03-13-2015, 10:27 PM
Dayum! Hard at work my friend! Really nice stuff in the new updates, your lineart is pretty nice, specially for the manga-ish chicks, and the edges on the paintings are steadily improving.
Now on the crit/advice section xD :
I think your paintings need more subtle gradients, specially trough characters ( skin , materials, etc), I have recently discovered that adding really subtle gradients ( and sometimes not so subtle) trough a character adds a lot more interest in the rendering. Of course you have to be carefull since you don't wanna add interest to areas you don't want the viewer looking at, but it's a really good way to start of with something that tends to be more sugestive to your brain.
The method I'm developing to do this is as follows:
1) Do your lineart or whatever foundation you prefer ( I personally start in stage 2 when it comes to painting ilustrations or stuff like that).
2) On a new layer paint over the silouhette of your character with a dark midtone ( the hue depends on what you want for the specific comp, but itsd better for it to be fairly desaturated) , be very mindfull of getting a clean shape with hard edges (you can blend them in the final stage if you want or paint over).
3)Now make ANOTHER new layer with a clipping mask ( ctrl+alt+g) attached to the previous layer with the silouhette, and pick a darker value with a 20 to 25% more saturation (between 1,5 and 3 , depending on your brush settings) and select a huge round brush ( preferably with flow/opacity set to pen pressure) and subtly create a gradient starting in the oposite direction of the key light you're gonna put into the painting. Give it the biggest contrast shift in fairly short spaces, meaning don't make the gradient completely stable, or it will probably give a fairly strange feel.
4) Now make ANOTHER new layer with a clipping mask ( ctrl+alt+g) attached to the previous layer with the silouhette, and paint your key light ( main light) and whatever you want, but keep the underneath layer as your shadow , meaning that you only paint light in this layer, no shadows, when you wnat a shadow you erase the light in the layer not paint over it.
This will give you a basic gradient from which you can start to work in more subtle gradients ( you can kinda yolo them if you're subtle about it, and by that I mean slight hue shifts or value shifts, nothing really impacting) , the more you practice this the more you start seeing in one way or the other in many pro paintings. I'm pretty sure that pros use other methods to paint these subtle gradients, but the one I use is the only one I know that allows for a lot of changes and freedom, even if the method itself constrains you by forcing you to keep your layers organised.
Anyway, I think this is one of the most important things I realised lately and it tackles a problem I had for a long time and I feel you might have aswell, which is that you understand well the light source and stuff, even ambient or reflected light, but need a little extra juice in order to make it more interesting to look at. I hope it helps, and sorry for my long ass explanation :P
Now on the crit/advice section xD :
I think your paintings need more subtle gradients, specially trough characters ( skin , materials, etc), I have recently discovered that adding really subtle gradients ( and sometimes not so subtle) trough a character adds a lot more interest in the rendering. Of course you have to be carefull since you don't wanna add interest to areas you don't want the viewer looking at, but it's a really good way to start of with something that tends to be more sugestive to your brain.
The method I'm developing to do this is as follows:
1) Do your lineart or whatever foundation you prefer ( I personally start in stage 2 when it comes to painting ilustrations or stuff like that).
2) On a new layer paint over the silouhette of your character with a dark midtone ( the hue depends on what you want for the specific comp, but itsd better for it to be fairly desaturated) , be very mindfull of getting a clean shape with hard edges (you can blend them in the final stage if you want or paint over).
3)Now make ANOTHER new layer with a clipping mask ( ctrl+alt+g) attached to the previous layer with the silouhette, and pick a darker value with a 20 to 25% more saturation (between 1,5 and 3 , depending on your brush settings) and select a huge round brush ( preferably with flow/opacity set to pen pressure) and subtly create a gradient starting in the oposite direction of the key light you're gonna put into the painting. Give it the biggest contrast shift in fairly short spaces, meaning don't make the gradient completely stable, or it will probably give a fairly strange feel.
4) Now make ANOTHER new layer with a clipping mask ( ctrl+alt+g) attached to the previous layer with the silouhette, and paint your key light ( main light) and whatever you want, but keep the underneath layer as your shadow , meaning that you only paint light in this layer, no shadows, when you wnat a shadow you erase the light in the layer not paint over it.
This will give you a basic gradient from which you can start to work in more subtle gradients ( you can kinda yolo them if you're subtle about it, and by that I mean slight hue shifts or value shifts, nothing really impacting) , the more you practice this the more you start seeing in one way or the other in many pro paintings. I'm pretty sure that pros use other methods to paint these subtle gradients, but the one I use is the only one I know that allows for a lot of changes and freedom, even if the method itself constrains you by forcing you to keep your layers organised.
Anyway, I think this is one of the most important things I realised lately and it tackles a problem I had for a long time and I feel you might have aswell, which is that you understand well the light source and stuff, even ambient or reflected light, but need a little extra juice in order to make it more interesting to look at. I hope it helps, and sorry for my long ass explanation :P