Naked people

Brolo

Trying to do some studies and render more realistically from memory. These are from the past few weeks when I can squeeze in time between classes. It's rather annoying being an illustration student and not having time to draw.


The faces aren't good. They don't match up with rendering on the bodies at all. Not really sure where to take the rendering from here. I want to move towards photorealism, but my anatomy isn't good enough, I'm not sure what to do with lighting (especially anything more complex than single light sources) and for the life of me I can't get my brush strokes to look 'sharp' or 'finished' in painter.

DeeLock

There's no shame in looking at references...just as long as you don't meticulously copy them.

There's numerous anatomical issues but the main problem for me is that fuzzy brush you're using...i don't think that it's helping you much.

Take your time and keep at it!

IZRA

actually the brushes look fine to me. obviously you want them nice and clean, to which i say you need to use one of the opaque brushes at 100% opacity.

I say you do more renders with ref, but what i would focus is the posing and body shapes, don't bother with rendering light and shadow. i say this cause you will run up to this wall where you can have a good grasp on colors (and you do) but the anatomy issues will drag your composition down. just do a thousand simple , small, sketches of figures and tell me later if you don't feel a difference(or see it).

Scosglen

It's hard to comment on the anatomy. The overall proportions aren't outrageous or anything but all three of the paintings lack appreciable definition, and there are scads and scads of subtle muscle and bone landmarks that are missed or too simplified which make the figures less convincing. The second one doesn't even have a navel, for instance. This just needs time and practice for now.

I think your main problem with the rendering is edge control.

You have too many fuzzy, partially opaque bits of errant strokes jutting out and confusing the contours of your forms. The feet on the third one are an indecipherable mess. You need to go back in with a small hard brush if necessary and clean things up along the major shape changes, or everything will just look hazy and messy.

Form shadows on rounded surfaces, like those of the human body, terminate softly--ugly, layered, semi-opaque strokes on top of each other is not going to achieve this illusion. Careful blending with a softer, larger brush is one way to achieve convincing gradients.

It might be to your benefit to try working in grayscale until you get a better handle on rendering, and I'm going to suggest contrary to DeeLock that you might want to try taking a small section of a reference photo and reproducing it as exactly as you can in another window as a way to practice this.

rts

Hey Rolo man. Honestly, anatomy is like the last 2% of learning to draw well from life. My anatomy knowledge is poor but I am fairly confident drawing the figure from life. If you are not drawing from life draw from reference. And again, anatomy is not a major factor early on. I would put down the wacom for a bit as well if I were you, and try just drawing on good old fashioned paper. Its a bit more honest a medium and you will be able to make more accurate observations about what you need to work on.

Underwhelming

IZRA wrote: »

just do a thousand simple , small, sketches of figures and tell me later if you don't feel a difference(or see it).

Great advice. Definitely do that. It's crazy how much of a difference that makes.

Mykonos

Underwhelming wrote: »

IZRA wrote: »

just do a thousand simple , small, sketches of figures and tell me later if you don't feel a difference(or see it).

Great advice. Definitely do that. It's crazy how much of a difference that makes.

Yeah, it really does help; at a minimum it has at least boosted my confidence a bit. I think part of the challenge is just struggling to move beyond to what you think looks right in a drawing and pushing on to make sure it is right.

Btw, In photoshop (not sure about painter) some brushes, especially spackle brushes, tend to become real fuzzy if ur working in a high resolution and your forced to drastically increase the brush size. Could be why your having a tough time with that but again I'm not that familiar with painter. For me I ended up having to dl custom brushes or make my own - which is fun as hell btw

Brolo

I think I kind of understand what you guys are getting at. I started fooling around with these drawing from memory exercises just bcecause I'd kind of start painting them absentmindedly and then followed through with them afterwards. However it's kind of pointless to paint something when you don't know what it looks like.

Right now I'm doing some live model drawing thanks to me finally having an illustration class, which is awesome. We're studying the human head right now. I can't wait to work with actual nudes. If I had more time with it I think I would do more traditional media studies. For the time being I'm going to kind of focus on my goal a little bit and learn how to do brushstrokes properly in Painter by reproducing some photos as accurately as I can.

Also Cake... glad to see you man. I hope you've got more stuff for us soon in your AC thread. I'll start posting some of my traditional anantomy studies soon.

rts

Rolo wrote: »

Also Cake... glad to see you man. I hope you've got more stuff for us soon in your AC thread. I'll start posting some of my traditional anantomy studies soon.

My new quarter at school started almost three weeks ago but I have been sick for most of that. Hopefully I will have some stuff to upload soon. I look forward to seeing some more of your studies.

Brolo

I painted this and then got pissed off with how much it sucked. Didn't bother finishing the sky, the radiosity effect I was trying to go for looks like bad xbox lightbloom, and the field of wheat is too distracting - it ended up looking like a bad photoshop filter. Ew.




So then I painted this and it seemed to go a bit better. It's based off this guy, which I've had sitting on my desk in various poses for the past week. They're really cool for studying lighting and poses and such.

desperaterobots

I think you should be working exclusively on paper and pencil dude! Just so you spend less time working on lighting and texture and more time getting the shapes right. I'm not the best with full figures and the last thing I'd do to learn would be to fire up my computer :P

Mustang

I have to agree with desperaterobots, it a big improvement but I think you're blowing a lot of effort lighting these things rather than getting the basics down. I hardly ever do full blown pieces, mainly because I don't think my basic skills warrant the effort yet and my time would be better spent getting my forms sorted.

Though I will say this, that hand on the last one is fucking great. and the way you light you charachters really makes them pop, so a round of applause there.

rts

These are cool and I think there are a lot of really succesful elements of that first painting. You are too hard on yourself.

Rolo if you are interested I would love to take a look at what your process is. Maybe if you want to pick a piece of reference and post it and then do a 20 minute sketch from it. I think I might be able to give you some good information in that case.

The_Glad_Hatter

desperaterobots wrote: »

I think you should be working exclusively on paper and pencil dude! P

If it's the anatomy/ realism you're after, i'd say it's better to stick with graphite. a lot less time wasted and less distraction.
it's like a 21inch CINTIQ... but cheaper..

And if you also want to improve your digital rendering skills, perhaps you can digitally paint over your pencils.

But trying both digitally will probably just give unsatisfactory results...

edit: not that i'm saying these suck or anything; the lighting in the last one looks great. But there's some small problems that could be fixed quicker if you focussed on the drawign and the painting seperately...

desperaterobots

But what's the point rendering skin and hair and lighting flawlessly, when underneath the figure is a disjointed mess? Not that these are all that bad, but I think it would be faster to perfect drawing people with a pencil. It's faster, you can't ctrl-z so you can keep a record of your errors...

I don't think I'm being too much of a traditionalist here?

Iruka

I agree with glad and des, Painting and drawing are different skills. These are all pretty okay lighting studies, but it looks like you don't know how to put a line down. Try doing some line drawings and refining your shapes. If you can start to understand how to make volume with just a line, it will serve you wonders as you move into painting.

Brolo

Hey, thanks for the crits guys - I actually do a fair amount in pencil and paper, but I generally don't post it since scanning stuff on my comp requires manually installing a bunch of drivers every time I restart the compy (does anyone know why that happens?).

Anyway, did a few scans today of recent stuff just to show what it looks like. The first one is a bit older but I included it for completion's sake:

Cakemikz wrote:

Rolo if you are interested I would love to take a look at what your process is. Maybe if you want to pick a piece of reference and post it and then do a 20 minute sketch from it. I think I might be able to give you some good information in that case.

I'll give that a try, Cake. Although my sketches tend to go really slowly.

desperaterobots

Your pencil stuff is focused on "shading" rather than "line" and while they're both important, I'd say focusing on getting the lines right before bothering about rendering form will be more helpful to you at this point.

Brolo

Heya Cake, this is pretty much when I do when I draw:



Trying a bunch of poses. I know I want her reclining, but I'm fiddling around with angles and lighting, trying to find something with decent balance.


I like this one a lot, especially the shadows being cast over her midsection.


Basic torso and pelvic discs laid out just to get a feel of how big this is going to be on the page.



Fleshing out the main sections and connecting the limbs together.



Adding some details and putting down lines for some of the basic shadow information.


Beginning to do my shading. I'm using a pencil set that ranges from F to 5B, and trying to balance things out between those ranges. Generally I start rendering at the top and just move all the way down to the bottom. Generally I put in the lightest, basic tone first, and then darken in and build up the shadows by switching to a darker pencil.



And... that's pretty much done. I screwed up the shadows on both of her feet, I was trying to make them appear more rounded with a bit of shading as they tapered away from the eye, instead they look like they're got an outline around them.

Also not sure what to do to not make my pencil lines look so scratchy. I'm not putting a whole lot of pressure on the paper, so I don't really think it's scoring the page, but sometimes my pencils get so grainy that it makes things like her mid-section and left shoulder look more spotted than shadowed.

Anyway, anything you can advise from here would be most welcome.

Mustang

Where did you get that thing? I must have one!

Demi Gourd

The above draws seem kind of blurry, but you shouldn't draw with outlines if you don't want to. Just try and define the contrast more? The forms just look like they're blending into each other and the background.

Have you tried drawing in the shadows instead of drawing in the light source? (Draw on black paper with white pencil.)

misosoup

is it just me, or does that model look anatomicaly fucked?

Tiny waist, massive head, and her boobies look like a childs drawing rather than the normal meat sacks any naked lady I've ever seen has posessed.

Brolo

Mustang wrote: »

Where did you get that thing? I must have one!

They're Art S. Buck models that I picked up from Curries. They sell for about $25 each here (Toronto), but I bought them and my adjustable lamp as a set for $40.




They can stand on their own, but with the supports that they include you can put them in off balance poses as well.

Iruka

You need contrast, and personally, I think you also need angles. Every think is getting all goopy, and you are favoring lumps over core shadows. Im an ass at explaining this with just words, so let me try this:

You have a nice drawing going, but then you rub it all out and get grey areas. Look at all the black in your reference, and then yours is like, super grey. Try some black and white drawings, even if you choose to not use line, you should try simplifying your shapes and applying it to your shading along with the figure.


You also miss the grey in the BG, which is defining the light edges of that figure. there are solutions for this, some better than others, but when doing a graphite drawing you want to shade those areas if you aren't going to use line. Theres a back and forth between value and line drawing that you have to figure out how to straddle. When the background starts to work, you should be aware of reflective light (I over emphasize it but whatever) its important for defining shapes in shadow, and you should look for it in your references.

hope that helps alittle.

Ravenshadow

I don't know if this is intentional or not but your also drawing the little toy you have, not a figure. All the drawings you've done from them have this stiff unnatural pose (like the figurines), and no muscles (also the breasts on the girls are unaffected by gravity). Of course your drawing from the toys so its understandable, but try and use the toys as a guide, don't draw the toys. (unless that's your purpose, but with the extra detail you put in the faces and hair it doesn't seem to me like thats what you want)

Look back over the figures you've posted here and you'll see what I mean.

Jimpy

This thread is going to have a lot of views...

rts

I am going to try to find some time to do a bit of an in depth explanation here myself, but right now I am in an illustration workshop with Glen Orbik until Friday. My main comment right now is that I would rather see you draw from actual people/photographs than these models right now. Not that they are bad, but I don't think you have enough of a basis in reality yet to make good use of them. They are more for assistance in inventing figures down the road than use as serious drawing reference.

Shiboe

Ravenshadow wrote: »

I don't know if this is intentional or not but your also drawing the little toy you have, not a figure. All the drawings you've done from them have this stiff unnatural pose (like the figurines), and no muscles (also the breasts on the girls are unaffected by gravity). Of course your drawing from the toys so its understandable, but try and use the toys as a guide, don't draw the toys. (unless that's your purpose, but with the extra detail you put in the faces and hair it doesn't seem to me like thats what you want)

Look back over the figures you've posted here and you'll see what I mean.

This is what I was going to say. You're drawing comes out really stiff, and rightly so, you are basically drawing a robot toy. IMO use the toy model thingy for clues on shadow and perspective, and really nothing else. Beyond a basic silhouette, these can never be true references, they just aren't complex enough.

Brolo

Yikes! What a bunch of great crits so far!

I think the consensus is to lay off the models, since they're not a proper substitute for the real thing. I've already become a bit frustrated with how to put down skin folds and musculature with them. The main problem seems to be balance and weight - there's just no way for a plastic figurine to show it accurately.

I suppose I'd better start drawing from photos, since I don't have access to live models during the summer.
I've always been reluctant to work from photos, since I tend to just "trace out" angles by eye. It makes for a pretty big leap in rendering quality, but I can't deviate from the photo at all. I'm pretty sure that I'm not approaching it the right way, but I'm not really sure what else to try.

I'm still trying to get a grip on where to go with my pencil work. One problem is just how to hold and shade with a pencil, period - I can't get shaded tones or gradation that looks consistent at all, instead I get this grainy mess. I don't know how to solve that. Maybe a change of grip.

Ultimately I want my work to look like this:

but I'm not sure where to focus on or what changes to make in order to get there.

Oh, and thanks for the pointers and paintover, Iruka.

desperaterobots

Practice practice practice. If you draw enough these things will just start clicking together. But you just have to hammer away and try to pick something up with every drawing you do, keep analyzing where your weaknesses are and focus on that. It will come in waves. You'll be really proud of a drawing for a while and as you develop you'll look back and see that where you got the shape right, the shading was awful. Or vice versa. And eventually you'll draw something where everything looks great, and you'll still want to be better, and that's where the alcoholism comes in to it.

I may have veered off into more subjective territory but I think there's some good advice in there somewhere

Mustang

desperaterobots wrote: »

Eventually you'll draw something where everything looks great, and you'll still want to be better, and that's where the alcoholism comes in to it.

Ha! Now there's a quote!