Help me become a Professional Artist

[Jaik]

Nice to see you are still keeping up those studies! As for the matte painting stuff, try to start with a natural environment and say.. - add an additional mountain to it.

The reason why I suggest this is because 1. Mountains are hard to get really badly out of perspective, so they are easy from that point of view
2. Doing this teaches you to keep your values really on point. Which helps train you to see when a value is wrong.

Also, the end result always looks kind of cool :P
Keep up the good work though, definitely getting there!

[KurtJeremy]

felt the need to update...

@jaik thanks man, mmm yeah i might try that. someday. someday.

[meat]

Still life's are looking great! Keep up the good work!

[Kir]

I have to say, I absolutely love your studies on the body! I hope you don't mind if I study your drawings and create some of my own like that.

[smrr]

Hey Kurt!

I read your first post here in your sb -- and haha I was the same! Making comics outta makeshift paper-stapled books ^ ^

Alrighty, so something that really, really helped me out with seeing colours was doing thumbnail colour studies from master paintings. Literally dozens and dozens of them... you'd be surprised how much you'll learn. So just use the RGB sliders (or HSB, whatever floats your boat) to pick the colours you are seeing in the thumbnail master painting and apply it to your own thumbnail... and keep fiddling with the colours til you get a really close (if not identical) match. Each thumbnail study should only take 10mins.

Just my 2 cents :)
you've got what it takes man, keep it up!

I'll see you 'round! o/

[Joe]

Good start on the still life stuff! From that and your masters studies it looks like you have a good eye for translating what you see, you should exploit it for all it's worth :)

you mighten be able to squeeze a little extra outta the still life if you think of them as a way to test what you've learn so far... eg you mentioned Gurney' color and light in my sketchbook, it has loads of information about light set ups and colour can you use that to guess how to colour an object based on it's local color and the light source, can you guess the color of the shadow side based on the ambient light. untimely you just paint what you see, but it's a good dialogue to have going on in your head because you'd are thinking about all the things you'll need to know when drawing it from imagination.

good chance to practice some basic perspective construction too, if you get a chance to throw that into your still life mix :)

[Jaik]

Nice update :D

In regards to your still lifes, I found that I get the most out of them when they are really long. I.e. a minimum of 8hrs, closer to 20 if you can. When you accept this from the beginning, you approach the study from a different perspective. Kind of like if I asked you to make 1million dollars, you would approach it really differently if I asked you to make $100. This structured start is really good to learn, and it helps when you apply it to short studies.

Just dont too many of them.. because they are as boring as bat shit.

[Gliger]

Did you, do a study of Paul? haha
Studies are looking nice, watch the edges, try dedicating 5 or 10 minutes after you finish a piece to work the edges of your paintings.

[KurtJeremy]

waaa this is what i have done mostly in june, i really need to have direction ! its so mixed up !
the only direction i have , is the deathline that i created. where i need to create at least one character from scratch every month. 

and i could say im halfway in finishing it.  i just need to paint it, wich im finding it difficult to do so. i need to catch up , i only have a week until july comes.

so im gonna try again for the 4th TIME in making a schedule for myself im gonna put something thats easy for me to do. im only concerned in putting some structure in all this chaos. gonna update the next post and try to produce something . i would like you guys to say some of your thoughts about it. if you can suggest something better. 

[KurtJeremy]

my apologies for the insta bump. but heres the schedule that ive come up with. 
still kinda vague. yet something to follow . gonna try this for one week and come up with a better one , assessing and adjusting things. 

[crackedskull]

Hello there, heres the advice on painting and characters :D
Really try to nail colors and values in still lives and masterstudies. Learn what colors work(for example what complimentary colors are). Try to paint the shadows in a complimentary color to the lit side, look for reflected lights. Get painterswheel or Coolorous application for photoshop. Experiment, for example I sometimes add high saturation paintstrokes on shadows.
As for characters its hard, determine the problems you run into, then find the material you need to solve them. For example if you want to design an adventurer with light armor, that looks appealing and interesting, then firt off you just go for it, try to do the best you can from imagination, after that your gonna run into all kinds of problems, maybe the pose is stiff, or the apparel looks bland, colors look wonky. Thats where you determine the exact problems you have and find your answers, search for some reference for poses, look at master drawings/paintings to see what they did, to make it dynamic. Look how various artists handle color, look for interesting clothing/leather armor on internet, also watching Game of Thrones helps, theres tons of interesting apparel there.
Another approach is to set criteriums for yourself, for example do a character that has fairly high contrast apparel(value wise), or a character that has many different materials and patterns, perhaps you can add a theme to characte, go so far where you can define the entire set of your character by a single word.
Make loose sketches of whatever characters come to mind, use more unstable brushes and looser strokes, paint around the basic forms to give complexity and volume.
Last but not least, have purpose behind everything you do, if you decide that you want to study certain culture, then you should also create a character that is influenced by that.

Good luck on the goal.

[Amit Dutta]

Hey Kurt, some nice studies, and nice structural pencil stuff. A good variety of subjects. There is no one way to study, so as long as you aren't just grinding any one thing purely for the sake of it with no joy, you're probably going to benefit from it. More still life and from life is good.

In terms of your schedule, everyone responds differently to these things. There is a thread here on CD about schedules, I think Sula posted it. You should hunt it down and read it to identify and get around some of the pitfalls of them.
If you are doing "portfolio" work, then maybe tailor some of the studies you are doing towards what you specifically need for these pieces. It is generally the process that you end up using as a professional, may as well start building that process in now.

My own personal recommendation is to make a physical prioritised list of what you are going to do the next day, each evening sometime before you sleep. This way in the morning you have slept on it and wake up focused, it is way more flexible than a weekly schedule and helps you when things come up in life that you can't predict. You can reevaluate and work on priorities, which can and should change if necessary. You also are not tied to this feeling of having to catch up when you miss a two hour block one day...that leads nowhere good. All you are doing is ticking things off a list.

Good luck!

[ZombieChinchilla]

Hey you've gotsome great stuff! Your studies are really solid and I'm loving the work load. I also like your work schedule, I need something like that.

I'd like to see some more complete works from you, though. Try to do a full-fledged illustration and do studies for it, with thumbnails and practice sketches and all that jazz.

Keep it up, can't wait to see more!

[eroquii]

You've been killing it with your studies lately! It's awesome that you're not only doing such variation in studies, but you're doing memory exercises as well. You're going to be great in no time! So young and already developing such skill. Keep it up!

[EduardoGaray]

hey man, its really great to see you so focused on improving your fundamentals, its definitely the way to go. Just add some personal work from time to time to test your limits and everything you have learned so far and you are golden.
And good luck, with your schedule, i've given up on following one, but i will be following your progress with it!

[Adam Lina]

Hey man thanks for stopping by my SB and offering advice. I noticed you have a habit of sometimes making your heads too tall. Like on that skull study at the top the forehead is a bit short and the rest of the face is a bit sketched out. Maybe your reference was like that but I'd say thats a bad reference to use then. You have to be careful with the skull photos online. Some of them are crappy replica skulls with wonky proportions. I'd go back and work on basic loomis construction of heads and dont worry about finishing them into a likeness or anything. Just focus on nailng down exact proportions and basic form of the over all skull. If you can buy yourself a nice skull replica online. I got one for about 70 bucks. The cheaper ones for 20 and 40 bucks arnt anatomically exact so dont bother with them. Its a really good long term investment thatll really help you head construction.

[Fedodika]

good work on that master study and the 6 hr still life! keep working on them faces mayne, if you wanna get good at em, draw alooooot with construction; till it HERTS!

[Eristhe]

Your studies are looking good! I would suggest working on some personal pieces - something that you're interested in making from your imagination. Then it will feel more like your studies are for a purpose and you'll be applying what you've learned, and hopefully help with motivation and keeping to your schedule. Keep going!

[KurtJeremy]

thanks for the comments
Ill be replying to your sketchbooks laters.

This week , i have completed my schedule. i have checked off the entire week as successful and has come into some realizations along the way.

i have made a bunch of traditional drawing that ill try to post tomorrow.

i like the focus that i have on the basic drawing and perspective. so im going to substitute the portfolio with the drawing and perspective blocks.

been very inspired by jeff watts lately so this month will be focused on drawing , alongside with perspective hoping they would complement each other.
im still gonna come up with the "own piece of the month" thing im going on.

anyway heres this weeks stuff.

[yangdaniel027]

Thanks for visiting my sketchook :)

Keep up the work, there's definitely a lot of improvement here from the last page to the first. One thing I notice is that your color choices are a bit too muddy/dull and neutral at times. This just comes down using more pure and saturated colors. Of course you want to find a balance between saturated and unsaturated colors.

I wanted to give you more resources about form also. For me industrial sketching probably best represents form drawing, and so here are some industrial sketching tutorials.

https://vimeo.com/idsketching