I'm sure Cake and a few of the other posters here that have had the opportunity to study under some extremely talented professors could agree with me there.
Appealing to me may not be the best strategy here. My own perspective on art is not the most popular around here either. And one thing you may not realize is that none of my teachers are even in their 40s yet. Age isn't really as important as experience. I run into a lot of older artists who have been doing shitty work for years and years and years. But they manage to make a living, some of them a much better living than I could ever hope for. But then you look at a guy like Jeff Watts who has done everything, storyboarding, inking, concepting, illustraton...fine art....and you see how young he is, and how good he is and you start to realize what is really important.
But of course, my own opinion does largely coincide with yours. Though I think when Mykonos says there is nothing you can learn in art school that you can't learn on your own I think he means there is nothing you can learn in art school that you can't learn out of art school. But here the arguement becomes ambiguous, because what really defines school? The answer is, it doesn't matter.
We learn from others, whether that be in a formal classroom or just by looking at their work...we are constantly learning. People want to get different things out of their educations though, so what may be right for one person may not be right for another. Personally, I want to be a great painter. Can I do that on my own out of school? Maybe, though I have yet to meet a particularly good self-taught painter. Most of the guys who are half decent out there claiming to be self-taught are full of shit anyways.
Schools are very different as well. Honestly, knowing what I know now and getting to know some professionals and seeing what the industry and education out there is like...there are very few schools I would attend. But I also wouldn't try to go it alone...I would make the effort to get to one of the good schools.
All that matters is who you are learning from, and what kind of work you surround yourself with. But I did the whole try to learn from CA.org shit for awhile, and you know what happened? I continued to suck. I didn't get good at drawing until I was at Watts. This forum is a great place to get encouragement, but I wouldn't say its a great place for critiques. Everyone is after something different and it becomes hard to wade through all of the different goals and justfications to deliver a good critique that is acknowledged and put into action. I find this forum more inspirational, seeing how creative a lot of the people here are and hoping that I will find some of that someday.
But for good critiques I think you need to be in an environment where the goals are very clear. And when it comes to drawing from life your goals are very clear...which is why it is such a good training tool. Sure we can look at your life drawings and comment, but it isn't going to be the kind of quality information you will get from someone sitting down on your drawing and showing you where they think you went wrong. Or hell, even as educational as just sitting next to somebody who is better than you in class.
I think it is important to get into that environment to really push you forward into a more open-minded learning experience.
If you've ever had to care for male horses then you know that these are real. And they need to be cleaned. But that's probably not a place that the doodle thread should be going...
There's very few informations that I have the pleasure of not knowing, this was one of them, and now that I know it I can never give it back.
Oh jeeze, theres someone in my college thats like 50 or 60, and hes been painting for 30 years. and his paintings are soooo bad.
How do you keep from sucking that long?...heh...
But really, I've been drawing for 6 years and my art has greatly improved. Will I hit a certain point and not be able to cross it? Or is the reason these people suck is cause they hit a certain point, and they don't want to cross it?
Like, I hit something I don't know how to draw, I study it until I do know how to draw it. Do these people find something they can draw over and over and never try to pan out of it? Like, for one, I've seen this artist here in town, all he does is keeps a close up of a persons face and eyes, I've never seen a full body shot. Are they to afraid to pan the camera back? So they just stay with what they know and not intrigued by what they don't know?
Like that dude thats been painting that long. Are all of his paintings generally the same subject? I'm asking. I need to know this.
I think it's more likely that when he says 'ive been painting for 30 years' he means 'i did a painting 30 years ago, another 20 years ago, and then maybe one or two in the last decade'.
MustangArbiter of Unpopular OpinionsRegistered Userregular
edited May 2009
Top ten resons for not improving
1. Born to suck (let's face it, some people suck no matter how hard they try)
2. Egos can't handle crticism
3. Belief that they are as good as they can be
4. Success (read cash) despite a lack of talent
5. Not willing to question themselves (see 2)
I'm sure there is something I'm missing, but Kincade's stuff didn't seem so terrible. His forms and perspective and depth all seemed pretty solid, and all the "effects" he attempted in the ones I saw worked, ie reflections on water, pooling light, etc. The only thing I didn't like was that his color theory seemed wack. Like instead of considering color of light vs. shadow he just vomited skittles onto the page. But at the same time it does give it a very magical garden gnome paradise feel that some people probably like.
starting sketch of my zombie marching band its challenging for me because its people in perspective and I cant find appropriate reference photos and leg shapes that look well... demented so yeah.. Im determined to do it by my head and perspective/ people building knowledge. I know the front leg is a little off so far but its not looking to bad I feel.
one of the loomis books have a section on drawing people in empty space using perpective grids. its freaking hard to get your head around, but even just a basic browse over will help. Perspective is frustrating. You can 'see' what you want to draw, but its hard to put it down on paper.
i 'could' easily pick apart the anatomy on that pic scos, but remembering how good your other work is, its so obvious the weird arse proportions are intentional.
There are some serious proportional issues going on there Scos. I think that if this piece implied she was small but her coat was big that it would be awesome, but to me it just looks like her torso is totally fucked.
Look at the size of her head compared to the broadness of her shoulders. Look at her upper arms...they have to be really really long. It's actually kind of disturbing because everything else about it looks so good that the proportional issues almost seem intentional. Gives me the creeps, like I am looking at some muscley body-builder guy who had his head and hands cut-off and replaced with that of a young girl's.
rts on
skype: rtschutter
0
Options
NakedZerglingA more apocalyptic post apocalypse Portland OregonRegistered Userregular
Yeah, I'm least happy with the legs. I need to redraw them so they're more perpendicular to the camera, and I think the knees and crotch need to come up a bit.
Which brown do you think should be more orangey - the light brown (hat/boots/vest), the dark outer coat, or the inner coat?
I realize having far too many can muddy an image, but why the emphasis on as few as possible? I don't have any limitations, platform wise. The Xbox handled animated test sprites that probably had 512 shades of gray.
Having said that, the palette you used is fantastic, and I'll probably redraw the sprite using it.
The fewer colors you use in a palette, the less chances you have to fuck up when animating it.
If you know that the headband, jeans and scarf are blue. highlight on headbands, jeans, and scarf is X blue, mid tone is Y blue, and shadow is Z blue, then you can keep it consistent inbetween panels.
that way when animated, you don't have flickering inconsistent transitions in between frames. look at SNK sprite work between KOF 96 and 2000, and you'll see some really good shit. However, in SvC Chaos, they fucked up Iori's sprite, and his hair flickered when he walked.
if you like my palette, remember to keep your saturation down, and keep your shadows less saturated than your highlights. Most importantly, though, keep the backgrounds even lower in saturation so that the character reads clearly against it. if you put that in the middle of a high saturated background it'll look like ass, if you put it in the middle of equal saturation, it'll blend in.
There are some serious proportional issues going on there Scos. I think that if this piece implied she was small but her coat was big that it would be awesome, but to me it just looks like her torso is totally fucked.
Look at the size of her head compared to the broadness of her shoulders. Look at her upper arms...they have to be really really long. It's actually kind of disturbing because everything else about it looks so good that the proportional issues almost seem intentional. Gives me the creeps, like I am looking at some muscley body-builder guy who had his head and hands cut-off and replaced with that of a young girl's.
It seems like I'm getting a lot of this lately. Maybe I just like fucked up anatomy
I can see the upper arms being too long, same as the last picture as well, something I should probably keep an eye on.
Overall though the intention definitely was to make it look like the coat was some huge eskimo type thing with lots of padding. I don't know what's throwing that off to make it look like she's grotesquely huge though. Maybe it's the inconsistency of the thickness of the coat around the shoulders compared with the cloth-like edges around the chest and cuffs.
It's her chest; right now, mostly because of the absence of a visible edge, but not helped by the way it's shaded, it looks like it's a good hand width too wide. I'd illustrate, but I have a feeling there are others who could do that far better than I.
There are some serious proportional issues going on there Scos. I think that if this piece implied she was small but her coat was big that it would be awesome, but to me it just looks like her torso is totally fucked.
Look at the size of her head compared to the broadness of her shoulders. Look at her upper arms...they have to be really really long. It's actually kind of disturbing because everything else about it looks so good that the proportional issues almost seem intentional. Gives me the creeps, like I am looking at some muscley body-builder guy who had his head and hands cut-off and replaced with that of a young girl's.
It seems like I'm getting a lot of this lately. Maybe I just like fucked up anatomy
I can see the upper arms being too long, same as the last picture as well, something I should probably keep an eye on.
Overall though the intention definitely was to make it look like the coat was some huge eskimo type thing with lots of padding. I don't know what's throwing that off to make it look like she's grotesquely huge though. Maybe it's the inconsistency of the thickness of the coat around the shoulders compared with the cloth-like edges around the chest and cuffs.
The best thing that I can tell you is just to make sure in these kinds of situations that you start with the figure first, and build the drapery on top of it. There is a reason people do so much nude figure drawing when in reality they will be drawing very few nude figures later on. It's so that they can fully understand what is going on underneath and what does/doesn't look wrong at a glance. With your drawing, how you fix it would really be up to you. If you made her head larger, it would immediatly correct a couple of issues. However more than a few would remain and now you would lose the scale of that coat. So i would probably go for correcting her torso. Its way too long and broad right now. If you were to move her braids her neck would seem huge. Once you fix the torso you will see how incredibly long her arms are and scale those back as well. And then I think you will have a pretty good looking drawing.
Man I really wish I could do a paintover right now. Unfortunately I am out of town and will be for more than a month. Maybe AoB will step in and do one.
Preliminary reworking of the pose. I'm somewhat restricted because the sprite needs to be reflected left and right, so I wanted him holding the gun with both hands (although for quick firing with a revolver you'd typically have one hand over the hammer...). He's supposed to be sort of half-crouching/leaning forward, but his back might have a bit too much of a hunch. Also improved the hands situation. The gray lines are where his legs would be without the duster.
I think the knees might still be a bit too low, and the right hand still looks like it's at an angle towards the camera (maybe the thumb is too thick).
Man I really wish I could do a paintover right now. Unfortunately I am out of town and will be for more than a month. Maybe AoB will step in and do one.
What am I, Big Bob's Discount Paintover Warehouse over here?
Guess so. Took a whack at it:
At first I wasn't paying attention too much to the conversation going on here, what I was getting from the picture was just a huge, oversized but not particularly thickly padded coat, like it was fitted to a 9 foot tall giant man. Hence, the first paintover. Then I read a bit and puffed it out a bit with puffy curvy folds instead of drooping sharp folds, brought up the shoulder seams a bit so it looks more fit for her frame. Looking at this now, the hips/legs are probably too wide still.
If I had to guess, it looks like you came up with that cool silhouette of the coat, and then tried to shoehorn the rest of the figure to fit it, and it ended up kind of whacking out your proportions.
Posts
Appealing to me may not be the best strategy here. My own perspective on art is not the most popular around here either. And one thing you may not realize is that none of my teachers are even in their 40s yet. Age isn't really as important as experience. I run into a lot of older artists who have been doing shitty work for years and years and years. But they manage to make a living, some of them a much better living than I could ever hope for. But then you look at a guy like Jeff Watts who has done everything, storyboarding, inking, concepting, illustraton...fine art....and you see how young he is, and how good he is and you start to realize what is really important.
But of course, my own opinion does largely coincide with yours. Though I think when Mykonos says there is nothing you can learn in art school that you can't learn on your own I think he means there is nothing you can learn in art school that you can't learn out of art school. But here the arguement becomes ambiguous, because what really defines school? The answer is, it doesn't matter.
We learn from others, whether that be in a formal classroom or just by looking at their work...we are constantly learning. People want to get different things out of their educations though, so what may be right for one person may not be right for another. Personally, I want to be a great painter. Can I do that on my own out of school? Maybe, though I have yet to meet a particularly good self-taught painter. Most of the guys who are half decent out there claiming to be self-taught are full of shit anyways.
Schools are very different as well. Honestly, knowing what I know now and getting to know some professionals and seeing what the industry and education out there is like...there are very few schools I would attend. But I also wouldn't try to go it alone...I would make the effort to get to one of the good schools.
All that matters is who you are learning from, and what kind of work you surround yourself with. But I did the whole try to learn from CA.org shit for awhile, and you know what happened? I continued to suck. I didn't get good at drawing until I was at Watts. This forum is a great place to get encouragement, but I wouldn't say its a great place for critiques. Everyone is after something different and it becomes hard to wade through all of the different goals and justfications to deliver a good critique that is acknowledged and put into action. I find this forum more inspirational, seeing how creative a lot of the people here are and hoping that I will find some of that someday.
But for good critiques I think you need to be in an environment where the goals are very clear. And when it comes to drawing from life your goals are very clear...which is why it is such a good training tool. Sure we can look at your life drawings and comment, but it isn't going to be the kind of quality information you will get from someone sitting down on your drawing and showing you where they think you went wrong. Or hell, even as educational as just sitting next to somebody who is better than you in class.
I think it is important to get into that environment to really push you forward into a more open-minded learning experience.
There's very few informations that I have the pleasure of not knowing, this was one of them, and now that I know it I can never give it back.
Check the chat thread.
facebook.com/LauraCatherwoodArt
I lol'd
the only depressing thing is that he's rawkusly rich, people are idiots = fact.
I can't wait for him to die so I can piss on his grave. I was going to piss on Rutherford B. Hayes' grave, but he's buried with his wife.
How do you keep from sucking that long?...heh...
But really, I've been drawing for 6 years and my art has greatly improved. Will I hit a certain point and not be able to cross it? Or is the reason these people suck is cause they hit a certain point, and they don't want to cross it?
Like, I hit something I don't know how to draw, I study it until I do know how to draw it. Do these people find something they can draw over and over and never try to pan out of it? Like, for one, I've seen this artist here in town, all he does is keeps a close up of a persons face and eyes, I've never seen a full body shot. Are they to afraid to pan the camera back? So they just stay with what they know and not intrigued by what they don't know?
Like that dude thats been painting that long. Are all of his paintings generally the same subject? I'm asking. I need to know this.
1. Born to suck (let's face it, some people suck no matter how hard they try)
2. Egos can't handle crticism
3. Belief that they are as good as they can be
4. Success (read cash) despite a lack of talent
5. Not willing to question themselves (see 2)
Hmmm, can we just make it a top 5?
6. Your name is Mustang
7. Having shitty teachers.
8. Death (always a popular one)
9. Quadriplegia
10. Having your limbs blown off in battle.
Also, doodle from lunch.
Pose is boring but meh
Something unrelated--
Mucking about.
Look at the size of her head compared to the broadness of her shoulders. Look at her upper arms...they have to be really really long. It's actually kind of disturbing because everything else about it looks so good that the proportional issues almost seem intentional. Gives me the creeps, like I am looking at some muscley body-builder guy who had his head and hands cut-off and replaced with that of a young girl's.
stance is awkward. avoid lining things up on a 45 degree angle when doing pixel work. it looks too unnatural.
work on gesture.
character design is generic.
i would push the brown for the leather from the yellow hue a little further into the orange hue so you;ve got come complementary play off the blue.
Which brown do you think should be more orangey - the light brown (hat/boots/vest), the dark outer coat, or the inner coat?
here's a palette i find a bit more pleasing.
Having said that, the palette you used is fantastic, and I'll probably redraw the sprite using it.
If you know that the headband, jeans and scarf are blue. highlight on headbands, jeans, and scarf is X blue, mid tone is Y blue, and shadow is Z blue, then you can keep it consistent inbetween panels.
that way when animated, you don't have flickering inconsistent transitions in between frames. look at SNK sprite work between KOF 96 and 2000, and you'll see some really good shit. However, in SvC Chaos, they fucked up Iori's sprite, and his hair flickered when he walked.
if you like my palette, remember to keep your saturation down, and keep your shadows less saturated than your highlights. Most importantly, though, keep the backgrounds even lower in saturation so that the character reads clearly against it. if you put that in the middle of a high saturated background it'll look like ass, if you put it in the middle of equal saturation, it'll blend in.
It seems like I'm getting a lot of this lately. Maybe I just like fucked up anatomy
I can see the upper arms being too long, same as the last picture as well, something I should probably keep an eye on.
Overall though the intention definitely was to make it look like the coat was some huge eskimo type thing with lots of padding. I don't know what's throwing that off to make it look like she's grotesquely huge though. Maybe it's the inconsistency of the thickness of the coat around the shoulders compared with the cloth-like edges around the chest and cuffs.
The best thing that I can tell you is just to make sure in these kinds of situations that you start with the figure first, and build the drapery on top of it. There is a reason people do so much nude figure drawing when in reality they will be drawing very few nude figures later on. It's so that they can fully understand what is going on underneath and what does/doesn't look wrong at a glance. With your drawing, how you fix it would really be up to you. If you made her head larger, it would immediatly correct a couple of issues. However more than a few would remain and now you would lose the scale of that coat. So i would probably go for correcting her torso. Its way too long and broad right now. If you were to move her braids her neck would seem huge. Once you fix the torso you will see how incredibly long her arms are and scale those back as well. And then I think you will have a pretty good looking drawing.
Man I really wish I could do a paintover right now. Unfortunately I am out of town and will be for more than a month. Maybe AoB will step in and do one.
I think the knees might still be a bit too low, and the right hand still looks like it's at an angle towards the camera (maybe the thumb is too thick).
Edited in further revision
What am I, Big Bob's Discount Paintover Warehouse over here?
Guess so. Took a whack at it:
At first I wasn't paying attention too much to the conversation going on here, what I was getting from the picture was just a huge, oversized but not particularly thickly padded coat, like it was fitted to a 9 foot tall giant man. Hence, the first paintover. Then I read a bit and puffed it out a bit with puffy curvy folds instead of drooping sharp folds, brought up the shoulder seams a bit so it looks more fit for her frame. Looking at this now, the hips/legs are probably too wide still.
If I had to guess, it looks like you came up with that cool silhouette of the coat, and then tried to shoehorn the rest of the figure to fit it, and it ended up kind of whacking out your proportions.
Twitter