I was thinking I should try to motivate myself to post more online and hopefully this sketchbook might help me do that. I will try to update it now and then with random studies, experiments and sketches i do.
These are my 2 first attempts at bringing something from b/w into color, I kinda got carried away and stopped looking at the refs when i started adding color and painting on top of the b/w.
Not much to say really-- Just keep doing what you're doing. When you think you can't draw anymore, draw for five minutes extra, and see how much you can improve your studies.
Hey there, welcome to the forums! Public accountability is a powerful thing; it might be intimidating at first, but it pays off immensely in the long run. Especially with critiques and challenges to participate in!
You're doing a great job on your studies from what I see here. Most of what I could crit is more a question of repetition and experimentation rather than advice, but I do have some tips for you
Be careful with the colours in your shadows. Shadows are almost never black or lacking in colour information like that. In fact, shadows tend to be more saturated that the lit area. It's easy to run into that issue if you're working from grayscale, and colouring afterwards. There's nothing wrong with that process, but if your values aren't super tight or are too dark/light you'll get kind of muddy looking colours.
Also, when you're colouring b&w pictures, try to think in the long term. Photoshop doesn't really have an effective, single way to colour grayscale, and in my personal experience a lot of the blending modes kind of suck for colouring on their own. They can accomplish certain things, but for the most part I have found using a variety of adjustment layers and masking them to certain parts is way more effective than painting manually on a soft light layer or on any regular painting layer.
i can expand a bit more on that technical side if you want, but I hope that helps and keep on workin!
Nice work on the portraits. Colour is really intimidating at first, but it will eventually become your friend... or at least not your worst enemy. Don't be afraid to interject various colours into your skin. Reds and pinks around the nose, cheeks, and lips and chin; blues, greys green around the eyes... the possibilities are endless. Truth be told, as long as your values are correct then, for the most part, you can kind of get away with uses crazy colours. This confidence will come with time. Good work!
Bookend, yeah I should probably try to push my things further : )
thank you patrick, feels good to be here! Yes I feel very exposed posting, especially with such great artists on this site. Ah yes, regarding the shadows being filled with color, I havent quite taken that information to heart yet. I very recently started to do master colored studies, and it kinda blew my mind how much color they use in the shadows, truly eye opening. I will have to keep that in mind : ) I think I would prefer to work with color straight away, but I also feel I am not good enought with colors atm, I tend to loose the values, or end up using only one color basically. Then again working with b/w can give a quick nice read to see if works i think? I guess I should use a color palette when i start on a new picture, I am not really well versed in this area.
pindurski, I think we are still at war me and color, but we are working towards a truce. Oh you are so right, I hope I will learn this with time, I should explore that more, throwing different colors into the mix.
I started drawing an orange on my desk, and for some reason i didn't work out, so I ended up doing this kinda quick draw of fedor emelianenko. The phantom of the opera is something i did a bit over a month ago, when I had first tried out a few color master studies and learned a little about colors, before this my coloring was a trainwreck, now i feel they are geting at least, passable but there is still a lot to work on. I'll stop rambling now, and thanks for the feedback!
It's hard to get into the habbit of posting skeches in my sketchbook, but here are some sketches from this morning. I haven't allowed myself much time to draw random things, I have mainy done studies past year. These are not graet, but it was really fun and i will definitly do more of just these random things. Doodles inspired by whatever song was currently playing in my headphones, except for the bottom middle that is just a doodle from firefly.
I'm not good at keeping my sketchbook updated i fear, but I mostly do studies atm that I imagine people don't find very exciting, figured I'll post some anyway more for my own sake then anything else since i aim to become a little more active in art communities : )
This is just a bunch of faces that I sketched out, not sure how long it took, i sketch them inbetween doing other stuff over the course of 2 days. I'm going to take a week or two and sketch some faces every day to see if I can improve some understanding of the planes, anatomy etc.
some randomness, the girl im a bit unsure of, I had some idea about a sci-fi version of little red riding hood. The other one is some kind of shaman : )
a cowboy bebop thing, I tried setting up the color palette before coloring, in the past I have kinda just thrown in whatever I felt could work. Seems this can be quite useful, at least when I get to try it more and learn more how to select colors etc.
Well I am just horrible at keeping my posting active, either way I keep drawing every day and hoping to improve. I think I am geting a bit more comfortable with brushes and color. I have a hard time finishing up pieces, but I tried to add a little more time into the varys study, I would say somewhere around 3 - 3,5 hours, I should still probably work to push it further and see how far i can take it.
