Working on trying to learn how to draw one character consistently. I was talking to a comic book artist on twitter, and one thing he said I should try drawing just way more of my own characters in addition to my study stuff so since my sketchbooks learn very heavily in that. So here we are
Sister in law brought us a cocoa pod from Grenada, so I painted it in natural light. Wow that is super hard after using strong light sources all the time.
That study would benefit from some hard edges. Having a little confidence in your contours can really push a piece forward.
The general at the trailer was really starting to shape up. The chrome on the trailer itself suffers from blurry, non specific shapes. If you are interested in painting, I really suggest picking up How to Render, its a very technical book and you probably wont consume very much of it at once, but it in combination with shape and material studies is a good way to put yourself on a fast track for learning how to accomplish some of these things. If you are already doing things like still life drawing, there's no reason to not try to back it up with books and videos when you can.
Yeah I think that's my biggest weakness with painting rn aside from craftsmanship stuff, I'll have to pick it up. Thanks for the comments
edit: I think what I'll do is start doing some more still lives and really focus on getting my edges and craftsmanship on point. In addition to the value stuff. And then some of the basic shape stuff for forms, I'll have to go back over the ctrl paint things.
There's just so much to do, its kind of overwhelming. Do you know any good books or videos about doing environments? I've been trying to do studies on the side of that (both little value renderings in pencil and master studies) but I don't feel like I'm really getting anything out of it.
The things I've been focusing on lately is:
1. Hands, which are mostly just drawings in my sketchbook, I'm trying to do 100, I'm about 1/3 of the way there, although I can't say I've been too happy with the first few
2. Working on my gesture drawing a bit more
3. Trying to actually just like, finish things which I think is a huge spot that is holding me back a lot. Just the actual full process of getting something to done enough. Like, I can't just throw away a piece and been happy with the results generally, it takes me a lot of prep and time to make something I'm happy with.
4. Trying to work on my line economy in everything, trying to consciously prevent myself from petting back over lines and things like that.
Do you think it would be best to just portion off an hour and a half or so each night just for study stuff and use the rest for actually finishing things? Before the last 2 weeks or so, most nights I would be only practicing except for some doodling at the end.
In other news I drew 100 hands, it took like 8 days but I knocked them out. I hope it helped a little. They're sketchbook bound so I don't have anything to show rn. Next challenge for my self will be doing a still life a day, focusing on my edges and texture.
Yeah I think that's my biggest weakness with painting rn aside from craftsmanship stuff, I'll have to pick it up. Thanks for the comments
edit: I think what I'll do is start doing some more still lives and really focus on getting my edges and craftsmanship on point. In addition to the value stuff. And then some of the basic shape stuff for forms, I'll have to go back over the ctrl paint things.
There's just so much to do, its kind of overwhelming. Do you know any good books or videos about doing environments? I've been trying to do studies on the side of that (both little value renderings in pencil and master studies) but I don't feel like I'm really getting anything out of it.
The things I've been focusing on lately is:
1. Hands, which are mostly just drawings in my sketchbook, I'm trying to do 100, I'm about 1/3 of the way there, although I can't say I've been too happy with the first few
2. Working on my gesture drawing a bit more
3. Trying to actually just like, finish things which I think is a huge spot that is holding me back a lot. Just the actual full process of getting something to done enough. Like, I can't just throw away a piece and been happy with the results generally, it takes me a lot of prep and time to make something I'm happy with.
4. Trying to work on my line economy in everything, trying to consciously prevent myself from petting back over lines and things like that.
Do you think it would be best to just portion off an hour and a half or so each night just for study stuff and use the rest for actually finishing things? Before the last 2 weeks or so, most nights I would be only practicing except for some doodling at the end.
Schoolisms offerings are fairly robust if you are willing to cough over 200 a year. If you have the self discipline, I actually think class structures work pretty well. You drill for a week or two on basic skills, you apply them at a medium level, and then you try and go hard on one painting, and sorta work in a cycle.
In the end, the structure that will work the best is up to you to find. I personally usually get stuck trying to lock down on large numbers. Drawing 100 hands is only truly beneficial if you try your damndest on every single one. I usually burn out, and need to keep the subjects varied.
Learning how to "finish things" is a huge hurdle, and its something that will probably stick with you for a while. You'll probably just get to the point where you feel like you can't do much else and uneasily call it done before you feel like you're 100% finished. Try not to get too caught up in it, and dont feel like you cant go back and play around with old work once you learned something.
Line economy is hard, and I'm not the best at it myself. I leaned hard into painting before I ever got better at it. Keep at it, though.
Thanks Iruka, I was looking at SVS learn, mostly because of their more meta art things rather than the meaty stuff. Schoolism was interesting too, I know the Nathan Fowkes things are pretty highly regarded. I started with New Masters Academy for a few months, they weren't super class structured, but I drew along and took notes on the perspective classes which really helped me a lot. I wanted to put a little aside for more class stuff. Currently, I just try to do a little practice during the week and mostly focus on finishing pieces, the last few have been fairly complex, which I think is good for me to push me harder out of my comfort zone. Schoolism I think might actually be more what I need right now, the only thing I never really liked about it was the payment model w/ the charges for switching classes, but w/e.
I think doing some classes in combo with the still lives would be better in either case.
I generally agree with the large numbers thing, but with hands it was something I just wanted to focus in on for a week, and it helped me learn a lot more b/t proko's videos and just drawing my own hands a lot.
edit: fixed the levels, bc wow there was a lot of crap I didn't see on my other monitor
Sketchdump of mostly mecha-story stuff (which I don't have a name for yet). I had a nice breakthrough on the story yesterday, so I think I might be able start putting things in better context in future illustrations. btw these are composited, not raw scans.
lmao this took sooo long. Next stuff will be a little simpler, I have some more character ideas I wanna do with this story and in the mean time I think I'm gonna do the schoolism class on realism right now, either that or the color and light class, I'm not sure yet. So I can do more regular painting.
Like I said in chat, my focus on this was mostly trying to divide my lights and darks clearly, and also try to be a little better about edges. I still don't know how into texture though. Also fabric is so difficult...
Number 2: Onions are a lot harder to paint than you'd think. Going to try to get through the schoolism #2 video tomorrow and actually start doing THAT re: studies, I just wasn't able to sketch out the time for it to really take notes and things.
Numbah 3: Bowl and lime. Started on the second session of the Schoolism lesson, the thing I've noticed in trying to put those lessons into practice is that they don't work too well on cylinders and spheres, trying to reduce shapes down more into like, lower poly basically to do block ins. But I probably just need more practice
Some sketches for some characters I was working on this week, I was going to try to finish this but eh, I got sick of it, and there's no story that really makes me want to finish it since its just a lineup. Idk, I'm in a weird spot where I'm super enthused to work on this comic idea, but my weak drawing is making me want to stop and go back into grind mode.
#5 in natural light. I have a long weekend, so hopefully I'll have SOMETHING to actually share. I've collected some more reference and I'm diving back into those character drawings.
Here's the promised drawing which is all I got finished, and some bonus sketches. I'm putting the still lives on hold while I do this schoolism class, I've been doing the new homework every night, but not saving anything since there's nothing really to show right now, just focused on breaking things down into simple 2 forms and studying angles with plumb lines etc etc. I'll try to post one of them before I move on to the next though.
Hi, its been a while. I've mostly been just drawing a lot this last week and not really finishing anything. I started the next lesson on schoolism and man its hard, its the first part of the values lesson, focused on just trying to get everything down in 5 values, 3 lights and 2 darks. And not really worrying about edges. I looked at some of the crit videos and it looks a lot like people just pen tooled or lasso tooled the shapes out and filled with colors, but I prefer doing it manually for now because I want the mileage.
Just an idea anyways. I'm going on vacation for the next week, so I'm gonna try to do at least one more before I leave of these, then when I get back I'll try to do one a day again, or one every other day. While I'm away I'm gonna try to start boarding my comic, I have some rough thumbnails to start from and it'll be my first real comic thing ever.
Anyway here's some doodles
Comic boarding sounds exciting! It's a time consuming endeavor so try not to get discouraged by the workload. It'll be cool to see some of these characters actually interact, so I hope you post what you end up getting to.
With your little biker dude, I feel like those types of doodles might be a good place to really practice trying to be more confident with your lines. Try to remember that the lines dont have to be perfect, but try not to feather them.
Yeah definitely on the doodle stuff. I actually went back and drew over the sketch again and did a 'clean' pass and then I liked even less. I'm trying to be good about it when I draw in my sketchbook, but something about digital lets me scribble more than I'm generally inclined to. This is the second one, but it lost a little something
I know that most of the time artists are quick to say that the tablet does not matter, but I do think smaller, older ones make the job harder. Once I went to on-screen drawing I found line fidelity to be a bit easier to achieve. Its an expensive leap, though, and I still prefer to sketch and do anything line oriented on paper.
I'm using a small intuos. Lazy Nezumi helps a little bit, but I think I need to tape some paper on top of it to help steady things. Most of the shakiness is perpendicular jitter I get to the line I'm drawing, and I think its part from the super smooth surface and part from it being hard to get a smooth motion on stuff. Paper is just more comfortable for me. Although with inking I just need more practice even IRL, I have a brush and inkwell now that I'm practicing with, but its one of those abstract things that its hard to tell how to improve at, aside from rules of thumb there doesn't seem to be a methodical way to approach it. When I used to do more ink stuff it was generally with nibs and ink instead of brush, but I find that brush inking is closer to how things behave in digital so I wanted to improve at it.
Hi, I'm back from vacation. Nothing much to show right now, but I'm back on my horse w/ the schoolism hw, so here's another of the same 5 value exercise.
At least on my screen, the light values are very close together?
For inking, at some point I ventured to accept that if I get vastly better results doing certain things on paper, that maybe I should put up the tablet sometimes and start there. If you dont have a scanner, that's a good investment, and photoshop's photomerge tools make it absolutely trivial to scan things. I work in 11X17 most of the time, but two or three scans mean I can still have whatever I'm working on in PS.
This isn't to discourage you from trying to ink in photoshop. Just consider the pros and cons of it as a tool, and dont force it if you hate it. Its like if you were doing a large scale graphite drawing and needed to fill a huge area, but you usually work with mechanical pencils. You could in theory do it with the mechanical pencil, but by all means you should buy a stick of graphite. You can certainly through time and practice make inking work for you on a small tablet, but dont force it if there's an easier, more efficient way and no one will be able to tell the difference anyhow.
Larger tablets enable a bit more room to complete a stroke, an important part if inking if you are trying to get that varied stroke line work. Drawing on screen is a huge step up, and if you are willing to take a shot on a yiynova, it can be slightly less than all your money to get into it.
All that being said, I dont consider myself an inker by any means, and prefer to paint. I just thought I would put that opinion out there if you are finding the inking to be frustrating.
Yeah I'm definitely going to give it a try I think, I need to get some new pen nibs since I lost my old container of them and just try inking from scratch again and just fixing things in ps later if I have to. I'd like a larger tablet, but until I can make some more cash its just not in the cards for me, they're way out of my budget.
The lights are about 80, 70, 60, 90ish was starting to make thing look a little blown out to me, but its hard to tell. I can definitely see them looking very close on other calibrations though.
A drawing, and the first of week 4 hw. The goal of it is to manipulate the values while trying to balance the relationships to still get the right effect. This was a darker set of values. I think for the next one I'll take some reference pics to practice on since these sculptures aren't too useful for this exercise I feel.
Looking at the other people's crit videos, I think I need to spend more time on the accuracy part in the beginning, bc there's are pretty tight and mine is still a little too loose. I also think I need to watch my verticals mostly, I tend to squish things down in general which I think is what is messing things up. I checked the painting over the reference and it squished in the face.
Wait...what do you do for work? I really like that bust.
Of all the studies you've done, I feel like this last one has clarity in the edges and a little more confidence to the shapes. The only nitpick I have is that you flattened out her eyelid by not bringing the shadow all the way to the corner of the eye, which interferes with it looking curved. Really nailing that eyelid structure in a conscious way when studying will help you make expressions when you are trying to exaggerate them in your characters.
I'm a graphic designer, mostly I design 3D lucite designs for big banking firms. In this case, the client has a lot of money to blow, and really want a resin statue of virgil and some guy from their company. I had to draw a mockup for the side view because there wasn't really any art I could photoshop together. If it gets made, it would go to a factory in china where some one will have to sculpt a base for the resin mold.
And for the eye, you mean the reflected light in the left eyelid?
And thanks on both counts, I'm gonna try to do at least 3 of these studies this week, they take so long and I'm trying to balance them with actually doing stuff.
Posts
Ok I worked this through some more, I'm going to put this one down now. Hope that improves things.
Stuff from this long weekend + an in progress pic of the next Paul/Prussian guy painting
Done I guess, I might sleep on this one just to force myself to do more to it maybe
Ok done now, composition didn't really pan out how I wanted. I think I always under estimate how much space I'll end up with
Working on trying to learn how to draw one character consistently. I was talking to a comic book artist on twitter, and one thing he said I should try drawing just way more of my own characters in addition to my study stuff so since my sketchbooks learn very heavily in that. So here we are
Continuing this character development, oh my god this takes forever.
just a fun sketch
Some hands, a Jaime Jones study and some fooling around since I guess I'm procrastinating.
Sister in law brought us a cocoa pod from Grenada, so I painted it in natural light. Wow that is super hard after using strong light sources all the time.
The general at the trailer was really starting to shape up. The chrome on the trailer itself suffers from blurry, non specific shapes. If you are interested in painting, I really suggest picking up How to Render, its a very technical book and you probably wont consume very much of it at once, but it in combination with shape and material studies is a good way to put yourself on a fast track for learning how to accomplish some of these things. If you are already doing things like still life drawing, there's no reason to not try to back it up with books and videos when you can.
Yeah I think that's my biggest weakness with painting rn aside from craftsmanship stuff, I'll have to pick it up. Thanks for the comments
edit: I think what I'll do is start doing some more still lives and really focus on getting my edges and craftsmanship on point. In addition to the value stuff. And then some of the basic shape stuff for forms, I'll have to go back over the ctrl paint things.
There's just so much to do, its kind of overwhelming. Do you know any good books or videos about doing environments? I've been trying to do studies on the side of that (both little value renderings in pencil and master studies) but I don't feel like I'm really getting anything out of it.
The things I've been focusing on lately is:
1. Hands, which are mostly just drawings in my sketchbook, I'm trying to do 100, I'm about 1/3 of the way there, although I can't say I've been too happy with the first few
2. Working on my gesture drawing a bit more
3. Trying to actually just like, finish things which I think is a huge spot that is holding me back a lot. Just the actual full process of getting something to done enough. Like, I can't just throw away a piece and been happy with the results generally, it takes me a lot of prep and time to make something I'm happy with.
4. Trying to work on my line economy in everything, trying to consciously prevent myself from petting back over lines and things like that.
Do you think it would be best to just portion off an hour and a half or so each night just for study stuff and use the rest for actually finishing things? Before the last 2 weeks or so, most nights I would be only practicing except for some doodling at the end.
Progress on what is developing into a very complex piece, so its kinda taking a long time...
Wow I'm donzo, that was the longest amount of time I've spent on a piece since school I think... that was every night all week to finish this.
In other news I drew 100 hands, it took like 8 days but I knocked them out. I hope it helped a little. They're sketchbook bound so I don't have anything to show rn. Next challenge for my self will be doing a still life a day, focusing on my edges and texture.
Schoolisms offerings are fairly robust if you are willing to cough over 200 a year. If you have the self discipline, I actually think class structures work pretty well. You drill for a week or two on basic skills, you apply them at a medium level, and then you try and go hard on one painting, and sorta work in a cycle.
In the end, the structure that will work the best is up to you to find. I personally usually get stuck trying to lock down on large numbers. Drawing 100 hands is only truly beneficial if you try your damndest on every single one. I usually burn out, and need to keep the subjects varied.
Learning how to "finish things" is a huge hurdle, and its something that will probably stick with you for a while. You'll probably just get to the point where you feel like you can't do much else and uneasily call it done before you feel like you're 100% finished. Try not to get too caught up in it, and dont feel like you cant go back and play around with old work once you learned something.
Line economy is hard, and I'm not the best at it myself. I leaned hard into painting before I ever got better at it. Keep at it, though.
I think doing some classes in combo with the still lives would be better in either case.
I generally agree with the large numbers thing, but with hands it was something I just wanted to focus in on for a week, and it helped me learn a lot more b/t proko's videos and just drawing my own hands a lot.
Sketchdump of mostly mecha-story stuff (which I don't have a name for yet). I had a nice breakthrough on the story yesterday, so I think I might be able start putting things in better context in future illustrations. btw these are composited, not raw scans.
lmao this took sooo long. Next stuff will be a little simpler, I have some more character ideas I wanna do with this story and in the mean time I think I'm gonna do the schoolism class on realism right now, either that or the color and light class, I'm not sure yet. So I can do more regular painting.
Like I said in chat, my focus on this was mostly trying to divide my lights and darks clearly, and also try to be a little better about edges. I still don't know how into texture though. Also fabric is so difficult...
Number 2: Onions are a lot harder to paint than you'd think. Going to try to get through the schoolism #2 video tomorrow and actually start doing THAT re: studies, I just wasn't able to sketch out the time for it to really take notes and things.
Numbah 3: Bowl and lime. Started on the second session of the Schoolism lesson, the thing I've noticed in trying to put those lessons into practice is that they don't work too well on cylinders and spheres, trying to reduce shapes down more into like, lower poly basically to do block ins. But I probably just need more practice
Some sketches for some characters I was working on this week, I was going to try to finish this but eh, I got sick of it, and there's no story that really makes me want to finish it since its just a lineup. Idk, I'm in a weird spot where I'm super enthused to work on this comic idea, but my weak drawing is making me want to stop and go back into grind mode.
Anyway here's number 4
#5 in natural light. I have a long weekend, so hopefully I'll have SOMETHING to actually share. I've collected some more reference and I'm diving back into those character drawings.
Here's the promised drawing which is all I got finished, and some bonus sketches. I'm putting the still lives on hold while I do this schoolism class, I've been doing the new homework every night, but not saving anything since there's nothing really to show right now, just focused on breaking things down into simple 2 forms and studying angles with plumb lines etc etc. I'll try to post one of them before I move on to the next though.
Just an idea anyways. I'm going on vacation for the next week, so I'm gonna try to do at least one more before I leave of these, then when I get back I'll try to do one a day again, or one every other day. While I'm away I'm gonna try to start boarding my comic, I have some rough thumbnails to start from and it'll be my first real comic thing ever.
Anyway here's some doodles
Comic boarding sounds exciting! It's a time consuming endeavor so try not to get discouraged by the workload. It'll be cool to see some of these characters actually interact, so I hope you post what you end up getting to.
With your little biker dude, I feel like those types of doodles might be a good place to really practice trying to be more confident with your lines. Try to remember that the lines dont have to be perfect, but try not to feather them.
I know that most of the time artists are quick to say that the tablet does not matter, but I do think smaller, older ones make the job harder. Once I went to on-screen drawing I found line fidelity to be a bit easier to achieve. Its an expensive leap, though, and I still prefer to sketch and do anything line oriented on paper.
For inking, at some point I ventured to accept that if I get vastly better results doing certain things on paper, that maybe I should put up the tablet sometimes and start there. If you dont have a scanner, that's a good investment, and photoshop's photomerge tools make it absolutely trivial to scan things. I work in 11X17 most of the time, but two or three scans mean I can still have whatever I'm working on in PS.
This isn't to discourage you from trying to ink in photoshop. Just consider the pros and cons of it as a tool, and dont force it if you hate it. Its like if you were doing a large scale graphite drawing and needed to fill a huge area, but you usually work with mechanical pencils. You could in theory do it with the mechanical pencil, but by all means you should buy a stick of graphite. You can certainly through time and practice make inking work for you on a small tablet, but dont force it if there's an easier, more efficient way and no one will be able to tell the difference anyhow.
Larger tablets enable a bit more room to complete a stroke, an important part if inking if you are trying to get that varied stroke line work. Drawing on screen is a huge step up, and if you are willing to take a shot on a yiynova, it can be slightly less than all your money to get into it.
All that being said, I dont consider myself an inker by any means, and prefer to paint. I just thought I would put that opinion out there if you are finding the inking to be frustrating.
The lights are about 80, 70, 60, 90ish was starting to make thing look a little blown out to me, but its hard to tell. I can definitely see them looking very close on other calibrations though.
Drawing I had to do @ work for a client that wanted a 2 headed bust
A drawing, and the first of week 4 hw. The goal of it is to manipulate the values while trying to balance the relationships to still get the right effect. This was a darker set of values. I think for the next one I'll take some reference pics to practice on since these sculptures aren't too useful for this exercise I feel.
Looking at the other people's crit videos, I think I need to spend more time on the accuracy part in the beginning, bc there's are pretty tight and mine is still a little too loose. I also think I need to watch my verticals mostly, I tend to squish things down in general which I think is what is messing things up. I checked the painting over the reference and it squished in the face.
Of all the studies you've done, I feel like this last one has clarity in the edges and a little more confidence to the shapes. The only nitpick I have is that you flattened out her eyelid by not bringing the shadow all the way to the corner of the eye, which interferes with it looking curved. Really nailing that eyelid structure in a conscious way when studying will help you make expressions when you are trying to exaggerate them in your characters.
And for the eye, you mean the reflected light in the left eyelid?
And thanks on both counts, I'm gonna try to do at least 3 of these studies this week, they take so long and I'm trying to balance them with actually doing stuff.