zizka Wrote: Vote for pubic enemy if only for the effort put into the rendering.
She looks like she intends to harm/eat the bird? Was that intended? If so, that’s cool because it gives her a cute but dangerous vibe.
It was a close tie with RP but the pasted marijuana leaves felt distracting to me and out of place considering the rest is carefully hand painted. I found the idea very original and interesting.
You got me. I figured for the effect /consistency I wanted I would end up spending months trying to make the time to draw the individual leaves. So I drew two different variations and copied them, flipped them varied their curves a bit. Erasing and drawing leaves over one another to have a strewn effect rather than sticker over one another. But, I could have shaded them better absolutely.
![[Image: 02cPfZFl.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/02cPfZFl.jpg)
![[Image: Whimsy03.jpg]](http://crimsondaggers.com/forum/attachments/121653/Whimsy03.jpg)