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shifty_uk
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Heard about this forum a few times from Makunouchi, thought I'd take a look. Lots of talented work in the Doodle star thread, impressive 
Some very recent work to begin with:
Some very recent work to begin with:
shifty_uk on
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I told you this was a good place! Loving the colours in the Stormtrooper helmet, it made me want to go away and try a Darth Vader one.
Also if you haven't noticed there are some awesomely helpful links right here: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=105734
The stormtrooper helmet.... I made a noise. It went like "OIIOOOOooooh!"
Some technical suggestions-
Use much bigger brushes. You have pretty "bold" brushwork in these, but it's too squiggly and fiddly in many places. Try to use the fattest brush you can get away with for a given stroke, and think more about stroke economy.
Varying the levels of finish within a piece can be an extremely powerful compositional tool-- bringing only the most important focal points of your painting up to a higher resolution of clarity, care, and contrast, while letting the more ancillary areas remain a bit looser and rough-hewn. The eye craves for pockets of concentrated detail where it can rest and linger as it moves across the canvas, and by carefully controlling how much and where they are placed, it's easy to sort of trap the viewer's gaze. Currently, none of these pieces has areas rising appreciably above what I would describe as rough or somewhat muddy. You can have a rough and dirty and highly textural style, but adding some peaks of polish that poke through will make the work that much more interesting to look at.
I'm less of a color theory expert, but I would also recommend against going so quickly to blacks in your core shadows, and to be more careful about the layering of colors on top of those really dark near-black values. I'm particularly looking at the shadowed areas of faces on the first two portraits, and what looks to be partially opaque flesh tone strokes made over very dark core shadows. The black just sucks the life out of those colors when they mix, and you end up with really muddy looking flesh. I would suggest manually picking the color you want and applying it opaquely as much as possible to retain some vibrancy when working on top of blacks. There's also something to be said about holding back your darkest darks, so as to retain their power (just like lightest highlights). The longer you can play around in the midrange and hold back on the extreme values, the richer your painting ultimately ends up.
I love impressionist art and the fact that you took the idea and applied it to a stormtrooper helmet is amazing.
I also love the knights on horseback one. Very nice color use
All Photoshop, I'm rather obsessed with making my paintings have that 'traditional' look.
People often like or criticise my work but very rarely will someone take the time to write up technical imperfections or ways of improving in such depth, particularly with technical knowledge - Thank you
Her eyes are actually closed ;-) At least, that's what I intended, hehe.
Thanks. As said previously, I'm rather obsessed with dramatic lighting and often try to replicate the methods of traditional oil artists
Well I only got my tablet at Christmas time so I'm not really that confident with it yet, line work is really difficult for me, I'm having trouble getting used to the surface and judging the distance between the pen and the surface. Also I hadn't used photoshop at all before getting the tablet so I've had to learn how to use that as well.
I posted something in the doodle thread just now which was basically just painting practice, I've got a long way to go :P
(I basically stole your idea I hope you don't mind ^^)