Sorry guys. I should've mentioned this before. Since I'm out of town and wi-fi is being _way_ worse than I could've imagined, I haven't been able to set up the crit sessions like I had planned. I know, it's lame. But when I get back from the trip I'm going to be catching up on crits. Meaning for a few weeks we'll have more than one session each week. I know this isn't ideal and it wasn't what I had hoped, but it looks like that's the way things are playing out. I've also got plans for more free goodies to make it up to y'all. But yeah starting at the end of next week (so probably Saturday), we'll be diving into some crit/Q&A sessions.
I'm behind on the work, but I should probably just post some up. I'll update the OP with this weeks assignment. I may also make it the monthly enrichment.
Nice to hear that from Noah, because I think people have been wondering. It'll be nice to have the direction of his feedback.
Yeah, I didn't have much time this week, but I managed to get some work done (although it's all pretty rushed). I need to get started on the new assignment now anyway, haven't even watched the video yet.
Same, just watched the Still Life video, which was meh, just kinda gotta jump in and do it. Also this weeks video builds alot on the last two weeks studies, especially the colour, so I'm going back and working on that a good amount and then gonna work on the Still Life.
@ninjai : How goes your learning of the digital medium? Im pretty much doing the same thing as you using the opaque hard edge brush and just colouring in the shapes so everything ends up looking like a mosaic lol I think our studies would be hard to tell apart lol
The studies do take a while especially when your learning a whole new medium to go along with the actually studies, but Id say from everything I've learned its been so far definitely worth the price of admission.
Pretty abysmal actually. My laptop has been spotty as fuck and has been crashing every 45 minutes or so. I have a feeling the heat sink is loose causing it to overheat, haven't had much opportunity to use it. I had some other stuff done before my last dump but reinstalled windows and forgot to back them up.
I have the opposite feeling as far as learning a new medium doing these studies. I was doing ink and oil just fine but digital, man a cintiq would make this a lot easier I honestly thing the disconnect I'm having is the tablet. I tried digital before when I was deployed and honestly had an easier time with it then than I do now.
Noah Bradley did a review on it and said it is VERY compariable to an expensive Cintiq and gave it like 4 stars. Im thinking I may pick one up eventually.
Buuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I'm still so far behind on all this shiiiiiiiiiiiiit and I haven't even gotten started on this week's assignments I am the worst.
We have had some serious tornadoes the last week. I still haven't gotten around to working on my still life assignments! I am going to spend most of tomorrow on them though.
Hope you feel better soon, nice work Skyturtle!
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Finally got some stuff done for this week!
Still life quickies:
"Finished" still lifes:
Random Sketches:
Was I supposed to do some random sketches based on still life type things? I'm having some trouble using the things I'm learning from the studies in my sketches.
You know, I think I'm getting a bit better with color accuracy. I'm wondering though if anyone signed up for this is actually pulling off the entire assignments? Didn't he say double the amount was preferred? I feel guilty that I haven't done more, but at least I'm learning.
. I'm wondering though if anyone signed up for this is actually pulling off the entire assignments? Didn't he say double the amount was preferred? I feel guilty that I haven't done more, but at least I'm learning.
i honestly think he gave the workload so that you can't be "done" for the week. Either that or he's a fucking lunatic. Doing some basic math there literally isn't enough time in the week for what he's proposed. 25 of what he did in the video is 50 hours, then 8 "complete" still lives? Lets take the ones I did for my drawing one class. I worked fairly quickly and took 15 minute breaks after 3 hours, took me 14 hours to do the quickest one and I still wasn't "finished". 14 x 8 is 112 hours that's 162 so far, with only 168 hours in a week, good fucking luck. Now find time to do the rest of those color studies... And sleep, and shower, and eat
You literally can't unless you rush everything. That plus having a full time job not happening
Yeah he said something like 20 hours a week for the course, if I'm remembering correctly, which is probably only doable if you are startlingly efficient.
I wouldn't stress about it though. The course hinges on you being honest with yourself. If you feel like you're putting in a solid effort and are learning in the process, that's pretty much the only thing that matters.
The numbers are ridiculous, I think everyone caught on on week 1 or 2. I agree with fug, honesty and effort are what matters here. But, I can continue to use his assignments as inspiration for enrichment threads, which means we (and other forumers) can keep tackling these problems with communal feedback.
Has there been any more word on crit/Q&A sessions? When is that going to happen, or did I miss one?
Yeah he said something like 20 hours a week for the course, if I'm remembering correctly, which is probably only doable if you are startlingly efficient.
I wouldn't stress about it though. The course hinges on you being honest with yourself. If you feel like you're putting in a solid effort and are learning in the process, that's pretty much the only thing that matters.
Good point.
There is a typo in this weeks assignment, right? Right!?
There is a typo in this weeks assignment, right? Right!?
Yes, the description for the YouTube video also has the assignment listed, with no mention of 8 fully finished still life paintings being on the agenda.
I think I'm going to have the bust out the traditional media for this week. After an hour of trying to do this digitally I was getting a burning pain in my shoulder from the way I needed to position myself respective to my mirror in order to be able to see my monitor and the mirror without moving my head too terribly much.
Sometimes I fantasize about owning a tablet monitor, but this is the first time where I've wondered if it would actually make the job a lot easier.
Sometimes I fantasize about owning a tablet monitor, but this is the first time where I've wondered if it would actually make the job a lot easier.
Yeaaah I've been running into that lately myself, but I don't have the scrilla to make that happen. I think I'm going to just start drawing on paper more.
I need to scan some composition stuff. I'll post my still life later, it looks like butt right now:
Also, I require lots of critique on my still lifes. Lives?
my only critique is that your finished ones don't look finished to me, like you rendered the subjects on your still life but left the area around them unfinished and seemed to leave out the idea of composition other than "these things are center on my canvas". You can arrange objects to lead the eye across the page alluding to lines, repeating shapes or generally keep the eye contained on the page. Also its hard to tell if some of them have any direct light source. They feel like "these things were on my desk so I drew them." Kd's with the mouse feels the same way. Still life is more than simply drawing a few things from observation, you can really take a boring scene and make it interesting with a little planning. Choice of lighting, choice of objects, how they're arranged etc.
Hope I don't seem overly harsh I'm just bad at getting out what I mean and tend to be very forward.
@F87 I don't really have a critique but I would suggest grabbing a dishcloth or something and putting it under whatever you're drawing you can practice textures and how light affects fabric and you don't have to render your desk over and over, I'm probably going to do that since I didn't get very far in my still life work last week.
Self portraits: aka This doesn't really look like me
I'm probably going to do more color studies before I try another color portrait. I am way better at picking color than I was when I started camp but it's still pretty bad
Okay, yes, that would be the cheaper/more effective solution, but not nearly as fun as buying an expensive piece of equipment that might make my job slightly easier.
Sorry that I haven't been critiquing anyone's work. I guess I've been so focused on getting my own work done that I haven't taken the time to really look at other people's assignments. That changes NOW.
Your color studies are coming along well. You're getting pretty close in most places. I think you could maybe spend more time on them to hone in the accuracy of some of your colors. I know Noah tends to go through them pretty quickly, but I think it might be a good idea to give yourself the extra time to check your work and really dial in some of those colors. One way is to very occasionally open your palette and color pick a couple places on the master study, and compare them to what you estimated. Also, this may be cheating, but sometimes I'll just paint a quick dab directly on the masterwork and see how far off I am. Obviously you don't want to do that too often, but personally, I think it helps a lot in figuring out how the piece is actually constructed. I think it's especially effective if you test out the darkest area and the lightest area, since getting either of those way off can basically derail an entire study and leads to a lot of frustration, in my opinion.
Now, for technique, I'd like to see you put the soft brushes in a lockbox for awhile. I don't think I quite realized until now how much you use them, and it's giving all of your sketches this kind of messy velvet painting look. Soft brushes are great for little effects like glowing lights/highlights, or really smoothing out a transition, but all of that should come in much later in the painting process, probably when the piece is getting pretty close to completion. I think, especially for this camp, it wouldn't hurt to be a lot more authoritative with your brush strokes. Maybe even experiment with using a brush with no opacity for a couple of compositions, or a brush with a very quick transition. The chalk brush that came with the set linked earlier in this thread is less delicate than the square brushes I usually use, but I actually like it a lot and it's starting to make me paint in a different way than I usually do. But don't use any brushes with a soft edge. The less you use brushes that are designed for blending, the more you'll have to do that blending by hand, the more you'll have to think about how those color/tone transitions actually work, the more confident you'll get, and the better your paintings will look. It will be strange at first but I guarantee you'll like what you produce once you aren't making everything so hazy and undefined.
Good color studies. You're hitting a lot of colors and tones pretty darn close.
Same basic point about the soft brushes though. Maybe it's a personal thing, I just don't think they look great whenever they're used for anything but touching up a near-finished piece. Maybe it's the really obviously unnatural fading they do when compared to the rest of the brush strokes. Maybe it's because when they're used with impunity, they create a lot of muddled colors and weird textures. I know the point of the studies isn't to make something that looks good, it's to learn, but in this case I think it indicates something about your technique when you use a soft brush instead of a brush with a hard edge. They're not great for sketching.
It looks like you're starting to get the basic premise down, so it's only going to get better. Avoid painting on the black and white backgrounds so much, since it will be harder to gauge tones.
Noah basically touched on all of this, but one thing to keep in mind when starting the piece is to break the face down into a handful of values and just focus on roughing out the basic shapes and planes. It's much easier to figure everything out if you start out with all of the basic pieces already on the page.
As an example, here's the step by step of one of the portraits I did today. Not a fantastic roadmap, but I think it gets the basic idea across.
Also, it helps a lot if you use one really bright light source to give those shadows as much shape and volume as possible. Today I just kind of, threw some towels over my windows and shut off all the lights except for my computer monitor.
@Fugitive thanks for the feedback, process, and tips. I started the other three with a sketch so this time I went back and just used shapes, it's still really uncomfortable but I will keep at it. I also think I'll have to work at night. The other 3 are during the day I have giant windows and white walls.
A quick question about the background. I notice you filled yours in, was that what the background actually looked like through your mirror or did you do that for contrast?
It was pretty dark in my room, though I did cheat with the background on the left in order to pick out the shapes of the back of the head. In reality, there wasn't that much contrast between the hat and the rest of the room.
I kinda slowed down on the color studies, because unlike the composition studies, they were more boring than frustrating. I want to do another master study, because color is more of a challenge for me when I'm trying to keep my values in check.
Funny you would say that about soft brushes. Just a few years ago you would be hard pressed to finding me using them at all. I would say that my normal brush is actually semi soft, but I do have trouble getting really solid shapes down quickly, no matter what the brush. I think that's where the low contrast comes from, because I tend to keep the values close when Im not sure if the shape is right yet. I'll keep an eye on my hard and soft edges.
Heres the early stages of my selfie, to show my usual brush:
A color one, Still working on it. Want to move on to some Imagined faces, and some referenced faces. Just to do a couple before the next assignment tomorrow.
I kept moving my expression, I think the b&w one is more accurate. I am trying to flounder around less in the early phases of drawing and get in there and establish some things.
Look harder for the colors in your face, Pay attention to reds, greens, and yellow. There's a lot going on under the skin that shifts color in certain areas, and lighter skinned people especially are effected by the sort of blueness of the veins under their skin, and then the red flush on cheeks/ears/nose. You can be a lot more playful!
I am not really going to do much for the Plein air study, some ink studies maybe. I wont be around this weekend, weather is shitty, and I basically own no paints. I also have some other drawings to get done so I'll probably take this week as an opportunity.
@Iruka - I like the black and white one a bit better. I'm not sure if the assignment was to make a "realistic" portrait, or if it was more open-ended...but yeah, the color one starts to get a little cartoony in a similar way that your drawings are sometimes, in the shadow. I think the b+w one may've also been a bit more successful because you handled the sharp brushes around the eyes really well - it gave the portrait a nice focal point.
@F87 - What Iruka said was spot-on...remember to add more hue shifts, especially when going from lights to darks. This is the same thing I mentioned when I did that paintover for your character awhile back - and seeing your previous drawings in this thread it seems like it's something you're still kinda struggling with. It's okay to push it really far to break out of your comfort zone (it will feel awkward and horrible and wrong sometimes!) but going that far off the deep end with it can really help you break the mold. You can always pull it back later a little bit, but initially I think it may help you to not be timid about it, and to just kick those colors in the face.
Didn't really do well this week, only managed to get out some very quick and loose studies - I got frustrated with how I couldn't balance soft and hard and get a read quickly enough, as well as with general construction issues - lost patience. I'm gonna try and spend some hours on a fully finished portrait render this week cause I really need to work on this.
Plein air this week!
Ugh, gouache plein air is ruining me. I just spent an hour wrestling with tubes, brushes, palettes and a sketchbook whilst trying to keep the ants off of me and my paint from drying out and cracking - pretty much all i got out of it was a decent graphite sketch, ruined by painting over it poorly. Is there any way of handling things that is less cumbersome outside of just going the watercolour way? I just got some gouache, watercolours and a sketchbook and figured i'd leave the watercolours till later, but it looks like I'm going to have to dive in if i want to paint outdoors and not literally lose it. I got one gouache first try from indoors, and i'll go out now and try to see if I can do anything in watercolours - i'll try to upload tonight
@NightDragon I'm guessing realism was mostly the goal for the assignment. I always seem to have a cartoony undertone to my work, I agree. Even through school, My life drawing teachers always tried to push me for more accuracy in the "I like your drawing but push for more accuracy" kind of way. In the end, I don't think I'll ever be one of the ones who achieves hyper realism, But I am trying to be more observant and slightly slower.
I Have alot of trouble with self portraits though. I've been drawing myself as a cartoon for so long That its sort of hard for the drawings to not become this:
I might go into both and give them an extra pass. The trouble with this schedule is that its hard to decide if I want to produce a few good drawings or go for a marathon of sketches. Anyways thanks for the crit! I'll keep the observations in mind.
@kevindee for what its worth I think the face studies look like a good start. If you keep pushing at it you'll only get better. Did you do any self portraits?
Also I feel you on the plein air. I'd really rather do it digitally, but I no longer have a laptop. I might wake up tomorrow and get one done.
Posts
Also in case you guys missed it:
Nice to hear that from Noah, because I think people have been wondering. It'll be nice to have the direction of his feedback.
Studies:
Sketches:
@ninjai : How goes your learning of the digital medium? Im pretty much doing the same thing as you using the opaque hard edge brush and just colouring in the shapes so everything ends up looking like a mosaic lol
The studies do take a while especially when your learning a whole new medium to go along with the actually studies, but Id say from everything I've learned its been so far definitely worth the price of admission.
I have the opposite feeling as far as learning a new medium doing these studies. I was doing ink and oil just fine but digital, man a cintiq would make this a lot easier I honestly thing the disconnect I'm having is the tablet. I tried digital before when I was deployed and honestly had an easier time with it then than I do now.
Btw if you have some extra cash lying around and want to REALLY pursue digital art seriously then you can pick up one of these badboys for cheap --> ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009QQ7BG0/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B009QQ7BG0&linkCode=as2&tag=nosar07-20)
Noah Bradley did a review on it and said it is VERY compariable to an expensive Cintiq and gave it like 4 stars. Im thinking I may pick one up eventually.
stupid windows phone
But really gj kd. Love ur painting
Here's stuff I worked on over the past week.
We have had some serious tornadoes the last week. I still haven't gotten around to working on my still life assignments!
Still life things
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Finally got some stuff done for this week!
Still life quickies:
"Finished" still lifes:
Random Sketches:
Was I supposed to do some random sketches based on still life type things? I'm having some trouble using the things I'm learning from the studies in my sketches.
You know, I think I'm getting a bit better with color accuracy. I'm wondering though if anyone signed up for this is actually pulling off the entire assignments? Didn't he say double the amount was preferred? I feel guilty that I haven't done more, but at least I'm learning.
i honestly think he gave the workload so that you can't be "done" for the week. Either that or he's a fucking lunatic. Doing some basic math there literally isn't enough time in the week for what he's proposed. 25 of what he did in the video is 50 hours, then 8 "complete" still lives? Lets take the ones I did for my drawing one class. I worked fairly quickly and took 15 minute breaks after 3 hours, took me 14 hours to do the quickest one and I still wasn't "finished". 14 x 8 is 112 hours that's 162 so far, with only 168 hours in a week, good fucking luck. Now find time to do the rest of those color studies... And sleep, and shower, and eat
You literally can't unless you rush everything. That plus having a full time job not happening
I wouldn't stress about it though. The course hinges on you being honest with yourself. If you feel like you're putting in a solid effort and are learning in the process, that's pretty much the only thing that matters.
Has there been any more word on crit/Q&A sessions? When is that going to happen, or did I miss one?
Good point.
There is a typo in this weeks assignment, right? Right!?
Yes, the description for the YouTube video also has the assignment listed, with no mention of 8 fully finished still life paintings being on the agenda.
I think I'm going to have the bust out the traditional media for this week. After an hour of trying to do this digitally I was getting a burning pain in my shoulder from the way I needed to position myself respective to my mirror in order to be able to see my monitor and the mirror without moving my head too terribly much.
Sometimes I fantasize about owning a tablet monitor, but this is the first time where I've wondered if it would actually make the job a lot easier.
Also, I require lots of critique on my still lifes. Lives?
Yeaaah I've been running into that lately myself, but I don't have the scrilla to make that happen. I think I'm going to just start drawing on paper more.
I need to scan some composition stuff. I'll post my still life later, it looks like butt right now:
Hope I don't seem overly harsh I'm just bad at getting out what I mean and tend to be very forward.
Self portraits: aka This doesn't really look like me
I'm probably going to do more color studies before I try another color portrait. I am way better at picking color than I was when I started camp but it's still pretty bad
Okay, yes, that would be the cheaper/more effective solution, but not nearly as fun as buying an expensive piece of equipment that might make my job slightly easier.
@F87:
Your color studies are coming along well. You're getting pretty close in most places. I think you could maybe spend more time on them to hone in the accuracy of some of your colors. I know Noah tends to go through them pretty quickly, but I think it might be a good idea to give yourself the extra time to check your work and really dial in some of those colors. One way is to very occasionally open your palette and color pick a couple places on the master study, and compare them to what you estimated. Also, this may be cheating, but sometimes I'll just paint a quick dab directly on the masterwork and see how far off I am. Obviously you don't want to do that too often, but personally, I think it helps a lot in figuring out how the piece is actually constructed. I think it's especially effective if you test out the darkest area and the lightest area, since getting either of those way off can basically derail an entire study and leads to a lot of frustration, in my opinion.
Now, for technique, I'd like to see you put the soft brushes in a lockbox for awhile. I don't think I quite realized until now how much you use them, and it's giving all of your sketches this kind of messy velvet painting look. Soft brushes are great for little effects like glowing lights/highlights, or really smoothing out a transition, but all of that should come in much later in the painting process, probably when the piece is getting pretty close to completion. I think, especially for this camp, it wouldn't hurt to be a lot more authoritative with your brush strokes. Maybe even experiment with using a brush with no opacity for a couple of compositions, or a brush with a very quick transition. The chalk brush that came with the set linked earlier in this thread is less delicate than the square brushes I usually use, but I actually like it a lot and it's starting to make me paint in a different way than I usually do. But don't use any brushes with a soft edge. The less you use brushes that are designed for blending, the more you'll have to do that blending by hand, the more you'll have to think about how those color/tone transitions actually work, the more confident you'll get, and the better your paintings will look. It will be strange at first but I guarantee you'll like what you produce once you aren't making everything so hazy and undefined.
@Iruka
Good color studies. You're hitting a lot of colors and tones pretty darn close.
Same basic point about the soft brushes though. Maybe it's a personal thing, I just don't think they look great whenever they're used for anything but touching up a near-finished piece. Maybe it's the really obviously unnatural fading they do when compared to the rest of the brush strokes. Maybe it's because when they're used with impunity, they create a lot of muddled colors and weird textures. I know the point of the studies isn't to make something that looks good, it's to learn, but in this case I think it indicates something about your technique when you use a soft brush instead of a brush with a hard edge. They're not great for sketching.
@skyturtle
It looks like you're starting to get the basic premise down, so it's only going to get better. Avoid painting on the black and white backgrounds so much, since it will be harder to gauge tones.
Noah basically touched on all of this, but one thing to keep in mind when starting the piece is to break the face down into a handful of values and just focus on roughing out the basic shapes and planes. It's much easier to figure everything out if you start out with all of the basic pieces already on the page.
As an example, here's the step by step of one of the portraits I did today. Not a fantastic roadmap, but I think it gets the basic idea across.
Also, it helps a lot if you use one really bright light source to give those shadows as much shape and volume as possible. Today I just kind of, threw some towels over my windows and shut off all the lights except for my computer monitor.
A quick question about the background. I notice you filled yours in, was that what the background actually looked like through your mirror or did you do that for contrast?
Latest attempt.
Noah suggested imagination sketches with a self portrait as a basis so here's me as an orc.
That was too much fun.
I kinda slowed down on the color studies, because unlike the composition studies, they were more boring than frustrating. I want to do another master study, because color is more of a challenge for me when I'm trying to keep my values in check.
Funny you would say that about soft brushes. Just a few years ago you would be hard pressed to finding me using them at all. I would say that my normal brush is actually semi soft, but I do have trouble getting really solid shapes down quickly, no matter what the brush. I think that's where the low contrast comes from, because I tend to keep the values close when Im not sure if the shape is right yet. I'll keep an eye on my hard and soft edges.
Heres the early stages of my selfie, to show my usual brush:
More into it:
Still pretty dark though,
I kept moving my expression, I think the b&w one is more accurate. I am trying to flounder around less in the early phases of drawing and get in there and establish some things.
Also, thanks @Fugitive and @Ninjai for the crits. I've put my soft brush up for now.
I need to get on some Plein Air drawings now...!
I am not really going to do much for the Plein air study, some ink studies maybe. I wont be around this weekend, weather is shitty, and I basically own no paints. I also have some other drawings to get done so I'll probably take this week as an opportunity.
@F87 - What Iruka said was spot-on...remember to add more hue shifts, especially when going from lights to darks. This is the same thing I mentioned when I did that paintover for your character awhile back - and seeing your previous drawings in this thread it seems like it's something you're still kinda struggling with. It's okay to push it really far to break out of your comfort zone (it will feel awkward and horrible and wrong sometimes!) but going that far off the deep end with it can really help you break the mold. You can always pull it back later a little bit, but initially I think it may help you to not be timid about it, and to just kick those colors in the face.
Didn't really do well this week, only managed to get out some very quick and loose studies - I got frustrated with how I couldn't balance soft and hard and get a read quickly enough, as well as with general construction issues - lost patience. I'm gonna try and spend some hours on a fully finished portrait render this week cause I really need to work on this.
Plein air this week!
Ugh, gouache plein air is ruining me. I just spent an hour wrestling with tubes, brushes, palettes and a sketchbook whilst trying to keep the ants off of me and my paint from drying out and cracking - pretty much all i got out of it was a decent graphite sketch, ruined by painting over it poorly. Is there any way of handling things that is less cumbersome outside of just going the watercolour way? I just got some gouache, watercolours and a sketchbook and figured i'd leave the watercolours till later, but it looks like I'm going to have to dive in if i want to paint outdoors and not literally lose it. I got one gouache first try from indoors, and i'll go out now and try to see if I can do anything in watercolours - i'll try to upload tonight
I Have alot of trouble with self portraits though. I've been drawing myself as a cartoon for so long That its sort of hard for the drawings to not become this:
@kevindee for what its worth I think the face studies look like a good start. If you keep pushing at it you'll only get better. Did you do any self portraits?
Also I feel you on the plein air. I'd really rather do it digitally, but I no longer have a laptop. I might wake up tomorrow and get one done.