Punky Sketches

[smrr]

Alrighty Top Cat, firstly, take a breather - inhale, exhale. Getting better at art is all about getting frustrated, seriously. If you're not feeling uncomfortable like you are right now with these landscape thumbnails, well, you're not thinking/pushing yourself hard enough. Right now, you're working outside your comfort zone and you're not used to it, so every part of your being is trying to retreat, but don't give in-!!

What lurch was saying about readability is true. When you have too many breaks in values, the piece on a whole can somewhat look messy and in turn make it hard to read. Now, here's the thing. You have 4 values to work with using those copics. That's all you need to make incrediballs images. But you need to use them wisely and make every stroke count, just like in a painting. Don't just move your arm/hand in a sporadic movement when shading form in; by doing doing this, you're not actually communicating what the shape is  that you've drawn - give every shape a little TLC, because they're all unique to these:




Now, you wouldn't believe how long it took for my to render that sphere... and I am still unhappy with the result. So, I'm trying to show you that you should take time making a brushstroke or a mark on paper --  really try and follow the form. Wrap around shapes. You wouldn't believe how much this'll help your drawing out. 
I know this sounds tedious and probably boring, but if you think about this when drawing, things will become easier. For example, by adding those two simple shapes together and playing around - you can create rocks/mountains/whatever




Again, this took me a while but I'm trying to explain that understanding these things take time. Don't be afraid to take your time and try to understand what you're doing. Now the final rendered rock-thing "Pacman Rock" still has that 1-2-3 read with the values, but I thought about light intensity, so that may change the high value of white on the top facing rocks. If you don't know about it yet, there's a book called Color and Light by James Gurney, it's a goldmine and I recommend you check it out because he does a hella better job at explaining thing than I could.
But basically what I'm trying to get at with this paintover is: you need to think about all objects, even people in this way. Wrap your lines/brushstokes/marks around form to help describe it better. You only need to use 1-4 values max in the beginning stages of creating an image, once you have the sketch made with forms reading well (like number 2 of the painting thing I did), you can go in and render more minute details, adding in the full value range if you want.
So work from big to small shapes. Get the big picture down, then think simple values, then expand on this. Now, I know you're not a digital painter, so this may not relate, however, I'll talk about it anyway: it's like when you're working on a painting digitally - you wouldn't start by being zoomed in and working on the canvas zoomed in from the get-go. You would instead work from a canvas size similar to a thumbnail to get the "big picture" down first, get the composition looking right (which you can do easily by contrast of shapes btw :D shape language and negative space are really important in creating interesting designs, I'd recommend looking into this, it'll help you out a lot with these assignments), and then zoom in gradually as you add more detail, etc. 

I hope this helps you in some way, I'm terribad at explaining things... so I apologise for that. But  yeah, anything's possible, Top Cat - just gotta change your mindset and adjust to each problem that is thrown your way.

Keep at itttt-!! <3

[meat]

Smrr got it!

[Punk-A-Cat]

another sketch dump, mostly hands and feet, going from quicker timed drawings to more lengthy ones, and an attempt to figure out landscapes in watercolours so I can do the EDRocks assignment (excuse orange paper, got given a bunch of free paper - reams worth, but it's slightly garish on one side, and I refuse to waste good paper on timed drawings, besides which, the orange is quite nice to draw on..just..loud o.o )

[ZombieChinchilla]

Hey, Punk! You seem to be doing great, your sketches are improving a lot! Keep kicking ass, and I hope your hand gets better soon!

[meat]

Try doing contour sketches where you try to keep the line being 1 continuous line for as long as possible (like peeling apple with a knife), purposely following and exaggerating the curves along the form of your hand. The end result will most likely be very ugly drawings but that practice helps you remember what the curves are on a hand, and later on when you draw from memory, you'll remember better. Also your contour drawing will eventually start to look actually kind of cool. Unlike what I just did here. 

[Pax]

Damn Punk, these sketches are seeing major improvement!

[RottenPocket]

Puuuunk, it's been too long, where you been?

[Bookend]

Punkyyyyy! Come baaack!

[Punk-A-Cat]

Well, it's been ... uh.. 9 years????
I hit wicked anxiety/ art block and RSI issues and pretty much stopped doing art around 2018, and I'm slowly and very rustily trying to enjoy the process again.

I am definitely not cut out for the whole art industry thing, I had work in an art gallery and ended up really hating the entire process of trying to "make art that will sell" which seems entirely elusive, especially as I've basically become an animal artist (it's what I enjoy painting, but I would still really like to master drawing people well enough to make a comic, I'm just gonna work on that slowly)

I managed to publish two children's picture books, and I don't particularly want to do any more, especially as I had to do the layout and typesetting etc on them as well, which I hate. I guess it's good to know what you *don't* want to do XD

Can't remember how you post images here, *shrugs*

[darktiste]

Drag and drop into the box or click the box to open your folder and select the file manually.

Make sure the size of the file respect the limit i think it something like under 2.1 mb.If the file is to big i recommend cropping if possible or reducing the quality by changing the file to jpeg in photoshop if you have acess to the software.

You can drag and drop multiple file at the same time into the box so it a good idea to keep what you post in the same place that way you can upload everything in one drag and drop.

[Jephyr]

Welcome back. Yeah, sometimes living the 'art' dream can become a grind especially when we're tryin' to make a buck out of it.

Hope you can get back to health and making art again and will post as you do

[Punk-A-Cat]

aiyo, so I'll just dump this here XD I haven't given up art totally! But damn it was a close call for awhile there, I do not do well under pressure.

I hope everyone here isn't suffering too much with the whole AI thing, I figure it comes for concept art pretty hard, which sucks, but I've heard that it's pretty incapable of doing what the industry wants so fingers crossed it's fire burns out fast.

[Damien Levs]

Feng Zhu has just recently released a Design Cinema video talking about what AI cannot do. It was quite an interesting watch. It basically boils down to the fact it isn't consistent in designing anything. It can't solve design problems.

I think it does hold a threat against digital illustrators though. So I hope all the forth coming court cases etc make haste. Because that would be a big shame.

Please don't don't completely give up art. You got something good going here. I especially love that kitty portrait. Really nice contrast in there! Looking forward to seeing some more!

[RottenPocket]

Yaaaayyy Punky's back!