Need Some Direction

[xelfereht]

Hi everyone,

I've been doing Dave's realistic orc painting tutorial and have gotten quite stuck. I'm very new to digital painting and the lack of knowledge has left me clueless about what to study to improve my rendering skills. I somewhat understand where to put the mileage in drawing but I'm lost when it comes to digital painting. This has left me unmotivated to render out the rest of the piece as this is maximum quality I can achieve currently. Any and all critique, criticism, guidance etc. is invaluable.

Thank you.

ok, some goals to work towards.
where do you want the viewers eye to start, then how do you want it to travel around the image, are you keeping the eye form going off the page
*use contrast in value, colour, detail level, and so on to achieve this
use visual shapes to act as arrows to lead the eye around as you decide

are there a good variety of visual shapes types and sizes
are there moments of detail that make the image worth more than a glance
Is the lighting serving the image as far as story and displaying the forms that best show off in this case, your character

as well as that stuff theres also more things specific to the type of illustration and purpose so i reccomend having an idea of where youre shooting for subject matter, purpose and quality of finish

for this i reccommend making a mock port folio, fill it with a bunch of images from artists you like but also closest to what youd like to be able to paint like.
once youve got that in front of you. you may have some clues as to what particular things you need to study.

if you want some help with that, make the mock port folio. maybe 20- 30 images, make them into a pic, show here and maybe i can help you figure out some things to work on and how to do it.
for making the mock folio, the program pure ref is great, can download it for a once off donation,  super useful for reference boards

hope that helps