JyonnyNovice - from Novice to Master!

[JyonnyNovice]

Angelique Hey! Thanks for stopping by : ) I think I'd been staring at them for too long yesterday, they look better now I look again. Thanks for the tips - I was a bit too timid and was getting a bit overwhelmed with the colours to really address that stuff yesterday. I'll have another go tomorrow and try for more accuracy with the lights and shadows! Thanks ^_^


Didn't get much time today, was just doing some warmup shape exercises but worked them a bit more into cleaned up little characters (was planning to paint them but no time, I might save them for another time):

[JyonnyNovice]

Nothing much to show today but got this back from the illustration & logo job I did a while back. Looks nice now it's all been put together by a pro X) (not me XD)



Have a great new years eve everybody!

[rork]

Nice progress Jonny, love the direction your work is taking.  Very loose and fluid like an animator. I noticed a few posts back you were signed up to the Watts Atelier, is it any good ? I was thinking about trying out a month

[JyonnyNovice]

Rork Thanks so much! This comment made my day, I've been watching a lot of animation and really inspired by lots of old and new stuff - really so happy it's coming through in my work! I'll put my comments about Watts in your sketchbook.


Good day today but for this year I really determine to not be so chaotic with the things I do, I tend to skip from subject to subject a lot and have great plans for each thing but never follow through and end up just jumping to something else. This year I want to get some order, and focus to my work and complete some of the goals I keep setting myself!

Just revising head rhythm stuff, they're a bit wonky:

[JyonnyNovice]

Really feel like I am getting somewhere with the head rhythm stuff, gonna keep going and see where it leads.

Trying to work out a good process for doing these in digital, by the third one it was starting to form. I didn't take them any further since the more I tried to refine and develop them the more I was screwing them up, so I left it at this:



The colours are all screwed up but I wasn't trying to make them look nice, just threw some colour on for something different.

[IrishWhiskey]

Your heads are improving so much with every post!  
I think you shouldn't stop when you think your messing up the studies, they're only studies after all. keep going until they go from good to bad and bad to awesome. it happens 

That perspective drawing is insane btw 

[JyonnyNovice]

Irish Thanks man! Yea I feel really good about head drawing right now! I'll try and dig deep and push them further (went a little bit further today, but still not far enough!)! That perspective drawing is just an exercise from Scott Robertson's book, but it did turn out nice, I drew it really big on A3 paper which made it much easier to work with.


Some notes and exercise from a Michael Hampton lecture. That guy is so great at breaking things down into logical process to follow. Gonna work more on applying this stuff to portraits this week.

(If anyone wants to read the notes, there is a bigger version here: http://i.imgur.com/gCzFULD.jpg )




And some hand warmups from this morning:

[JyonnyNovice]

Photoshop is driving me crazy... many weird errors like hitting space bar to move around and it getting stuck there til I tap the pen on the page, lagging like crazy all the time and randomly crashing. It got really bad today so I switched to pencil. I went through so many guides and posts on the web to try and fix it but keeps giving me problems...

Anyone know anything to try? I use photoshop CC, a wacom intuos, I have a laptop with 8gb of ram, 64-bit windows 10 and i5 processor, I turned off all unneccessary background programs... my disk space is around 10Gb free which is not much, maybe that's the problem?

Some hands and faces (please ignore the monstrosity in the bottom left - there was an even worse one just next to it but I cut it off)

[JyonnyNovice]

Started the next course from schoolism: Painting with colour and light. Lesson 1 is about diffused natural light, must do 5 still life's in this setup. Fortunately where I work there is almost always diffused natural light in the room. Construction's a bit off but I tried doing it without lines, just thinking about shape. It was really fun! Started off simple, will try something more ambitious for the next ones.





And some portrait practice, trying to think about a theme and 60/30/10 splits and value range and stuff before painting it. Turned out okay!

[StardustLarva]

Heya Jon, good to see you're still going! I like those digital studies, I really do like the painterly feel they have. It's a good exercise too, as you said, about working without lines and focusing on forms. Good stuff.

[KurtJeremy]

ahhh the notes! keep doing them im sure its gonna help in the long run!

[AlCo]

Hei Jyonny! Lot of things, you've been practicing a lot!
Lovely still life studies, want to see moaaaaar :D

Keep going hard dude :)

[JyonnyNovice]

Stardust Thanks man, I want to start traditional painting, I joined a weekly watercolour class. Man this stuff is hard ¬_¬

Kurt Thanks for dropping by, notes are good! You've reminded me to do them more often so I'm gonna try and make notes on all my new paintings.

AlCo Thanks man, there are more... but didn't turn out so well this time ^^;


Those still life paintings above seemed to be some kind of beginners luck, since these next lot just scrambled my brains so much... just couldn't get stuff looking right... felt I was neglecting my drawing so did one in pencil too. For the next week or so at least I'm going to do one pencil still life and one digital still life per day (probably the same set of objects for each).













(The fruit ones above I drew and painted them with the light off, to practice diffused natural light, but had to turn it on for the photo, so the lighting was quite different.)

[JyonnyNovice]

Did lesson 2 of painting with light and colour. This was about value, seemed to get much better results with these.

I will give a quick summary:

They talk about 'exposure' in a drawing, which I never thought about before. Basically you decide on whether to play up the darks or the lights, and leave one of them really burned out / crushed with very little detail in it and put more rendering and details into the other one.

You set your value range at the beginning, and choose three values. If you're exposing for light, you choose the light and mid value close together, if it's for dark you choose the dark and mid closer together on the value scale.

Then really really squint hard and make decisions right at the beginning over what will fall into light, mid or dark then use the lasso tool to create shapes and start to recreate the scene in front of you. You don't have to stick to reproducing the exact values in front of you, and need to make decisions over what will fit into light mid or dark. Dice Tsutsumi says that as long as you are decisive, even if everyone doesn't agree on the result, you will make a nicer piece of art.

After getting the 3 value picture laid in, you can work on rendering the details. Starting with this 3 value painting, it's much easier to keep values working together since you know if it's in the 'darks' you should only go up a little bit on the value scale, or if it's in the lights you should only go down a little bit.

For me these worked better than my still life paintings since I'd made those decisive decisions - which did not truly reflect the reality in front of me but ended up making nicer pictures. With my paintings before I was trying to put down every single colour and value exactly as I saw it, which ended up with a kind of washed out unclear value structure.

Here is what I came up with:

(This one was abandoned cause it was getting too complex for me)











The nice thing about getting this very clear value structure down is you can play with the levels to look at different moods and everything still works together:




Finally a crappy still life! Cylindrical objects are so hard... gonna draw lots of cylindrical objects for my warm ups for a while:

[JyonnyNovice]

Starting to go again to life drawing today, warming up a bit at home first (all between 1 and 5 min poses):

Kinda feel that I haven't improved at all since the last time I went to life drawing (many months ago), despite all kinds of gesture / character study.















And a cup with a really big handle:

[JyonnyNovice]

rekindled my love for the brush pen, these drawings seem to be much more interesting than my pencil ones. Must be that I think too much when drawing with pencil.

[JyonnyNovice]

Some more experiments with gestures / figure drawing. Did a load of brush pen ones then tried to use graphite and charcoal in the same way, being bold and decisive with the lines without doing too much construction then cleaning up and adding more detail on top.







Some doodles:



Some more 3 value still life's then rendered on the top:



(I got so bored of this one so it's kind of half finished - that star shaped light is supposed to be a reflection off the plastic frame over the poster)


Not sure if the 3 value version reads so well, I'd been staring at it so long it looked ok to me, but not sure how clear the objects are:

[JyonnyNovice]

Watercolour painting class today, painting skies:

[StardustLarva]

Nice work with those watercolour skies. I think the darker or stronger areas of colour look a little muddy in some of those pieces. I'm sure you'll iron that out as you practice though(I'm awful at watercolours so I probably don't have much to offer in terms of critique). Keep going Jon!

[JyonnyNovice]

Stardust Yea, so easy to overwork them. I learned by the last one for sky is better to just do something really quick then DON'T TOUCH IT! and it often dries looking nice.


Brush pen gestures from today, starting to feel quite happy with these: