Lucio's Grimoire of Lines and Values

[luciostephani]

Will be posting stuff here in a daily basis (I hope).
Please, DO criticize me and tell me where to improve.

Most of these works will be results of the Daily Spitpainting group on Facebook. It's a group os artists (amateurs and professionals alike) that draw, within 30 minutes, works of given subjects, always trying to improve from one work to another. Altho it's a very good and fun exercise, due to the huge load of works there, I can't get enough critic on it, thus posting them here, a place focused on learning.

I'll also post progress and finished paintings of my personal work, wich shall not be made with some kind of limitation.

On to it? Made these this morning.

[luciostephani]

Today's works

Scorpion King


Dead Eyes


Lady of Thorns


Wrath of Buttercup


Tomorrow I'll have some spare time and will try to make a more finished piece...

[luciostephani]

Today's works! :)

Magic book


Purple dragon


Cyborg samurai


Plane crash

[bemota]

Hey! Welcome to the Daggers.

From what I can see you have some interesting ideas and your compositions are pretty neat! Your color choice is a bit hit or miss at the moment but I think your main problem lies on volume and light value. It's pretty hard to judge from speedpaintings though.

Either way, the course of action I would take if I were you would be to relax for a bit and not to limit yourself in terms of time. Try to get things right first, then try to get there faster. You might risk getting bad habits carved in stone. Some black and white studies should correct some problems for now. Then move on to color studies.

If you haven't already, one great thing to do is look around at other people sketchbooks and see exactly what they are doing to move forward. Look at it with a critical eye and thing about what you need to do yourself.

Hope this is useful to you and that I don't sound too harsh. Happy new year!

[smrr]

Great way to kick off your sketchy, Lucio!
Haha yeah, that Spitpainting group is in like the thousand+ members now hey? It's definitely hard to get a decent critique there.
I'd have to agree 100% with bemota. If you really want to improve on your Spitpaintings and longer pieces - understanding form and value go a loooong way! Really and truly, I believe that if you take the time to study these fundamentals, even if it's just 2hours a day, your paintings - Spitpaints and the like - will improve drastically!

But yeah, keep it up! You have some really cool ideas and your compositions are quite engaging!

Hopefully you are able to post daily, that'd be cool :D

[kidult]

Nice stuff you have here, good variety. To add to the above comments, try spend some time tightening up and adding details. These help with giving your image a focal point, something for the eye to spend time looking on. Speedpainting is good for exercising your ability to put down ideas fast but to be more successful at them you'll need to build up your painting skills by doing longer studies and imagery too

[luciostephani]

Thanks all for the feedback. It really helps a lot!

Here's an old (? 2 months ago...) human figure I did for value and anatomy study. Is stuff like this right??


I quit my last job on December, where I had little to no time to study whatsoever. My free time was spent only on video games and I'm still somehow struggling to get rid of that. That said, I'm taking this intermission between jobs to study hard.

About some stuff you pointed out:
-My color choices are, mostly, guesses. I'm colorblind and have a VERY, VEEEEEEEEEEEEERY hard time using colors in any way. With these spitpaintings, I'm trying to get more used to it working on colors only. That's why most of them are not even in the slightest harmony.
-I was taught digital painting by painting it on grayscale and after that putting colors in, but I ALWAYS screw up after the grayscale. My colors turn out either very opaque or muddy. Here are some of my older works, done without time limit, painted on grayscale first and then inserting colors.








I'll take a look on the other's sketchbooks and see how I can improve. :))
Thanks again for the feedback!

[luciostephani]

Today's works






From what I saw on the others' sketchbooks, looks like I'll be needing an anatomy study book.I always think about anatomy and get references when drawing some serious stuff, but it really sounds reasonable and productive to really study it, like daily.

Also, I should go back a bit to the old paper and pencil. I've been using the wacom for so long now that I cant remember the last time I sketched on paper.

Thanks all for the tips! :)

[Archreux]

Hey, I'm liking a lot of the stuff I'm seeing here. You definitely have a lot of interesting ideas.

I agree with what everyone else is saying. Keep on just trying to get things right before you start focusing on speed.

If you're interested in color I always like to suggest James Gurney's Color and Light. You really can't go wrong with it in terms of color, and I'm sure it'd be able to help ya. Figure out what you want to work on for right now, and just focus on it. As it is your stuff is all over the place without much focus.

Keep on keepin' on, man. :]