the self mentoring challenge.

[sleep]

why wait for some sucka to lend u his time? me and tza will both be starting illustration at uwe bristol in the UK this september...over the summer we will be self mentoring to tackle our weaknesses using a combination of stuff from other mentoring threads and .... common sense.

self mentoring is basically what we do our whole lives. learning from experience. its just that now we're setting up challenges for ourselves and structuring our learning......blatantly im just bitter that i wasnt picked to be a mentee. lets see how this goes


1: environment thumbnails
basically we set out to do some environment thumbnails from imagination purely in values. wasnt long before i realised i was absolutely shit and had no idea how to do it, tza was having similar troubles so i suggested doing them from ref instead to get comfortable with the technique before doing anything from imagination. heres my stuff. more soon

708113
also i realised it was much better to block in shapes with pen pressure opacity turned off. it was introducing too many unnecessary values and just made it muddy

[TZA]

we kinda fucked up on our topic, well I did, not really enviroment thumbs, focused more on narrative.

http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c194/Majikz/thumb1.jpg
i tried to draw the attention straight to the guys face to explain the scene at first read - strongest contrast of value at this point - tried to show it was suicide by having the gun in his right hand - probably should have silhouetted this gun abit more to make it clearer but I think the triangle that ends at this point helps this slightly.
http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c194/Majikz/thumb2.jpg
this is prob the weakest of the three, really small value range, which is good for a start but not for a thumbnail - should have pushed some more darks into it, very hard to read the forms, no sense of distance between the foreground/background
http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c194/Majikz/thumb3.jpg
okay, the sword sucks and is bent as fuck, just ignore that. think this was probably the most successful in terms of narrative, good atmosphere/silhouette - hope the image asks some questions

[sleep]

quick points . and im gonna crit u on the narrative even tho this was meant to be an environment task

as i said; thumbnails are called thumbnails because they are as big as thumb nails. u got carried away with size!!!

first one: like what u did with the contrast round the head, im not completely sure what is going on though. as u said the gun isnt clear enough it would have been better if it was silhouetted against a lighter mass. also would have been worth vignetting the door a bit so the bottom is darker... right now it leads your eye straight off the bottom and therers nothing to look at there. how is his head just exploding if the gun is already down there?

second: punching ina few darker values would really rescue this. in the background, round the sides and in the silhouette of the boy maybe. not every picture has to have a full value range, less contrast can be used to very nice effect, like in creating a subdued atmosphere

third: i think this is ur weakest one actually....hope that doesnt disappoint u too much. the composition just makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, theres diagonal lines top left, a vertical thing on the right, and the edge of a box on the bottom left with no suggestion of perspective. and the composition is really un-dynamic...almost symmetrical with the sword and the centred figure

[surfandsnow]

If the goal here is thumbnails, I think everything here is way too detailed. I tend to think of thumbnails as more silhouetted simple shapes with 2-4 values. These seam more like preliminary sketches.

I am sure youve seen the Kian/danny thread. http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=110528 The thumbnails there were very simple. I think when you focus more on interior/local value and details you tend to lose some of the perspective, and the larger compositional elements. So I would say fewer values and more silhouetted shapes.

just a thought.

[dcorc]

Congrats on having the initiative to help yourselves/each other!

Can I suggest you read up on "Notan" and "value massing"?

See here:
http://www.painterskeys.com/clickbacks/notan.asp

and here:
http://forum.portraitartist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1857&perpage=10&pagenumber=1

These both emphasise strong design by arranging and grouping values (and by minimising the number of values used).

(Can I also suggest that you might perhaps like to meet myself and/or others on fridays in London? See the UK thread. We might be able to help with some things?).

Dave