Knight's sketchbook

[dimensional-knight]

Before anything, just to make sure we're all on the same page: My goal is to bring the entire human body into my comfort zone, for creative drawing. If it's believable and dynamic, it's enough. Not that I'll stop studying, but my skills are unbalanced. I need to level out the field.


@darktiste

The point should never be to compare the longer season to the render level of the shorter one. (snip)

Thanks for the detailed response!

I get annoyed at many things, but thankfully this is not one of them! I'm fine with letting things sit unrendered or halfway done, and I'm inured to the natural variation in quality of drawings when studying. It might be a bad day, or it has some aspect of it I find tricky, it happens.

My annoyance comes from creating something completely unusable. I can't build anything from those initial figures, no artwork without redrawing from scratch and stiffening them in the process. They don't work as warm ups nor loosen up my lines. They don't have the saving grace of being aesthetically pleasant at least. A 100% failure rate, with the added stress of timekeeping, that's frustrating.

for gesture i would say if you are more comfortable with longer session i would say you could work backward so instead of having 1 to 5 min gesture or even 30 sec one you can try let say do 2x30min 4x15min that would be in the case of if you have let say 2 hour to spare as you see you start from a space of confidence and as you warm up you decrease the amount of time for the subsquent ''study'' of course my example highlight that it probably best not to have such a high degree of difference in the amount of time(30/15)

Though I love shading I don't feel compelled to shade them to just so I get satisfaction from the process. I'm already getting shading practice from the morning portraits, at this point I wouldn't benefit much from shading figures, which I'm studying late at night.

In any case, I've slowed down. The best approach to build confidence seems to be vulturing: I take my time to tackle the worst and often easier issue first. I keep circling the subject, working on one point a time, getting used to it, from easier to harder, until it consistently meets some criteria.

This causes the spent time to fluctuate. It's always higher at first, decreasing with the practice, increasing again on the next step when I swoop in from a different angle. In the end the overall time to draw _subject_ decreases while quality goes up.

Of course the idea is that over time you move from needing long introductionary study to just having what gesture is about which is about capturing the essence of the pose.

I agree. I'm not ready for gestures. I'm not sure if I'll ever benefit from them, without volume they almost look like abstract lines to me, but I'm sure that my weak foundation certainly makes me not ready for them.


@JosephCow

I really want to learn more blender because there's so many cool things you can do. I know there's some software that can help you generate whole trees as well that can be then used in blender. I'm still a big nooby tho so I don't know how to do anything lol. Whenever I think about doing this kind of thing I get overwhelmed and I'm like, oh well I'll just paint everything by hand on one layer.

Yeah, there are addons for everything. And because it's open source the amount of information, guides and everything is amazing. It might feel overwhelming at first, but the interface is pretty intuitive.

You could try simple things, like a blockout of a scene from mind for perspective reference, maybe a simple sphere of a material for studies, so you get used to the interface.

When I first started I was very curious about the physical simulations so I created a fabulous ball of hair, hah.

I really like seeing your work, it looks great. hope you keep posting.

I badly missed this art forum atmosphere. Have no intention of going anywhere, even tweaked the css on my end to make reading more comfortable (nerd!).



@Dominicque

That's the different between an 'intuitive' artist and an 'analytical' one. I do feel I missed the boat being the first, because I was a teenager too obsessed with 'copyright', internet dogpiles and getting good enough to draw what I want and hopefully financially support my family. (snip) I already think I suck, if someone points out something wrong, it just confirms what I already believe about myself.

We've threaded similar paths, I think I've just ran out of fucks to give. I don't look at circlejerks, and with all I've been through in the last years, am more than ready to yeet mean assholes directly into the Sun. People in my life need me, I don't have time to give to walking emotional blackholes.

That doesn't mean I'm not a brutal critic of myself, but understanding where the upset and the challenges come from has been helping a lot. I'm still self-conscious and skittish about things I'm "supposed" to master, like figure, since I've been doing pro character work for quite a while.

if I just had more confidence I could have been where he is.

It wasn't the right time for you then. People have different personalities and are raised in settings that cultivate different traits. Someone like Milles seems to have had some inherent confidence + access to resources and plenty support from a young age. Yes, he's impressive, but he also had opportunities we hadn't, or weren't prepared to take advantage of at the time.

I'm not the same person I was few years ago. I wasn't ready then. I might be now, and getting to this point isn't a waste of time because this was the time it took for me to experience what made me myself today. I'm not a timelord, and I suspect you're not one either, so don't blame yourself for having no control over the order and speed of events that led you to today.

I assume it wasn't just getting used to the medium again, but also how long you allowed yourself to spend on each drawing. I always thought to myself, 'Why spend hours rendering out a piece if my end goal is not to be a realist artist?'.

Yep. Time fixes it all. I often fumble in the middle of a drawing, then recover. It's so common I've learned to trust the process.

I always thought to myself, 'Why spend hours rendering out a piece if my end goal is not to be a realist artist?'.

If it's of any help, knowing why things look like they look will let you deliberately tamper with them, aka stylize. You don't need to master realistic painting, just get a grasp on it to twist it your way. And you don't need to lvl it all way up, you can always pick it up later again for further study if needed.

I think that's why when it comes to laying out the initial shapes I'm fine, but when it gets into the rendering stage I get bored, frustrated, or anxiety kicks in because I think I should be doing something else. Colouring and rendering detail is not a strong suit of mine, because I have very low mileage in that arena.

It sounds as if you've developed some aversion to it. Have you tried going small? Painting something that will make you happy but is self-contained, which won't take as much time and planning as full illustrations, so you get used to the act of painting?

look up refs that align with that. Just need to work on believing the work is all still mine, even if I consulted references or other artists work to get it to a more finished stage.

Hold on a moment! Never let someone, even you yourself, tell you references are cheating, that they make the work any less yours.

You've probably have seen Ophelia by John Everett Millais before. Have you ever head about its creation?



He did it in two stages, first landscape then Ophelia. For the landscape he travelled to the banks of the Hogsmill River and painted 11 hours a day, six days a week, over a five-month period.

Ophelia was modelled by Elizabeth Siddal, an artist in her own right. She was nineteen at the time. She spent five months in a bathtub. Once, the oil lamps he set up to warm the water went out and she came down with pneumonia.

The great artists of ye olden times used reference, and a lot. I bet they'd be happy to avoid being stuck in a riverbank being devoured alive by insects or catching near fatal illnesses. Fine, contemporary artists work differently, like Norman Rockwell, you know, the illustrator, he didn't—




Nevermind. ;D

If their work isn't any less theirs when they had people modelling specifically for them down to the fold of the fabric of their outfits, why would yours be not yours just due references? Shush this bugbear, it doesn't know what it's talking about.

I guess I shouldn't shame people that like my work and give me compliments, then lol.

I'm grateful most of my work interactions are online. I have no idea how to react to compliments. Then there's the believing them. I accept they mean it, but it can be hard to sink in. I'm always with that impostor syndrome sensation like I just fooled them with the pretty colors so they don't see the weaknesses.

'Shade in circles blend values'. Noted, I assume with light pressure, at first.

Yes, very light. The lightest values were the first thing I've learned, before that I was struggling because I only had two settings: dark lines and blank paper.

About the motion, it's circular but adapted to the area I'm rendering. Eg if it's a narrow area I'll do something oval.


@Leo Ki

I'm on the opposite spectrum, have to set up faraway landmarks and refine within or I end up warping.

Witchcraft!

The stick-like effect of your first leg drawings seems to stem mostly from the region of the knee. (snip)

I'm proud to announce my pogo sticks now have some flesh to them. I'm figuring new ways to structure them around my volume bias.

For the sake of understanding what you mean, is there a distinction between quick gestures and quick poses? For me the former is lines of action stuff, the latter is more like regular drawing but simplified (what you did).

Because my default mode is "stiff" I started with (detailed) gestures, but all gesture drawing in the world can't help you if you're getting shape and length consistently wrong. Simple figure drawings have enough info I can target issues and push poses whenever I want without being onerous to produce.

It's getting late, I'll come back about the comic, leaf engine, forests and other topics.

Please, don't feel compelled to address every point if you're running out of energy!

I was thinking about generating the trees like you do the leaves, and Joseph suggested it. I know some software for landscape designers or nature scientists does it. However, how much control would you have on the process, how much of your spirit would seep in?)

One of the leading software for generating trees for games and movies, SpeedTree, gives you artistic control down to patches of bark. However, exerting control to this degree is time consuming. You either reuse trees or don't do it for every single one.

I've not tried to create entire trees in Blender for paintings yet (which should be faster). Maybe special trees, but for the ones in the background I'm afraid it'd start looking like matte painting: Rigid and ill-fitting if used without care.

Last time I checked tree addons weren't very advanced, but that was three years ago. A lot has changed. So many ideas for approaches yet no time to put them in practice, hah.

You're lucky to be next to a tropical forest, they are the best! But your for-simplification pine forest is nice looking :)

I also live in one of the largest metropolis in the world. Getting to true wilderness takes some travelling. And oh boy, tropical forests are like walls. Extreme undergrowth! I kinda envy those temperate forests in which you can walk.

So you say you want a pretty and weekly comic. How many pages (or panels) per week is that?

One page per week. Two would be ideal, but doubt it'll be possible. I'm aiming for something like Hiveworks, where you keep your own site and complete control over the work.

Industrialization period with magic, sounds exciting! Do the two oppose, or is magic part of the growing industry?

Hey, don't tempt me into infodumping, haha! It's both. The way magic works enabled technological advances in areas such metallurgy beyond what should be possible at the time, while curbing others like arms industry because both mages and Shades (the undead) can tamper with temperatures and ignite substances at a distance. Your guns will go boom, so will your fuels. If it weren't for the Shades, society probably would try to do away with mages now they're being outpaced by industry.