Mat Kaminski Sketchybewk

[matkaminski]

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clockodile:

Wow these studies show so much improvement. I skimmed through the first page and compared to that you have really improved with your brushwork and handling colour more accurately. It might help to try to block in colours with the biggest brush you can to avoid 'streakiness' in your surfaces - you seem to have improved at dealing with this though, so keep up the good work.

Great to see you making an effort to apply those studies too. If you have having trouble generating work from imagination, it could help to do more studies that focus on the construction of objects - drawing through the forms, building them out of primitive shapes (sphere, cube, cylinder, etc.) and the like. Once you learn the 3D shape language of things, you can reuse it or adapt it more fluently from your head.

For your demon lord picture, the design of the head area with the horns looks really cool, and I like how the horns act compositionally to draw attention in to his face like that. Well done on taking on such a challenging lighting challenge as well! Regarding the staff and altar, I have a couple of crits. The staff is lacking in a core shadow and is rather evenly lit, so it looks a bit flat - a shadow would be broken up by the detail of course, but it might be more effective to work that in first and build detail on top of it, using your light sources. Though it is open to interpretation, the perspective might be a bit off on the altar too - you might want to try experimenting with changing the angle of the nearest side so it is a bit closer to the viewer. (Since the altar is so near the viewer, it should demonstrate more perspective distortion/foreshortening than it does now.)

BTW, I really enjoyed looking at your 3D illustration project on the previous page, great designs on both the robots and their environment.

WoW! Thanks for the well-thought out response...
Alright, so to start off, the whole seeing through objects thing: Luckily that was taught pretty early on at art school, so I've been doing that for quite some time, BUT I think it would help to continue drawing up the forms from base to fully-costumed. I do agree though that of course it needs to be pushed even further.

I think lately I've stopped pushing myself because I've been comparing myself to all the artists that I enjoy and just getting discouraged rather than just pushing it to the limit. I've come to realize that I'm me, and they are them. So it's best to just do and draw what I would like to see. Things are really starting to look up, but it's always going to be a struggle.

The digital struggle is just something that I need to look back on and just do. I think that my struggle was less about actually being able to do it and more about the fact that I was a bad drawer trying to paint on top of it. So now I feel much more confident in my sketching ability and also my digital painting. I think I'll try this technique again!

I need to purely draw more from my head rather than just using reference for everything. Sometimes it's nice to just paint for the sake of painting rather than dealing with everything being completely accurate initially.

The Demon Lord picture has so many problems at the moment that I'm tempted to start back at the drawing board and just really rethink the design of the foreground - or just axe it all-together and just deal with the Demon only.

Thanks so much and I hope I'm not rambly, it's kinda late atm hahaha...

Cyprinus:

Your anatomy studies are looking good as always, great work. I'd agree on the edges and stroke economy, especially edges. Since I started paying more attention to edges, my work has changed for the better (at least I feel so). If you'd like to read something, here's a post where Lyraina shared some links about the topic with me:
I hope this works and brings you to the post...

As for the demon lord, I really like the design of his head and face! Something that irritates me a little though is the right side of his coat/cape. Right now to me it looks like theres something pulling at it from the right lower corner. As I see it, if you consider gravity, I think the lines of the cape should be a bit more vertical. (it also disappears right after the staff...) Also, the area of the sleeve/cape of the arm that is holding the staff is still a bit unclear. I think though you haven't fully worked on this area yet since you say that it's still a WIP. It's great though seeing how you apply everything you studied in a work from imagination.

I'm going to start doing something new as part of my post-process and really flesh the lines back out at the end. It might end up looking slightly comic-booky, but it might end up just looking nice period. It's worth a shot regardless... AND DOH, I only just now saw the link! :O

There are quite a few problems with the Demon that I stated above... UGH.
Anyway, thanks so much!

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Just a Bunch of WIPs

Title: Just a Bunch of WIPs
Medium: Photoshop CS6, Pencil
Scale: Varies

Notes: Ultimately, I'm just full of experiments at the moment, but the last one (Samus) is actually part of a contest that I'm going to be entering soon. It's basically just drawing a video game character on top of a pose that was provided. I thought it would be fun to paint some Zero-Suit Samus - although... I think I'm bordering on a pin-up version of her.Other than that just sketching around trying to get some ideas flowing.
More soon...