Jeckal's Hydeout for Artsies

Jeckal · November 2010

So I got my act together and uploaded some stuff so
now I can link it here.

I should talk about myself too, but blah, all i can say is
that Im pretty much self taught, I get a medium and play with it.
I mostly draw portraits and love eyes. I draw musicians and starting on moviestars.

Anyway to the art and stuff....feel free to crit my work aye.
DOODLES

Hairy Chick

Eyes are looking at you

DRAWINGS

Kirsten Stewart

Bob Dylan

Jared Leto

Combination of all my people drawings

PAINTINGS

Hot Chip Dude

Dave Ghrol

Matt Bellamy

My Cousin Harrison

The Beach

DIGITAL

Random Peeps

David Beckham

Pete Wentz

Jared Leto

James McAvoy

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Bday card

Mustang · November 2010

Kudos on the thread title.

Your biggest failings that keep coming up is the placement of facial features, i would suggest when you doing stuff digitally to flip your drawing horizontally. It sounds stupid, but your eye gets used to looking at the picture one way, when you flip it it gives you a new perspective on it and it will highlight any flaws that have crept in.

If you working in a traditional medium like pencil or paint, hold your art up to a mirror to obtain a similar effect.

When working on anything I try to flip as often as I can, otherwise you can get beyond a point of no return where it's easier to start again than fix.

Angel_of_Bacon · November 2010

Some pretty good stuff here- but your work does show the unmistakable signs of someone who has learned primarily through copying from photographs and not working from life, and not because most of your subjects are celebrities, either.

First tell-tale giveaway is that choice of light. Most pictures of celebrities you're going to drag up on google are not going to be lit well. They're going to have lights all over the place to try to drain the definition out of the subject's face, they're going to be unflattering flash-bulb straight on- they'll do everything but play up what's needed for an artist to make a good piece of art with, which is showing the form of the subject through light. How can you make a good painting starting from a picture that's not very good to begin with? You can't- unless you know enough about light, anatomy, form, and construction that you can render a better, more paintable scenario than what is described in the picture.

The second point, which relates to the first, is that taking your photoref as the word of God, means that you don't consciously design what you're doing, but rather taking what is given as the only important consideration. Good design means being able to take what is given, and make it work more effectively.

Let me give you an example. Below is a portrait by Jeremy Lipking. I've reduced the portrait down to 3 flat values, in order to demonstrate how the picture is designed. It is designed very clearly, that the side plane of the head is clearly lit, and the front plane is in shadow. The bottom planes of the nose, lips, and jaw are dark to show the form. The hair and the blue background are given darker values in order to frame and provide contrast to the face. The eye is reduced to a simple dark shape- he could have made the whites of the eyes white, but doing so would have been unrealistic and led to a garish, overly contrasty effect in that area.

It's a very simple, but very effective setup. It's well designed.

Now, I went and repeated the process on one of your paintings. As a result of the straight-on lighting, strange things start to happen when reduced down. The lips disappear. The nose seems to be lit from both the front and the bottom. Creases in the cheek get overemphasized, the distinction between neck and jaw gets lost.

Now, it's one thing to blame the photo, but sometimes (for whatever reason) you can't get a really good shot of your subject, and you have to work with it. What do you do? Well, in a scenario like the one above, it means looking at the problems presented when reduced down, and working around them. For example, the creases in the left cheek- if you make a decision to play the individual creases down, and play up the broader grey area on that cheek as a whole, you take away attention from the weirdness of individual features, and bring more attention to the head's form as a whole. Similarly, you could invent a shadow under the jaw to emphasize the head, similar to the Lipking- or any number of things that could improve the overall read.

What I might suggest as an exercise is to put away the photoref for awhile, and instead paint some copies of master paintings*, as best you can. Doing this with an eye towards what design choices the artist makes-what they put in, what they leave out, what lighting they choose, etc. will help you more quickly figure out what's possible and what's effective in paint, rather than assuming trying to do what a camera does in paint is the only and best choice (it's not). Then when you go back to working from photos, that extra understanding will help a lot in determining your choice of photo, and what you choose to do with that photo.

*If you take me up on this, please do yourself a favor and get a good reproduction out of a book instead of working from a 300x200px GIS of it. If you don't know where to start, I'll throw out some names you can look up: John Singer Sargent, J.C. Leyendecker, Ingres, Lipking.

**also obligatory work from life, work on construction from basic shapes, yada yada yada.

Jeckal · November 2010

Actually you make alot of sense, I think i learnt alot from doing this

Because I had to breakdown what I was doing to enable to build it up again.
But yeah I planned to get less super realistic detail, because I takes to bloody long
And try catching the planes? on the face. etc to get all that.
I think I create some sort of monster from what yourve said lol

Angel_of_Bacon · November 2010

Just to be clear, my point has nothing to do with realism or lack of it, or detail or lack of it. Nor does it have anything to do with style, or making pictures that look like my shitty diagrams up there.

It is about having the knowledge and experience to know how to make the use of realism (or lack of it) and use of detail (or lack of it) effective. What makes a piece of art effective or not is largely the same, regardless of style. The point of the Lipking demonstration above isn't to say, "draw like this", it's to explain, "here is why this is good".

Jeckal · November 2010

How quaint, I got what you said first time, but thanks for worrying.

Jeckal · November 2010

Thought I would stick that here, instead of more posts in the doodle thread

tynic · November 2010

Hear that, bacon? I think you're in there.

There's a surprising disparity in the quality of your work - for example the Grohl portrait is excellent, but the Stewart sketch is all over the place, and the eye doodles and a lot of the digital pieces are very flat. I can't guess as to why without knowing a lot more about your drawing habits, but it looks like you often get good results when you spend a lot of time on a piece, but the fundamentals of form and shape are still lacking, which gives a kind of a hit-or-miss effect when looking at your portfolio as a whole.

JeckalHyde · February 2011

Ok so heres an update on the pirate

JeckalHyde · February 2011

Ok so Ive been randomly busy today doing a few things.

I have been toying with the idea of a friends movie/script thing and turning it
into a comic, maybe animation format, but this are just doodles of characters
Guess what one i was actually acting as lol.

I will probably go vector on this.

another monster

this is my whiskey cowboy i drew with a gun and bottle, in process of adding that.

Penny Arcade

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