blue

[SocialSystem]

A small update.
I'm starting the eyes right now and am seriously torn between green and blue. Oh well.

I keep wanting to just call it done but I know if I do when I look at it it will bother me. A lot. Hopefully I'll feel remotely content after I finish the eyes; this was really only meant to be a study and I've spent insane amounts of time on it. I'm seriously considering just leaving the shirt kinda blocked in like that.

http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/7219/blue9my2.jpg

[lokki]

At first glance, it seems the hair is somewhat lacking in depth... there is some shading going on in obvious areas, but the forehead and crown seem kind of flat both from tonal variation and in the uniformity of the lines you've implied. Almost like the hair is piled up rather than brushed backward. Back from her temple, you have the right idea.

From this point, though, I'm not experienced enough to give you more concrete feedback, and I'm not sure if you're going for realism versus something realistic but more stylized. Neither do I know what you intend for the lighting. Personally, I think the hair looks pretty good, but would need to see more of the concept before venturing further into critical evaluation. I guess what I'm saying is that I feel I need to better understand what you're going for.

[Cati]

The reason why the hair doesn't look so natural is that you're trying to paint the hair one by one. It's one of the main reasons why the hair lacks depth and why it doesn't look natural.

Try to treat the hair as one mass or one shape. Just block in the hair with a solid area with the darkest shade of the hair first. Build up from the darkest shade of the hair to the lightest. Stay within the range of your chosen basic value of the hair for general shape. For example: if you have dark hair stay with the dark side of your palette for creating the shape and use middle values only for brighter highlight or light value to extreme (washed out) highlight.

Use larger brushes first and just bring out smaller strands of hair for finishing touches.

[TrenchcoatPixie]

Linda Bergkvist's hair tutorial is a must-read for anyone who wants to make realistic hair. Try doing it her way, by the numbers for a few pieces, then use it as a jumping off point for your own experimentation. http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?threadid=259468

[SocialSystem]

lokki, thanks for replying. :) You're right, her forehead area and the top of her hair both presented a major struggle for me. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to give her hair depth and make it look swept back without making it look... the way it does. The more I look at it and the more I hear about adding depth to her hair, I think I have a better idea of how to approach it.
You think I should add some darker colors towards the top of her forehead? Not like her temple but over the section of her nose? Looking at it, the shading doesn't seem that bad to me but I do think it needs more, which might, like you said, add a little depth and hopefully make it look like her hair and forehead are connected in a more 3d manner.

The lighting in the reference picture was straight on and I figured I shouldn't deviate from that. I wonder if I should have changed it? I'm also unsure of how to approach the background. I figure just adding a small gradient or something might help, but I don't really know what to do with that quite yet.

Hah. Yeah, this is an attempt at realism. I understand where you're coming from, looking at it--the tip of her nose seems a little larger than I had intended and I had forgotten to go back to it until you said that. I think when I finish the eyes it might be a little more obvious that this is supposed to be realism. If I can achieve realistic, normal sized eyes I feel like the style will be a little more obvious, if not apparant.

Which brings me again to the question of what color I should make the eyes. I want them to be realistic but I want their color should stand out without being bright/unnaturally colored to the point they take away from the other colors in the picture. I think I'll go to google or try to find some stock images and take some colors from people's eyes so I can get a natural color. The question is what color though. Hmm. Maybe I'm thinking too much. I think I'll just do blue.

The reason why the hair doesn't look so natural is that you're trying to paint the hair one by one. It's one of the main reasons why the hair lacks depth and why it doesn't look natural.

Try to treat the hair as one mass or one shape. Just block in the hair with a solid area with the darkest shade of the hair first. Build up from the darkest shade of the hair to the lightest. Stay within the range of your chosen basic value of the hair for general shape. For example: if you have dark hair stay with the dark side of your palette for creating the shape and use middle values only for brighter highlight or light value to extreme (washed out) highlight.

Use larger brushes first and just bring out smaller strands of hair for finishing touches.

D:
that's actually what I did--I blocked in the black with a large airbrush and then used a dark blue to add some blocks over the black and to block in the blue sections. I went over the blue sections and a few places in the black with a lighter blue. Same thing with the green. I blocked it in with a large brush and went over it with a lighter color green and then went over it with an even lighter color.

After looking at pictures in comparison to mine, I understand that I need to block in the base color and block in highlights--which I kinda tried to do but clearly should have focused more on that than individual strands--before adding strands on top.

Linda Bergkvist's hair tutorial is a must-read for anyone who wants to make realistic hair. Try doing it her way, by the numbers for a few pieces, then use it as a jumping off point for your own experimentation. http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?threadid=259468 (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?threadid=259468)

Wow, thanks. I've seen that tutorial before but it never really occurred to me that I'd be painting hair in painter so I forgot about it. Thank you so much for posting it, just glancing at it right now kinda gives me an idea of what went wrong. I can see I had the basic idea right--block in base color and add lighter colors to imply sections of strands on top--but I need to use a bigger variety of shades to achieve highlights and lowlights before adding individual strands.


Thank you guys for your feedback. So far I'm fairly pleased with the way her face has turned out and hope that finishing that up won't take too long. I'm also shocked how close I came to getting her hair right when I didn't know what I was doing. Haha. It will probably be pretty easy just to go in and add some layers of more block-like highlights and then work off of that. I was thinking I would have to trash the whole thing and start the hair completely over and I'm glad it doesn't necessarily look that way.


I'm surprised no one's been in here yelling at me for being a bad artist. :S At least no one seems to think I should trash it.

[Cati]

Just to let you know - what I meant with bringing out smaller strands of hair I meant few strands - not every single strand of hair. Linda's tutorial s great and it gives you good direction. Although I confess I'm not able to do the hair as well as she can.

You're not a bad artist so why should anyone say that to you. The face looks great :-) We've all been in your pants anyway.. or most of us has.

[lokki]

You're right, her forehead area and the top of her hair both presented a major struggle for me. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to give her hair depth and make it look swept back without making it look... the way it does. The more I look at it and the more I hear about adding depth to her hair, I think I have a better idea of how to approach it.
You think I should add some darker colors towards the top of her forehead? Not like her temple but over the section of her nose? Looking at it, the shading doesn't seem that bad to me but I do think it needs more, which might, like you said, add a little depth and hopefully make it look like her hair and forehead are connected in a more 3d manner.[quote]

Honestly, I'm not any kind of sketch artist, so I'm looking at this in terms of 'did you achieve what you set out to achieve?' A quick way for you to be able to play with some variations is to open a flat version of this in Photoshop and overlay a dodge/burn layer. Then you can work with shading very quickly and try a few variations. Once you find what you like, you can go back into Painter and rebuild or tweak as needed (though I admittedly cheat and do more shading by layers than the "correct" way of actually painting properly).

[quote]The lighting in the reference picture was straight on and I figured I shouldn't deviate from that. I wonder if I should have changed it? I'm also unsure of how to approach the background. I figure just adding a small gradient or something might help, but I don't really know what to do with that quite yet.

The lighting looks even, but uncommitted... there's not much character to the lighting itself, though it is well executed. Again, what you want out of it flavors how criticism should be directed (and taken). While you've got the highlights right for a large softbox just over the photographer's right shoulder, I wonder if that's really what you want out of the picture. Reproduction or interpretation? Again, adding a non-destructive layer to play with shading might be a good exercise - and you may end up coming right back to where you started, but at least you'll have taken the road and given yourself more confidence in your choices.

The background will be dictated by the story you want to tell... if it's simple (hah!) portraiture, a soft, mottled background or suggestions of a scene will be sufficient. But if you are looking to develop a character here, you'll have to think about why the subject is sitting there vamping at us :)

Hah. Yeah, this is an attempt at realism. I understand where you're coming from, looking at it--the tip of her nose seems a little larger than I had intended and I had forgotten to go back to it until you said that. I think when I finish the eyes it might be a little more obvious that this is supposed to be realism. If I can achieve realistic, normal sized eyes I feel like the style will be a little more obvious, if not apparant.

I think you're not giving yourself enough credit. Realism of course is not devoid of personal style, even if you are going for exact reproduction. What I intended by stylized in this case is are you going to creatively interpret the subject to enhance some features or elements over others to imply something that may not be otherwise obvious.

And yes... I think you're over thinking this... just let it out and see what happens. You clearly have the skill, so charge ahead and get the work moving.

A wonderful sketch artist once shared with me her personal secret for creating beautiful work: All the art you're ever going to make is inside you, in order; you have to work through each piece before you can get to the next.

Paint in the eyes, set up your ideas for the background, and post again :)

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