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Kevin's Photoshop Drawings
Kevin R Brown
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I want to build a portfolio for myself that I can show to clients to get work (temp, freelance, FT, whatever) doing maybe concept work or illustration work for things like pen & paper games. I'm comfortable with just standard comic bookish line drawings, but I really want to learn how to do techniques like this:
...Where the scene is constructed with lighting & shading rather than lines.
Not much success yet with experimentation, but hopefully I can either dig up some documentation on methods for doing that type of work or just eventually dig-up my own method by just making crappy blob drawing after crappy blob drawing.
Anyway. Here's stuff I done:
(Pose & composition are shit in this one.
Guy is kinda just standing there; I was going for a kind of ominous effect that didn't materialize)
All that stuff's fairly recent (oldest would be about 6 months old).
...Where the scene is constructed with lighting & shading rather than lines.
Not much success yet with experimentation, but hopefully I can either dig up some documentation on methods for doing that type of work or just eventually dig-up my own method by just making crappy blob drawing after crappy blob drawing.
Anyway. Here's stuff I done:
(Pose & composition are shit in this one.
Guy is kinda just standing there; I was going for a kind of ominous effect that didn't materialize)All that stuff's fairly recent (oldest would be about 6 months old).
' As always when their class interests are at stake, the capitalists can dispense with noble sentiments like the right to free speech or the struggle against tyranny.'
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Your going to have to get back to some basics to progress. This means pencil and paper (for portability) and drawing objects from life (and pictures if need be). This will help you to build an understanding of 3 dimensional shapes. Also what program are you using to colour these? The soft round brush you are using for shading lends to these very fluffy looking forms. If you try a hard edged brush with a lower opacity setting you'll find you can hardened them up a bit more, which will give them more weight.
Could you give us a run down of what process you're using at the moment from start to finish?
Well, the sprite-sized graphic are/were intended for a long-term project in Construct, so that would by why they appear that way.
I'm currently using Photoshop CS4 with just the standard brush set; usually I use the round brushes with the fuzzy thresholds because I prefer the 'fuzzy' aesthetic. I do tend to use lower opacity settings when establishing shapes, coloring, shading & adding lighting (around 30-60 percent, typically).
Portability isn't really a concern; take my laptop and tablet with me wherever I go.
The process I use for doing the drawings is usually just the standard Set Action Lines --> Make Rough Skeletons --> Render Details --> Establish shade/lighting.
I'd love to learn how to do techniques like just building whole drawings with light sources and shading, but I'm vexed as where to find learning material.
Your mech youtube video made very little use of the fuzzy brush, however if you must use it, shore up your forms with some use of harder edged brushes. At the very least try experimenting with them.
I hope you already know this but I'll state it anyway, learning colour, forms and values isn't something your going to master quickly. It will literally take you years to get a basic grasp on the subjects and then a fuck-load more years to master. That being said, go check out the first page of the question and discussion thread.
There are a bunch of links in there that will set you on the road.
-You need to build up your basic drawing skills, your work is lacking a lot on a foundational level
-Fuzzy edged brushes look like shit; you don't know enough about picture making to have an 'aesthetic' aka 'style' yet. So stop it. All your PS drawings look muddy.
-Basically basics are your greatest asset. No amount of FX or Razzle Dazzle hides shitty foundation. You can draw, but you need to practice the right things to get good. The youtube video you posted is just someone who has mastered the basics and knows what to do with them. There's no trick. It's something we all need to work on daily. It's just repetition and practice. And practicing the right things. Hence, art forums.
Other than that, right now I feel like you've fallen into some of the traps of digital and its working against you. Find some figure classes/life drawing/still life classes and learn some fundementals. Its what you really need to learn to then build everything else off of.
Well, while I was drawing with the GIMP I used hard brushes almost all of the time; I've been using soft brushes recently because I just thought the effect was neat (I wasn't implying, "Well, they're my style,"). This would be some of the older hard-brush stuff I did:
I was just sort of 'bored' (not really the right right word, but I can't think of a better one at the moment) with the hard brushes, so I tried using the softer ones. I don't think they make the drawings look like shit, but yes, they do make them look less sharp. Since it's been recommended twice, I'll switch back to the harder brushes.
Also, while agree that Andree isn't using any sort of gimmick, it is most certainly a unique sort of style.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply I didn't use a pencil. I'm always in the process of filling-up a doodle pad. I don't have access to a scanner, though, so I can't really put any of my pencil stuff on display (...It's nothing to shout about anyway; most of it is just landscape studies where I'm just sitting somewhere and sketching the scenery)
...Really? Which 'traps'?
It's called "painting". There are lots of books that exist on the subject of painting and drawing with value. The people who work like the guy in the video you posted have serious drawing and painting chops, which means they understand in their bones the basics of 3 dimensional form, light, perspective, anatomy, composition, and other elements of picture making. They earn that understanding through years of practice and study with the fundamentals working up to that level.
If I can put some words in Wasser's mouth regarding "traps"; you are biting off more than you can chew by trying to work digitally right now. There is obvious technical fumbling with the nuances of photoshop and digital markmaking here, which only compounds the fact that the underlying foundational skills that you're trying to work with are shaky at best.
Working digitally presents a user with a cornucopia of options and tools--far more than you actually need or honestly are capable of having solid command of at this point. To put it simply, it is asinine and completely missing the picture to worry about something like the hardness of a photoshop brush when there are much bigger issues permeating the work that need focused attention to overcome.
All of those tools are certainly useful, but you don't have enough fundamental knowledge to make them work. Your desire to learn how to paint "Where the scene is constructed with lighting & shading rather than lines." might need to start off the computer drawing cubes, spheres and cylinders.
*edit
Scosglen said it better than I did
Your colours are a little iffy. They look highly saturated in areas. I'd also work with a sharper brush.
Maybe try drawing these on paper, using a fineliner, and then scan and colour digital.
I've done studies using basic polygons, 3 point perspective lines and landscapes, and I construct most of my figures (well, those that aren't sprites) from polygonal skeletons.
Thanks for the insults, though. They're tremendously appreciated.
I wasn't aware that the techniques demonstrated by Andree were of an extremely advanced caliber - I just thought it was another neat way of designing a scene.
you should probably (as wassermelone said) stop using el-cheapo photoshop effects such as the blur filter and basic gradients so often! They are ridiculously easy to spot (especially on that "jagrel sabre hound pup" which is so blurred that its scary) and only serve to make it look like you aren't confident in your own capability
as others have said, the fuzzy brushes really just aren't working for the most part. Sure, for some styles of picture they can work, but most concept art is about forming focal points, drawing the eye around an image, and making thing stand out, none of which are particularly easy to do if everything is blurry. Plus when was the last time you saw a fuzzy mech?
i'm not sure whether you still do it any more, and if you have stopped then just ignore this bit, but try not to trace so much! I'm fairly confident in saying the majority of vehicles in that last batch of images are photographs or models that you have drawn over the top of and given different paintjobs
the reason i'm so confident in saying this is because they have a definition of form and structure that is frankly lacking from some of your other work. The visible lines in the last vehicle images are scratchy and unconfident, and it is clear that you're following the crisper lines of the images underneath.
I mean I'm not trying to say that there is anything wrong with tracing to learn, but it'll help you a hell of a lot more in the long run to be able to plan out and draw those vehicles on your own (as it looks like you have begun to realise anyway!)
aaanyway that's my two cents, I hope to see more from you here in the future!
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Do you not see the differences in quality of form, perspective, tone, color, etc., between the drawing made in that video, and what you have produced? Most of what you've shown us isn't even original work, it's just copying sprites and drawings from other things (if not drawing over them). I know you did not design that dragon, I can look at your first drawing and see what you're actually capable of.
You can take this all as an insult, and that's you're choice. It's hard to hear, and I'm not exactly being nice about it, but it's just something we all learn to hear and live with. We are not born perfect, we have to practice for a very long time to get good at anything, and art is one of the harder things to be good at. Even the most talented people go to school for years, practicing scores of hours every week, and still aren't their best. If you take this seriously, you'll probably do the same.
I don't think anyone on this forum is at the level of that guy (looking at his DeviantArt), and there are some incredibly dedicated and talented artists here.
...Actually, the 'pup' isn't blurred. It was drawn with a fuzzy brush and then stroked with the smudging tool a bunch of times. But yes, I know that one doesn't look very great.
I don't think a single one of those drawings uses the gradient tool; I use gradients for backgrounds, but rarely in actual figures.
The T-80 tank was the only vehicle I traced, and that one was done a while ago. The rest of the vehicles were drawn with a photo reference; though, honestly, I think most of them look fairly bad. They were also drawn a while ago (the 'scratchiness' is due to me attempting to detail the vehicles using the Multiply function in Gimp, rather than simply using straight up black lines.
I wasn't claiming to be at Andree's level of talent; obviously I'm not, and I wouldn't dare compare my stuff to his.
I definitely drew that dragon. In fact, I drew it twice, thank to my laptop being accidentally rebooted when I was nearly done the first time and me being stupid and not saving while working. It took 12 hours in total to do; maybe it's not much to look at, but it was very hard work.
I used the Blue Dragon featured in the 3.5 Edition monster manual as the body reference as the head of the animated Godzilla character as a head reference, but did not trace either.
And since you're accusing me of stealing the sprites, where did I steal them from, pray tell? What games? It's easy enough to do a google search for whatever arcade title you think I ripped them from and show me to be a fraudster.
If I'm being defensive, it's because many of those pieces took several hours to complete and are being schluffed-off as 10 minute jobs prettied-up with effects. No doubt they don't look great, and that's fine - I'm still practicing. It's not that you're being 'not nice' (frankly, I don't care) - you aren't even offering helpful advice. Just, 'Feh. Go draw some cubes or something.'
my bad on calling it "tracing", but the major point i was trying to get across was that you need to be able to design and plan out these things by yourself if you want to get into concept art
srsizzy did not say you didn't draw that dragon, he said you didn't design it. When it comes to the idea of designing your own characters/monsters and drawing vehicles, there is a distinct difference between using something as inspiration and copying it.
with the dragon for example, saying "i used godzilla's head along with the body of a blue dragon" isn't designing a monster, it's just taking other peoples' designs and pasting bits of them together. If you're going to combine influences, you should at least try to draw them from a different perspective or something instead of simply copying the reference's design and pose and claiming it as your own design.
The same applies to vehicles; using pictures of tanks, hummers or dump-trucks as references is all well and good, but simply copying them in the angle they appear in the photo isn't really going to help you in the long run. Ideally you should be able to look at a variety of references for a vehicle, then draw it from an angle that isn't in any of the pictures! (not that you have to do this EVERY time, but would i be correct in assuming that most of the vehicles are drawn from the exact same angle as the reference photographs?)
i don't debate that you DREW those images, or that they took a long time! What i'm concerned about is that some of your designs are not actually YOUR designs, and that others are copied from a photograph and repainted instead of constructed and arranged by you personally. To someone looking for a concept artist, I think this would stick out like a sore thumb (i.e. "wait, is this bad-guy YOUR design? because it look like you copied a picture of a dodge viper and stuck a ghost on top")
aaand mid rant i am about to fall asleep so i think i will. Sorry for any runon sentences or anything, dreamland beckons :P
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I don't think anyone is telling you to straight up abandon digital work. There's no reason you should stop practicing it. But your fundamentals are definitely lacking and it's really obvious when you try to pull things off in Photoshop--which is something of an advanced medium--that you just don't have the foundation for. Practicing working digitally will increase your proficiency with the program and the tools, but will do very little to improve your drawing and painting abilities. Focusing on your fundamentals will not only improve your technical abilities, but it will improve your digital work as well. I speak from experience, as do most of us here.
It's great that you are reading up on things and using references and employing traditional techniques to construct your drawings. You just need more practice--a lot more practice, perhaps--before it shows. You're being told to go draw cubes because you obviously have no concept of how light falls across three dimensional objects, or if you do, you lack the ability to render it. Same goes for every other piece of advice you've gotten in this thread telling you to go back and work on something basic. Do you think that kind of drawing practice is beneath you or something? I don't understand why this would be insulting unless you thought pretty highly of yourself, which you claim not to.
Learn to be less precious with your work. Refusing to fix something or acknowledge that something needs to be fixed because you've spent time on it isn't going to help you get better. Being able to let go and scrap part--or even all--of an unsuccessful piece is extremely difficult, but invaluable to your potential growth as an artist. And don't come into an art community (or class, for that matter) expecting to get asspats or sugar-coated critiques. Approach something like this with the mindset that whatever feedback you get and whatever small tweak or exercise you do will help you improve, and you will.
but you should listen to these people, they are making an effort to help you with those huge posts, its rare to see so many that big.
Ah, yes, I recall this logic - I also hid behind it when I was learning photoshop / oekaki.
Pro-tip: do not use the smudge tool. Do not use dodge, do not use burn. Use brushes and colour, and nothing else, if you are so set on learning photoshop. You may have good intentions in your head as to what your smudge tool will do, but it does NOT look good, and it never will until you have been using photoshop for 10 or 12 years, I kid you not.
Listen to what people are saying here. They're smart.
Also - if you want black lines to still appear in your artwork - put them on a separate layer and colour on another layer underneath of 'em. That'll help you a lot.
Also your vehicles look very, uh, as if you painted right on top of them. If you like vehicles so much, you should try doing some studies of them. Have you done some before? Do some more! Can't hurt!
I wish my threads got so many well thought out posts. I know that all the criticism might be hard to take in but in the long run criticism is the way you'll improve the best. Good luck
Jesus christ man. What sort of advice do you think we are going to be able to give you? We will say, "Oh, you need to flange the corinthian to the ingle" and suddenly you'll paint like Craig Mullins? Theres no secret. Theres no hidden technique. What that guy in that youtube video is doing is not unique. He learned the fundementals through practice and is applying them to his painting. I'm telling you to go draw some 'cubes or something' because when looking at your art, I don't see that you've learned that yet. You may have done it before, but its not supposed to be something you do by rote. You don't JUST copy what you see in front of you... you have to do it with a critical mind. You have to analyze in your head why things do what they do. Painting has often been described as the study of light. STUDY it. General critiques are pretty much all we are going to be giving you because theres so much wrong that fixing one little thing isn't really going to help. You still need to be learning the basics.
I'm sorry that it hurts to be told that your art isn't very good. But you SHOULD be told that. You should be happy in knowing it. So many artists think they are such hot shit and because of this will never get better. Knowing that you are bad is the key to progress. Blunt critique is rare and should be treated like mana from heaven.
You need a basic understanding of light and form. You need a basic understanding of the painting fundamentals (hue, saturation, value, edges, focal points,) and you need to really focus on your drawing. Drawing is much more important right now for you. Good drawing is the foundation for good painting, and the better you are at it the better off you'll be. And when I say good drawing, I mean making marks and using those marks to properly portray the form of whatever you're drawing. Having a strong knowledge of anatomy, perspective, etc.
Do a shitload of life drawing.
If you really want to learn to paint and nothing we say is going to convince you to focus on the fundamentals, then at least read these
http://itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm
http://itchstudios.com/psg/tuts/process.jpg
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better have that tear now, while there is still time to fix it.
Anyway, Kevin R Brown, you're getting it a lot easier than most of us did (depending on when we all joined), you need to swallow your pride before you choke on it, and listen to what everyone's saying. You're trying to drive a race motorcycle and haven't even grasped bike riding.
Take each reply as a complement. Plenty of mother fuckers show up here and either get ignored or their thread locked because they aren't serious enough to take up space on the forum. People are replying to your post because they think you might be worth the time to critique. Don't get offended if someone calls something you worked on for two hours a "10 minute job." You should be wondering why it looks like a ten minute job in the first place.
People post here because it is something your friends and family can't give you: honest, skillful advice. Even the best of the best of this forum put up work that I would kill to produce and it gets put through the wringer just as bad as the new guy who posted his sketch book doodles. That's why so many damn fine artists put up their work, because fresh eyes see things your own eyes can not.
Yeah it's even more of a gut-check when you have a bunch of views and no responses.
Can't say that hasn't happened to me...
sometimes a bad reply is better than nothing, trust me.
He's not great (I'm terrible at drawing little details and doodads, so I tend to stick to easy shapes and stuff), but it's been entertaining to draw. There should be some derelict buildings behind him and maybe I'll widen the image to put some more cars in front of him to nom on.
This is a pretty good example of why people are telling you to go back to basic geometric shapes, because this drawing is impossible to read. I have no idea what I'm looking at in the middle area--It's like a rat's nest of lines. I can infer that it's some kind of monster bulldozer semi or something, and not much else.
You should post some of your pencil work.
Well, the lines in the middle are the guidelines I was using, as well as just some rough lines from while I was still figuring out what I wanted to draw. It's still a work in progress; the lines will be cleaned-up on the finished drawing.
Again, there's a ways to go, but I hope that's clearer?
This is the page out of my sketchbook for today (dug out my old scanner):
They're just a couple of images I sketched from one of my cartooning books (As you can see, I messed-up the perspective on the police car pretty badly; I drew my guide lines a bit crooked).
That's as far as he got tonight.
I know that the coloring and lighting job isn't great, but I definitely wouldn't have done any better with pencil crayons or felts.
And I'm not sure how that thing would move. Believability is a good thing to strive for. The monster bit looks like it would be too heavy and too off-balanced for the machine to move without tipping forward.
Also, your lighting doesn't seem to make sense. I see light hitting it from three different directions, and I can't make sense of those shadows.
The figure itself has the preliminary painting done.
Well, I wasn't sure about integrating the machinery into him with, say, some webbings of flesh overlapping mechanical parts. I'm still think about adding that, but part of me just says, "Well... if you lose an arm and it gets replaced with a prosthetic limb, does my body suddenly start trying to grow around it?"
It's a monster, so I know it can have different rules, but it seems a bit cliche and I can't see why all of a sudden it's body would start to grow over top of mechanical parts that were added to it.
And yeah, the lighting is bogus. I just put highlighting where I thought it would look cool.
I know, like, dick about lighting. None of my cartooning books really discuss it at length.
You have a tendency to draw these characters and vehicles at basically perfect profile or frontal views, from a mid-height perspective at 100 feet away.
You seem to be avoiding the use of linear perspective like the plague, which is a pretty odd thing to do for someone who seems to have an interest in mechanical and vehicular designs.
Cool; how would you recommend I fix that (or future drawings) to make it 'pop' more?
...I don't think you intended it this way, but I actually take the first part of that to be a huge complement. It's kind of what I'm going for in a lot of my stuff; I grew up with Contra, Metal Slug, Captain Commando, Double Dragon, Ninja Turtles, etc, and so that's the art that's most burned to memory for me.
So, err... thanks? :P
Sorry, I don't mean to be a dickhead or anything; what do you mean by linear perspective? I'm used to the terms 3/4ths perspective, top-down, front, side, etc, as those are the terms used by the drawing reference books I have.
as in a lot of your drawings (such as the most recent one) are drawn from simple straight-on perspective, with no exciting angles or anything
and i'm pretty sure that carries over to what he was saying about vehicles; drawing them from weird angles and in strange positions is a great way to learn, plus it makes things a million times more interesting visually
games like contra, metal slug et al. are awesome in motion, but often not particularly amazing when you just see a sprite side-on
even if you want to get into designing for that style of game, it will still help a hell of a lot to be able to draw whatever your design may be in different ways, to show off just how awesome your designs are to any prospective clients
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It's flat because of the things I mentioned-- that the drawing is in almost profile at a medium height at an apparent great distance-- a habit that you probably picked up because it lets you get away with not having to deal with difficult perspective problems. It's basically the difference between this:
and this
You may be saying to yourself, "but my monster struck is slightly turned, it isn't in total profile!", and yes it sort of isn't, but it still isn't following any kind of perspective that we would expect it to.
I made a little gif to illustrate further. I redlined a rough "cage" to represent the truck as a simplified block in order to show its perspective lines, or rather, lack of perspective as we get no sense of the parts of the truck further away from us receding into space (this is how our eyes work). The final frame illustrates how a layout with approximated linear perspective might be aligned. Hopefully this gets the point across. I could try to say a bit more but honestly I am not an expert on perspective so I will stop myself here.
Those games looked like they did because of hardware limitations in the early 90's on what could be done with videogame graphics. You can still emulate the style and spirit of that stuff without chaining yourself to some arbitrary technical limitation which makes absolutely no sense in the context of illustration.
This is what I mean by Linear Perspective-- you should be able to find a wealth of information on this subject with even weak google-fu.
Learn the basics of how to draw. Then you can draw like Metal Slug because you want to, not because you're forced to.