Vita learns to draw

[Vitasketches]

Hi. I need to work on drawing/painting/everything a LOT.

Please help me along the way.

I Will try to update this regularly. Here are some quick renders I did last night of some statues and myself in the mirror/hands this morning. All from life.

Looking forward to your crit.

[RickyS]

Welcome! Personally I think you can draw fine and it's good that you're drawing from life. If you really want to get better though you should also get an anatomy book like Loomis or Bridgman and study because your hand anatomy is off. However I think your rendering is nice. The most important thing is to just draw, so hopefully you'll continue updating this sketchbook regardless if you think you can or can't draw. Good luck. :)

[Vitasketches]

RickyS: Thanks! I just get frustrated sometimes. I feel like I have such a long way to go. xD

I actually just recently downloaded Loomis and I have a bridgeman book floating around somewhere, I will definitely work on the hands more. I get impatient and don't slow down enough, those sketches were all extremely fast as a warm up.

Here's a self portrait attempt in greyscale with only a hard brush in Photoshop CS3, done from life in a mirror. I'm learning a lot but it's aggravating.

[RickyS]

Yeah I know how you feel. I get frustrated sometimes too, but you have to remember to calm down and know that while things are tough now, they will be easier in the future when you practice more. I also find it's good to not really care if the end result is perfect. Just doing the studies to learn and have fun makes it a lot less stressful. I guess you need to realize that since you have so much to learn, everything you do now will suck in some way no matter how hard you try, so what's the point in getting frustrated if you can't help it. If you keep doing it every day you will eventually get better and some day you will laugh at your old work.

The self portrait isn't bad, but you could work on the lighting and again anatomy is important. I personally don't do much digital painting, so I can't help with this specifically, but keep it up and maybe someone else with more experience will be able to help!

[Vitasketches]

RickyS: Yes, I know, I just expect waaay too much out of myself. I draw everyday, even my last year work bugs the crap out of me now.xD Thanks for the encouragement though, I changed the title to something a little more positive. And when you say work on anatomy/lighting could you be more specific? Those are very general terms that I feel could always be worked on.

Here's a really sad attempt at a color portrait, a WIP but i may scrap it:

[RickyS]

Well it looks like you're working hard so keep it up. :)

Like I said I don't have much experience with digital painting, but I will try to help with what I know. I actually painted over your self portrait, but I don't want to hijack your sketchbook, so I will only post it with your permission. I will try to explain some issues with words for now and be more specific.

Looking at your painting again I noticed there is too much dark value on the right side of the face and the arm. I'm not sure if your room was dark like that, but it would look better if you have a more gradual transition from light to dark (kind of hard to explain with words). To fix this you could refine your brushstrokes a bit and add more grey midtone. I think the problem is you have too much contrast and not enough midtone in those areas. However overall the painting seems to have too much dark contrast and not enough highlights, but I guess it may just be the lighting in your room, so I can't help with that.

Plus overall the brushes strokes seem rushed and messy. It would help to spend some time afterwards to go back and refine the brush strokes to make them cleaner. Of course I also have problems with this so I'm not sure how you can get awesome results. You might need to try softer brushes...

As far as anatomy goes you could develop the hands more, but you already knew that so I thought it wasn't worth mentioning. Otherwise I'm not an expert at anatomy, so sorry I'm not much help with this.

Now to improve your most recent painting you could bump up the contrast a lot. If you turn the image into grayscale in Photoshop you will notice there is too much grey value. It may be helpful to get a reference photo if you haven't already, turn it into grayscale and try to make the shadows darker and highlight lighter. I would recommend doing the painting itself in grayscale too at first and try to understand the value, the move onto colouring after. Plus skintone usually has some traces of warm and cool colors, but I will stop here because as far as color theory goes I have no idea. As far as I know if the shadows are warm colors, then the highlights will be cool colours and vice versa, plus a number of factors like the background color affects skin tone. Whatever you do don't quit or scrap it because if you just scrap it you won't really learn much from your mistakes and the mistakes will continue! Try to look for the problems and solve them before moving onto something else. :)


Of course take my advice with a grain of salt. To be honest I learned a lot about digital painting just from helping you out, so it shows how much we both have to improve. :P

[Vitasketches]

Thanks for the crit! You can feel free to post the paintover if you want, though I attempted to resolve the peice today after looking at your crit and some other friend's crit and I think I made it a lot more solid.

In the future though, don't feel as if you have to hold back, I'm on here to get as much crit as possible, I can take it, I promise. xD

Also, I've looked through your sketchbook and I've been meaning to return the favor on the feedback I just haven't had the chance yet, will do soon!

The color portrait was an attempt at a weird upward angle with the mirror underneath me however i made my face waaaay too fat. I think i am going to start anew on that one and take what I learned from it to make a more solid peice that can actually hold it's own. And use an angle that's not quite as hard to hold, haha. I had a warm lamp on my face, however for the life of me i could not get any color, i kept wanting to mix things. maybe i will try more color glazing, digital is such a different beast from traditional.

CA is giving me fits about uploading so I will put it up later. xD

[RickyS]

Haha, I was just making sure because I don't know if other people would feel uncomfortable having their stuff edited, but I guess it worked out okay because you were able to improve it yourself. To be honest after working on my own digital painting study today, I think my paintover isn't very helpful, but I'll upload it anyway so you can make your own judgements.

As for the colored painting I didn't know you were doing it from life, so I guess my advice on using greyscale doesn't apply... Plus I haven't really painted from life in color before so it looks like you're on your own. Good luck!

Oh yeah and if CA doesn't let you upload pictures I find if you refresh the page then go to Manage Attachments and hold Shift + click then it will let you upload pictures again. It always works for me when I do that.


Here's the paintover:
887880

[Traveler]

Keep practicing and be patient. Unfortunately, there's no shortcut; but if you really want this then work hard, think positively, and you're sure to succeed.

Draw, draw, draw. :painting:


If you need some inspiration and motivation watch some of Bobby Chiu's and Steven Silver's videos on Youtube. Those guys are full of artist wisdom and enthusiasm and are virtually guaranteed to get you moving forward.

http://www.youtube.com/user/digitalbobert#p/u (start with the earlier vids here)

http://www.youtube.com/user/silvertoons#p/u

[Vitasketches]

today I finally decided to stop sucking at photoshop, yaaaay

Here is that piece, finished like a month ago.

Here is another self portrait, finished like, two days after that other piece.


And now for some recent stuff, something I did last week from life,

an environment i did the other day from my head

and lastly a life drawing that doesn't actually suck!!!

I've done waaay more work than this lately but this is the only stuff that doesn't totally suck.

And let me know if the images are too tiny, i peeled them off of my blogger because I didn't feel like fighting with resizing the rez on each one.

Thanks for the crits by the way, sorry I didn't get to each one, life has been hectic!