Nightdragon: used the same pic eh? heh heh, i suppose it is a pretty popular one. ive seen it several times too.
but yeah, more contrast. ive been hearing that a lot lately. im a little color shy i guess... ill see what i can do, but this may be one of those "i dont want to look at it anymore" kinda projects. thanks for the help
This, more or less, is currently rocking the back of my ipod. I say more or less because even though I can get basic character design down, I really can't draw it the same way twice.
This one was just a quickie though.
AoB: Yeah man, you should seriously do a video on taking a rough concept and finishing, just for me! The hardest part of art for me is finishing. I would also love to hear any insight you have on taking it all the way. :winky:
Flay: Make sure you're conscious of the weight of the figure and how gravity would affect it. That pose is very unsteady. You're making good progress, though.
Squid: You totally underestimate your ability to capture likeness!
Wak: Is the texture from the gesso being so brushy? Normally, I like a lot of texture in paintings, but only when it adds to the forms. It kind of works in a few spots (the side of the monster, particularly), but almost everywhere else it's disctractingly flattening. If it weren't for that, the painting would be rather solid.
Frank: Yeah, I agree with Iruka. Keep the cave. It's very Panzer Dragoon with it, and boring without it. There's just too much empty space. The closeness of the figures added much needed tension for a stare down.
Bacon: I can really only think of Snake when viewing that second one. Face cammo has ruined me forever. I really dig the confidence in those long stripes of white, though. I feel they work better on the figure than the building in the background, though.
---
I think this one's for all of those people who tell me my art is homoerotic.
I'm somewhat hestiant to make a tut or video on the idea of "finishing" because it seems to imply a break- a different mode of working, or thinking- from the normal kind of flow I use in the basic speedpaint. This is not at all the case; there is no point at which I go, "well, I am done with the "speed" phase, now to 'finish'". On the contrary, the idea is exactly the same- I start to make things tight when I decide, " I need this tighter, now". Even then, I do it as simply and quickly as I can- zoom in for a second, work a detail I want to stand out, zoom out, continue with the whole. The detailing, the 'finishing' all comes together throughout the whole picture as I work- I try to avoid working on any detail for too long.
I suppose how I would put it is, work like there's an impatient gallery owner standing out your door, just waiting to snatch your picture away. At ANY MOMENT he is going to burst in and just grab it out of your hands, and slap it on the gallery wall- you'll never be able to touch it again. You have to work in a way that ensures that at whatever point that asshole steals your shit, you are going to be confident that you will still get across what you were trying to convey, at the core.
Don't focus on details; if you work on something long enough with the idea of getting across the essentials; you will be able to pick out where the details are needed and when.
For example, painting over your painting, after establishing the light and mood I wanted, it became apparent that one of the first points that the viewer's eye was going to center on would be the head of the forward monster- therefore, there is where I needed contrast and detail. I quickly put in some glowing eyes and sharpened up the lighting there to satisfy that need, so I could then get back to the rest of the picture. I paint what is most important first to the overall effect of the painting, then the second, the third, etc.
The problem I have with the idea of a 'finishing' process is that it (at least, in the minds of many an amateur artist) eshews this idea of focusing on what is important for noodling on needless details. I see a lot of drawings and paintings where there's a shitload of details on an object- which the artist has obviously spent days rendering with great pain- when the picture as a whole would look better if that entire object, and all its loving details, were entirely put into shadow, so you couldn't see them at all! Doing so would have took 10 seconds; thinking about 'finishing' ruined the picture, and took longer. Why bother?!
In the same way: I could have detailed in the rock wall there starting with your initial painting, and I could have focused on the creature's anatomy all the way down the hairs on its nuts, but why? These things are less important than the mood, the light, the colors, the feel. If I don't have those things, I have nothing. One sharp detail in a good picture is worth more than a million in a poor one.
Now, I could keep working on this for however many hours until I decided there was nothing more that I can add that serves the basic idea of the picture, which is the point where I would consider it "finished". The "finished" piece might still be rough and loose, if the picture is better served by being rough and loose, or it might end up bursting with Where's Waldo-esque detail. It might take 10 minutes, it might take 400 hours. Who can say? I can't, until I have reached that point- and certainly no set "process" I could give you could tell you either.
Angel, that's a really helpful explanation of your thought process while you're painting. I love how all you talented people keep throwing all this knowledge at us. Thanks a lot!
AOB- You know what would rock for me, if you did a little video on flash. Like even if you just do a head turn or something but talked about the tools and stuff, I'd love a video of that.
Agh... Upcoming half-yearlies are taking their toll on my time...
Still, I managed to do a few quick-portraits of some of the other people in my english class. I'd like to post the others I did here, but seeing as they were drawn directly on to the desk in front of me it don't think it's going to happen (I erased them anyway ).
EDIT: TOTP! Noooooooooo...
EDIT: BOTP Stuffs...
And that's one sweet paintover AoB. It's always interesting to see how other people go about their stuff.
AOB- You know what would rock for me, if you did a little video on flash. Like even if you just do a head turn or something but talked about the tools and stuff, I'd love a video of that.
I'll try to see what I can do (though I can easily imagine a video about making an animation to be both very long and very uninteresting), but could you be more specific on the sort of things you'd want covered?
I'd imagine the only thing of any real complexity to cover would be how to work with symbol hierarchies- which I generally try to avoid making too complicated in any case. It usually just boils down to:
Scene 1 -> Main -> Character
then inside the Character symbol I've got my layers for the body, eyes, mouth, etc.
Usually I don't need those things to by symbols, but if you want to do Homestar Runner style animation you can make all the arms and legs and whatevers into symbols, using free transform to set the pivot point for them, then using motion tweening for their whole motion. If you need a bending elbow, you'd have something like:
Scene 1 -> Main -> Character -> Arm -> Forearm -> Hand
Since each symbol is inside each other, so you can move the arm and the forearm and hand will follow, then go into that symbol and pivot the forearm at the elbow.
Also, the reason I make a "Main" layer to put everything else inside is so I can use it as a camera, so I can add pans and zooms and shakes over the whole thing.
And uh....
Oh yeah! When you make your symbols, make sure they are set to "Graphic" and not to "Movie Clip", otherwise you won't be able to see your embeded symbols move correctly while working at a higher layer, and they won't export to anything besides .swf correctly either.
Um, was that helpful or just confusing?
PS: If it's anything involving actionscript or website making I have no clue how either of those things work, just so you know.
Well my new graphics card sort of works, but I'll be without computron for a week or so soon. Feels good to finally be able to work in color again though.
Maybe this is solely because painting digitally is hard, but they all give off a flat, airbrushed-on-an-80's-van vibe (just the face though). Also, if you toned down some of those facial features they would look a lot more feminine.
Case in point: In this picture, remove the cheek line and thin down the lips, and you should be in business.
Ravenshadows ladies aint bad, per se, but what happens is his(?) drawings tend to opt for a smooth transition of value rather than emphasis on form. The arms lose definition to go for an idealized smooth arm, the kind of muscleless stick arms you see on models, and his arms look like tubes of gradient. The faces also lose shape by trying to avoid dramatic changes in light to smooth em out and get that "model face". Forgive me if this makes no sense. I'm not hatin'. I liked the last one with the boots. That was nice.
I'd challenge Ravenshadow to do some ladies with like White and two shades of grey and no blending. Maybe some black for that lingerie they'll inevitably be in.
Joe's right, I tend to get focused on smooth transition and the longer I allow myself to work on it the worse it gets.
I'm tryin' though. I have been trying real hard to break my line dependency. So what I normally do is start with a sillhouette thenblock in shapes then take a darker color and start shading, then I tend to work, and rework and overwork something until I've kind of sterilized the pic.
I don't know. It's really discouraging to spend so much time on these and the final result is kind of sterile and boring. I'll try what you said Joe and see if I can get something better out of it.
Maybe I should post some progress shots as I work and see if maybe you guys can help me figure out where I go astray. (other than my the basic anatomy problems)
I'ld appreciate anyone elses thoughts on the matter. And thanks Joe and Godfather.
I've been picking up some figure drawing classes again, I really like drawing live models.
Please, pardon my smudging.
@Raven : When I see your work, I always have this feeling that you could get more out of it. I mean, for example this one you posted, around the eyes you've got some good contrast going on, and if you did the same for the nose I think it would be more interesting. Try using darker darks for the skin, that's how I feel about it.
Now, not that I want to go and toot my own horn, but I see as one of your major problems is the same thing I talked about for Ehm's picture: focusing on 'the finish' and not the essential core of the matter.
Now, over the past few months (or however long it's been), pretty much all your pictures have been, in essence, the same picture. Girl, in lingere, black and white, same painting technique, same perspective, same layout for the most part. Now I'm all about people doing what they love, but this seems to be the very definition of a rut, unless you were completely and entirely satisfied with how all of them turned out, thus justifying a lack of change. However, since this does not seem to be the case, and you do want to change something, the only solution is to, well, change something.
What I see in your technique is fear of change- you draw something you kind of are happy with, and then spend a lot of time dicking around, afraid of losing it. DO NOT DO THIS. You end up with a dozen little precious bits and pieces you just adore so much but goddammit none of them work together coherently, add to the overall effect. You've got a certain way of drawing eyes that you like (btw, fyi eyeballs do not glow white, they are still subject to light and shade like everything else), you've got a certain kind of nose you like to draw, you like to make your strands of hair in a certain way. This preciousness of these stupid little features keeps you from focusing on the big picture- the light, shade, the overall forms. Sure, the face might come together semi-decently, but that matters not at all if the rest of the body doesn't match.
The face seems to have a light coming from the right-front, but the arm and body seem to indicate from way to the right, not towards the front at all. Then there's some kind of intense and weird rim light coming from the left side and hitting her chest. Then there's the frilly bit on the top of the corset that seems to ignore both of these light sources entirely. And the background- who knows?
This is the result of not making a concious effort to engage the entire picture at once, and instead working piecemeal, spending too much time on any one area that you forget about the rest, or decide you like whatever one part you spent the most time noodling with that you just say, 'fuck it' and call it quits.
What is the anitdote for this?
You're not going to like it. FUCK UP MORE.
Fail fast, and fail often. Free yourself from the death-grip of "finishing" that does nothing but strangle your brain from trying anything new, or creative, or god forbid better than your standard "this is the way I do things" method. If you coddle the little tiny bit you think is good, you stop yourself from even attempting new ideas, bold ideas, better ideas, considering the picture as a whole, for fear of "ruining" that tiny insignificant piece. You'd be better off wiping that precious little piece out entirely with a big ugly brushstroke than to let it sit there, holding you back from making what needs to happen, happen.
Now I'm including the steps here, because I think it shows a good example: mainly, on the first go, I totally fucked up. My usual rough-and-tumble hard edge flat brush that seems to work so well on my usual monsters and shit failed, and failed hard. I turned her into a horse-face skeletor girl and let's face it, that's just no good. Realizing I was headed down the long road to hell if I continued in this manner, I changed tactics: forget the hard brush, forget my usual high-contrast light, I'm just going to wash in some airbursh over everything to get rid of the evidence of skeletor-girl and see if I can get work from soft-to-tight, since tight-to-soft seems to just fuck me up in this scenario. I don't draw a lot of lingere models, so this technique was kind of new experience for me- it might have failed as well. If it failed? What else is there to do but change my method, my attack, my way of thinking yet again, until I find something that works?
You don't get "bonus art points" for sticking with a single method or technique dogmatically, you only get a poor picture at the end of the day, because your priorities are misplaced in a technique, or a style, or a way of drawing the nose, and not what the whole of the picture needs in order to work. Make the picture work by whatever means necessary. If you lack the means- the knowledge of composition, light, form, color, tone, whatever- there's nothing for it but to practice, to attack those problems full force and without hesitation.
(Forgive me if I'm coming across as overly hardcore about this all, but I've recently been reading Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings, and his hardcore philosophy in swordfighting happens to be equally applicable to painting (and he says as much, Musashi himself being considered a master painter, calligrapher, and scupltor as well as a swordsman in his day). That being, all the practice and techniques in the world are well and good, but they mean nothing if you can't execute- if you can't use them to cut down your enemy (the enemy, here, being a poor painting- the sword, your brush or stylus.).
Direct quote: "Go straight to the heart of the enemy. Your main purpose as a warrior is to defeat the enemy. Do not be sidetracked by the appearances of the enemy or yourself. Do not be conscious of the particular technique you will use. This causes hesitation. If you understand this mentality, you will never be beaten.")
Saw Squids House here the other day, and in an attempt to get some value training I've started doing speed studies, just to get used to seeing different values. Here's one I whipped up a short while ago, crits are welcome. Especially any help on contrast and value in general.
Actually, what I'd love to see from AOB is some more info as to how he does his 3-D work (program and methods used etc.), mainly because I absolutely adore his 3-D.
I'ld appreciate anyone elses thoughts on the matter.
BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL!
This was just a quick value adjustment. I know it's a bit blurry and imperfect in the values, but for the purpose of my crit I hope it will help get the idea across.
I think the biggest problems in the faces, tone-wise, are that you always seem to have black lips, and black lining the eyes. The rest of the face is super-smooth and light, and the shadows on the rest of the face don't come CLOSE to the black that you've used for the eyes and the mouth. The eyes and mouth, either because you draw them this way or because this is how it *looks* with how dark they are....are always really "sharp" and outlined. It looks like you drew them with a small, hard brush, and then did the rest of the face with a large, soft one.
Contrast, my man, contrast! Full range o' values.
Although I just breezed through what AoB said, I'm pretty sure I just elaborated one or two points he mentioned.
One of the things that I do when I'm working in Photoshop is to stop, save, and then put everything on one layer. Then I bump up the contrast to pure black and white, to test my values. If something is too dark, or too light, it will make itself VERY apparent after doing this. If, on the otherhand, the drawing looks like it *could* have been a xerox of a picture of somebody, value-wise, I know I'm on the right track. If all I see is the tip of the girl's nose (and that's not the darkest part of her face)...well, then, I know I need to lighten something up.
I'd suggest something similar to you if you get caught in the white-body, black-lips/eyes rut. Just to test to see if you're using proper values or not.
Good luck to ye!
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RedPearl - pretty good! It looks like you stopped short at the bottom, though...like you knew you were running out of space for his chin, and so you just squished it upwards a bit. I think the values could be bumped up some (though if you're GOING for the "midtone shades" look, obviously, I suppose that range would be fine)...but I think making the shadows darker, and the highlights brighter would help to give Mr. Willis more form. The ear looks a little low, but without a reference I can't exaclty point out if that's what's wrong. Good, though, overall, and recognizable.
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Your picture of Benjamin Franklin's pretty good too.
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very nice squid
finishing up this painting for my illustration class. Still have a lot of things to tweak.
but yeah, more contrast. ive been hearing that a lot lately. im a little color shy i guess... ill see what i can do, but this may be one of those "i dont want to look at it anymore" kinda projects. thanks for the help
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AoB - LOL
"I'm a god damn robot. " Your commentary is hilarious and very interesting. Very cool video, you should make more!
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k, so I tried out a speedpainting, but this is 1 hour in and I'm just going to try and finish it:
This one was just a quickie though.
Dump of Yesterdaysness:
EDIT: for bombsy:
Twitter
==
Please help me make this better, gang.
AOB: I love the first one. The explody-ring it awesome.
Once again I'm trying to work on my lines and inks...if anyone has any advice...
Squid: You totally underestimate your ability to capture likeness!
Wak: Is the texture from the gesso being so brushy? Normally, I like a lot of texture in paintings, but only when it adds to the forms. It kind of works in a few spots (the side of the monster, particularly), but almost everywhere else it's disctractingly flattening. If it weren't for that, the painting would be rather solid.
Frank: Yeah, I agree with Iruka. Keep the cave. It's very Panzer Dragoon with it, and boring without it. There's just too much empty space. The closeness of the figures added much needed tension for a stare down.
Bacon: I can really only think of Snake when viewing that second one. Face cammo has ruined me forever. I really dig the confidence in those long stripes of white, though. I feel they work better on the figure than the building in the background, though.
---
I think this one's for all of those people who tell me my art is homoerotic.
Cross-eyed man.
Did you do this all in one shot? That's the only explanation I could think of when looking at that glaring error.
Pretty sure I'm the only one that'll find this scenario funny, but this is just a warm up piece I did to play with brush presets.
I'm somewhat hestiant to make a tut or video on the idea of "finishing" because it seems to imply a break- a different mode of working, or thinking- from the normal kind of flow I use in the basic speedpaint. This is not at all the case; there is no point at which I go, "well, I am done with the "speed" phase, now to 'finish'". On the contrary, the idea is exactly the same- I start to make things tight when I decide, " I need this tighter, now". Even then, I do it as simply and quickly as I can- zoom in for a second, work a detail I want to stand out, zoom out, continue with the whole. The detailing, the 'finishing' all comes together throughout the whole picture as I work- I try to avoid working on any detail for too long.
I suppose how I would put it is, work like there's an impatient gallery owner standing out your door, just waiting to snatch your picture away. At ANY MOMENT he is going to burst in and just grab it out of your hands, and slap it on the gallery wall- you'll never be able to touch it again. You have to work in a way that ensures that at whatever point that asshole steals your shit, you are going to be confident that you will still get across what you were trying to convey, at the core.
Don't focus on details; if you work on something long enough with the idea of getting across the essentials; you will be able to pick out where the details are needed and when.
quick paintover:
A "Step by step", although I wish I could think of a more appropriate name. Each frame here represents an interval of time somewhere between 30 seconds and 5 minutes.
http://bacon.iseenothing.com/otherpeoplestuff/ehmsteps.jpg
For example, painting over your painting, after establishing the light and mood I wanted, it became apparent that one of the first points that the viewer's eye was going to center on would be the head of the forward monster- therefore, there is where I needed contrast and detail. I quickly put in some glowing eyes and sharpened up the lighting there to satisfy that need, so I could then get back to the rest of the picture. I paint what is most important first to the overall effect of the painting, then the second, the third, etc.
The problem I have with the idea of a 'finishing' process is that it (at least, in the minds of many an amateur artist) eshews this idea of focusing on what is important for noodling on needless details. I see a lot of drawings and paintings where there's a shitload of details on an object- which the artist has obviously spent days rendering with great pain- when the picture as a whole would look better if that entire object, and all its loving details, were entirely put into shadow, so you couldn't see them at all! Doing so would have took 10 seconds; thinking about 'finishing' ruined the picture, and took longer. Why bother?!
In the same way: I could have detailed in the rock wall there starting with your initial painting, and I could have focused on the creature's anatomy all the way down the hairs on its nuts, but why? These things are less important than the mood, the light, the colors, the feel. If I don't have those things, I have nothing. One sharp detail in a good picture is worth more than a million in a poor one.
Now, I could keep working on this for however many hours until I decided there was nothing more that I can add that serves the basic idea of the picture, which is the point where I would consider it "finished". The "finished" piece might still be rough and loose, if the picture is better served by being rough and loose, or it might end up bursting with Where's Waldo-esque detail. It might take 10 minutes, it might take 400 hours. Who can say? I can't, until I have reached that point- and certainly no set "process" I could give you could tell you either.
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Still, I managed to do a few quick-portraits of some of the other people in my english class. I'd like to post the others I did here, but seeing as they were drawn directly on to the desk in front of me it don't think it's going to happen (I erased them anyway
EDIT: TOTP! Noooooooooo...
EDIT: BOTP Stuffs...
And that's one sweet paintover AoB. It's always interesting to see how other people go about their stuff.
Stencil I am working on for print making. We are screen printing and I have to work from the inspiration of an artist and I chose PosterChild.
Later I will add to the stencil a space cowboy shooting a laser at this here dead astronaut.
also, the texture on that painting isn't all that much. The scanner really brought it out though.
posting right after wakk.
I like that one alot wak. you should finish it, that monster is lookin cool.
couldn't get her left eye right :P
?
Do I win the prize?
Sort of expanded on my sig a little bit.
I'll try to see what I can do (though I can easily imagine a video about making an animation to be both very long and very uninteresting), but could you be more specific on the sort of things you'd want covered?
I'd imagine the only thing of any real complexity to cover would be how to work with symbol hierarchies- which I generally try to avoid making too complicated in any case. It usually just boils down to:
Scene 1 -> Main -> Character
then inside the Character symbol I've got my layers for the body, eyes, mouth, etc.
Usually I don't need those things to by symbols, but if you want to do Homestar Runner style animation you can make all the arms and legs and whatevers into symbols, using free transform to set the pivot point for them, then using motion tweening for their whole motion. If you need a bending elbow, you'd have something like:
Scene 1 -> Main -> Character -> Arm -> Forearm -> Hand
Since each symbol is inside each other, so you can move the arm and the forearm and hand will follow, then go into that symbol and pivot the forearm at the elbow.
Also, the reason I make a "Main" layer to put everything else inside is so I can use it as a camera, so I can add pans and zooms and shakes over the whole thing.
And uh....
Oh yeah! When you make your symbols, make sure they are set to "Graphic" and not to "Movie Clip", otherwise you won't be able to see your embeded symbols move correctly while working at a higher layer, and they won't export to anything besides .swf correctly either.
Um, was that helpful or just confusing?
PS: If it's anything involving actionscript or website making I have no clue how either of those things work, just so you know.
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~ 1 hour quasi SP
My Portfolio Site
Something bugs me about your women.
Maybe this is solely because painting digitally is hard, but they all give off a flat, airbrushed-on-an-80's-van vibe (just the face though). Also, if you toned down some of those facial features they would look a lot more feminine.
Case in point: In this picture, remove the cheek line and thin down the lips, and you should be in business.
I'd challenge Ravenshadow to do some ladies with like White and two shades of grey and no blending. Maybe some black for that lingerie they'll inevitably be in.
I'm tryin' though. I have been trying real hard to break my line dependency. So what I normally do is start with a sillhouette thenblock in shapes then take a darker color and start shading, then I tend to work, and rework and overwork something until I've kind of sterilized the pic.
I don't know. It's really discouraging to spend so much time on these and the final result is kind of sterile and boring. I'll try what you said Joe and see if I can get something better out of it.
Maybe I should post some progress shots as I work and see if maybe you guys can help me figure out where I go astray. (other than my the basic anatomy problems)
I'ld appreciate anyone elses thoughts on the matter. And thanks Joe and Godfather.
Please, pardon my smudging.
@Raven : When I see your work, I always have this feeling that you could get more out of it. I mean, for example this one you posted, around the eyes you've got some good contrast going on, and if you did the same for the nose I think it would be more interesting. Try using darker darks for the skin, that's how I feel about it.
Now, not that I want to go and toot my own horn, but I see as one of your major problems is the same thing I talked about for Ehm's picture: focusing on 'the finish' and not the essential core of the matter.
Now, over the past few months (or however long it's been), pretty much all your pictures have been, in essence, the same picture. Girl, in lingere, black and white, same painting technique, same perspective, same layout for the most part. Now I'm all about people doing what they love, but this seems to be the very definition of a rut, unless you were completely and entirely satisfied with how all of them turned out, thus justifying a lack of change. However, since this does not seem to be the case, and you do want to change something, the only solution is to, well, change something.
What I see in your technique is fear of change- you draw something you kind of are happy with, and then spend a lot of time dicking around, afraid of losing it. DO NOT DO THIS. You end up with a dozen little precious bits and pieces you just adore so much
The face seems to have a light coming from the right-front, but the arm and body seem to indicate from way to the right, not towards the front at all. Then there's some kind of intense and weird rim light coming from the left side and hitting her chest. Then there's the frilly bit on the top of the corset that seems to ignore both of these light sources entirely. And the background- who knows?
This is the result of not making a concious effort to engage the entire picture at once, and instead working piecemeal, spending too much time on any one area that you forget about the rest, or decide you like whatever one part you spent the most time noodling with that you just say, 'fuck it' and call it quits.
What is the anitdote for this?
You're not going to like it.
FUCK UP MORE.
Fail fast, and fail often. Free yourself from the death-grip of "finishing" that does nothing but strangle your brain from trying anything new, or creative, or god forbid better than your standard "this is the way I do things" method. If you coddle the little tiny bit you think is good, you stop yourself from even attempting new ideas, bold ideas, better ideas, considering the picture as a whole, for fear of "ruining" that tiny insignificant piece. You'd be better off wiping that precious little piece out entirely with a big ugly brushstroke than to let it sit there, holding you back from making what needs to happen, happen.
STEPS
Now I'm including the steps here, because I think it shows a good example: mainly, on the first go, I totally fucked up. My usual rough-and-tumble hard edge flat brush that seems to work so well on my usual monsters and shit failed, and failed hard. I turned her into a horse-face skeletor girl and let's face it, that's just no good. Realizing I was headed down the long road to hell if I continued in this manner, I changed tactics: forget the hard brush, forget my usual high-contrast light, I'm just going to wash in some airbursh over everything to get rid of the evidence of skeletor-girl and see if I can get work from soft-to-tight, since tight-to-soft seems to just fuck me up in this scenario. I don't draw a lot of lingere models, so this technique was kind of new experience for me- it might have failed as well. If it failed? What else is there to do but change my method, my attack, my way of thinking yet again, until I find something that works?
You don't get "bonus art points" for sticking with a single method or technique dogmatically, you only get a poor picture at the end of the day, because your priorities are misplaced in a technique, or a style, or a way of drawing the nose, and not what the whole of the picture needs in order to work. Make the picture work by whatever means necessary. If you lack the means- the knowledge of composition, light, form, color, tone, whatever- there's nothing for it but to practice, to attack those problems full force and without hesitation.
(Forgive me if I'm coming across as overly hardcore about this all, but I've recently been reading Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings, and his hardcore philosophy in swordfighting happens to be equally applicable to painting (and he says as much, Musashi himself being considered a master painter, calligrapher, and scupltor as well as a swordsman in his day). That being, all the practice and techniques in the world are well and good, but they mean nothing if you can't execute- if you can't use them to cut down your enemy (the enemy, here, being a poor painting- the sword, your brush or stylus.).
Direct quote: "Go straight to the heart of the enemy. Your main purpose as a warrior is to defeat the enemy. Do not be sidetracked by the appearances of the enemy or yourself. Do not be conscious of the particular technique you will use. This causes hesitation. If you understand this mentality, you will never be beaten.")
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Saw Squids House here the other day, and in an attempt to get some value training I've started doing speed studies, just to get used to seeing different values. Here's one I whipped up a short while ago, crits are welcome. Especially any help on contrast and value in general.
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Dang. Just flipped that thing in PS. Thought I fixed that right eye :x .
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This was just a quick value adjustment. I know it's a bit blurry and imperfect in the values, but for the purpose of my crit I hope it will help get the idea across.
I think the biggest problems in the faces, tone-wise, are that you always seem to have black lips, and black lining the eyes. The rest of the face is super-smooth and light, and the shadows on the rest of the face don't come CLOSE to the black that you've used for the eyes and the mouth. The eyes and mouth, either because you draw them this way or because this is how it *looks* with how dark they are....are always really "sharp" and outlined. It looks like you drew them with a small, hard brush, and then did the rest of the face with a large, soft one.
Contrast, my man, contrast! Full range o' values.
Although I just breezed through what AoB said, I'm pretty sure I just elaborated one or two points he mentioned.
One of the things that I do when I'm working in Photoshop is to stop, save, and then put everything on one layer. Then I bump up the contrast to pure black and white, to test my values. If something is too dark, or too light, it will make itself VERY apparent after doing this. If, on the otherhand, the drawing looks like it *could* have been a xerox of a picture of somebody, value-wise, I know I'm on the right track. If all I see is the tip of the girl's nose (and that's not the darkest part of her face)...well, then, I know I need to lighten something up.
I'd suggest something similar to you if you get caught in the white-body, black-lips/eyes rut. Just to test to see if you're using proper values or not.
Good luck to ye!
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RedPearl - pretty good! It looks like you stopped short at the bottom, though...like you knew you were running out of space for his chin, and so you just squished it upwards a bit. I think the values could be bumped up some (though if you're GOING for the "midtone shades" look, obviously, I suppose that range would be fine)...but I think making the shadows darker, and the highlights brighter would help to give Mr. Willis more form. The ear looks a little low, but without a reference I can't exaclty point out if that's what's wrong. Good, though, overall, and recognizable.