JyonnyNovice - from Novice to Master!

[Patrick Gaumond]

Suira mentioned that I should switch to painting a while back too, I never really gave it a good shot. I'll try it out - how do you start something like that? Do you just put some nice shapes of solid value and then sculpt stuff out of it? Or do you put in some sketchy under lines first?

Well theres 3 ways you can approach it, and they all require different skillsets and levels of knowledge. I use all 3 in different contexts, which I'll explain, depending on how complex the drawing is going to be

The first one is using a relatively loose yet accurate sketch to lay in all the shapes. It's not meant as a finished line art, so you can knock it out fairly quickly without really polishing the line quality too much beyond proportions and anatomy etc. I personally don't use it that much for nude figures. I generally only use it first to block out the pose, then to lay clothes and whatever on top. I'm not so great at visualizing form underneath clothing and armour so I find it helps to build it up, and It winds up taking less time than just jumping right in and painting. Dave rapoza used to sort of work this way, where he would sketch out the forms and resolve most of the design, then jump into grayscale, But if you're working with line you might as well go right into colour. This might be good to start out with if you're coming from a line-heavy background, but at the same time it might make you hesitant to ditch the lines. I've been using this more and more lately; the more complex your designs and illustrations become, the more beneficial it is to have it all resolved to some extent in a sketch before you commit to light and colours. The downside is though that you also need to have good knowledge of designing a scene around light to make it work, and not rely on your lines as you may be used to to get the message across

The second one I use is basically shaddy safadi's method, blocking in big shapes (generally in the shadow colour) each on their own layer in silhouette and then refining them until they look identical to the reference or to the pose you're using. Then use clipping masks or lock transparency and use only 2 values (the base value you started with and the light value(NOT the highlight value)) and block out the lit areas. Once you have that down its a matter of expanding your value range and filling in the gaps. Your major form is worked out so you can pretty much jump right into colour with this. That's why I liked it so much when I came across it, it lets you focus on one dimension at a time without worrying about your edges or your proportions at all while you're learning about the colours and forms within your subject. I used to use this for all my studies and it really helped me a lot to break out of relying too much on line, and you learn how to simplify light down to its essentials

The last one is like you said, just jump right in and start working out the form inch by inch. If you've seen craig mullins gnomon dvd he demos that a bit, just visualize it and lay it down. This is probably the hardest one to do since you really need to know what you're doing but its also the quickest just for nude figures or with minimal clothing. It also forces you into a specific lighting scenario and colour palette if youre straight into colour and is really hard to change, so if you're not confidant in your ability to design a scene around light and not run into problems from the get go, then it's not the best option for you. If you're going to use a lot of fill lights and artificial light sources (think applibot work) then its ok.