My Long Term Image Dump (partial nudity)

#1

So a little back story. I usually work in 3D as a hobby, doing some pretty minor photomanipulation and painting for textures and what-not, so I know my way around photoshop. About a year ago I thought about maybe transitioning to 2D art for a while and try my hand at it. I messed around with it for about a week and really enjoyed it, and then life happened and I really didn’t do any art till now really. Attached in this post is the only painting I really worked on during that week, spend a weekend getting to this point on it.

Recently myself and some friends undertook a project which could greatly benifit from me getting back into painting, and I would really like to start at it again. So my mission statement is to keep this thread going and post at least 1 update per week, being a simple study, or an update on an actual painting, or a new painting. Writing it now, 1 per week sounds kind of low, but I don’t want to set unrealistic goals, I don’t have much free time and if I set it too high and miss I will probably be discouraged. I’m looking for any C&C I can get, on any aspect of my work (I can take it…), so I can improve as much as possible.

So this was my first attempt at painting (to be honest I think I posted it here already, but the thread is probably closed), not finished obviously, and I don’t know if I can get the full res files back to continue working on this itteration of it. the reference image is here.

So I probably won’t try something this ambitious right off the bat, I think the results I got were decent, especially for a first try, but I plan on really improving my fundementals and then maybe starting a more major project in the next couple of months, but everything will be kept in this thread.

So with any luck I’ll have something new to post in the next couple of days. might have to wait for the weekend to get enough time though.

Thanks a lot.

#2

Hey I’m goign to subsribe to this post and follow your progress.
I’m working with 3d at the moment and I’m also wanting to develop my 2d skills with drawing an painting, simply because i want to be able to design my own charectors and scenes. I’ve got an eye for this stuff but i havent experience in this sector of digital art.

so I’m jsut a member of your audience and ill motivate you if i see you slipping :slight_smile:

#3

first off, let me say, you have set some admirable goals for yourself, here. like you say, it is easy to get discouraged with this kind of thing, so I’m sure any small step in the right direction is definitely worth doing.

now I suppose so early in your endeavor it might be a bit premature to offer C&C, but I’ll give it a shot. based on the painting you posted, I can already see you have some good skills. you did a decent job here with proportions and capturing the overall lighting and skin tone. I especially like the way you rendered the nose.

one thing I noticed is that the reference photo is fairly evenly lit throughout. since you are just starting with painting, my advice, for what it’s worth, might be to at least try painting from a few pictures with higher contrast lighting. in addition to making your paintings a bit more dramatic and interesting, I have found from my own experience that it helps give a better understanding of how to use color to create forms with some dimension to them. a lot of times with beginner painters you find that their works will have a kind of “muddy” appearance to them. that is, the way colors blend and distribute across the painting do not have the dynamic look that the pros can achieve. I still struggle with this, myself, actually. in fact, for your first painting you have done fairly well as far as keeping the brushwork distinct, but paying special attention to light and shadow as you are initially planning your paintings will help take you to the next level. sometimes, even just raising the contrast in post will do the trick, as long as the lights and darks are in the right places. of course, not every painting will call for high-contrast lighting, but once you learn the overall techniques, they can be applied to a lot of situations.

anyway, hope what I said makes sense and is useful. since I don’t have much to go on, for all I know, you might have already been thinking along these lines. but hey, good luck in your quest!

#4

Thanks man, it’s always good to have people to motivate you.

Whipped this up in about 2 hours, just going back the the old reference image (don’t think anyone’s going to give me a hard time about wanting to use it :wink: )

The hair was kind of just rushed at the end to cover the seam around the face. I don’t think it’s as good as the attempt from last year, but like I said, I haven’t done this in a while. I’ll most likely be able to get a few more posts before the end of this coming weekend.

#5

looking good although i do see what your saying about the hair.
IMHO i think you should just take as much time as you need. no one looks at the art work and says he rushed it so its ok.

It is what it is when you look at it.

you haven’t been doing this for a while. come on I’m not even going to acknowledge that.

when you are working on some art. give it your all!
you’ve clearly got talent. FOCUS!

go hard or go home :slight_smile:

:beer:

#6

I wasn’t even going to do the hair originally, just practicing the facial features, it just looked weird so I added the hair last minute, wasn’t so much rushed because I wanted to finish it as it was just blocked in. Anyway, that’s just an excuse regardless and I see what you’re saying.

This more of what I had originally planned on doing with this thread, which is posting mostly just practice peices. Guess I’m working on faces right now… I decided to do an eye because it’s one of the most important facial features, and I remember drawing them all the time when I was in art classes/schools. It’s not finished, obviously it lacks eyelashes, and the eyebrows aren’t really great (I need to work on hair in general), but the actual eye and skin around the eye I think are lookin’ good. with this peice though I plan on finishing they eyebrows and eyelashes before moving on, so I’ll have another update of it soon. gotta go find some eyelash tutorials.

#7

Bah! Nucron I’m sorry I didn’t even notice your post the last time I updated. It was like 3am, so I apologize. Thanks for the tips and compliments (I also think the nose is definitely the best done part of the picture). Like I said in my last post, I’m probably going to be doing a lot of exercises I remember from art school, which means a lot of eyes, lips and noses, and then a bunch of shading studies involving geometric shapes.

Speaking of eyes, I think I’m done with this version of the eye. I got rid of the eyebrow, I need to take some separate time to practice hair in general, the eyelashes were bad enough and probably the weakest link at the moment. So, apart from the eyelashes this was all done on one layer. This was my first eye in photoshop, I’ll definitely be making tons more, probably sooner rather than later.

This is the eye pasted directly onto the reference image (because it’s pretty symmetrical I did both eyes, just flipped one, messes up the glare in the right eye a little, but it’s just a test). It’s a little uncanny valley-ish but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.

#8

Just some practice with shading a face from an outline I drew. it’s just practicing skills, I probably won’t do anymore with this picture specifically, but I’m definitely going to do more in the near future, hopefully improving with each one.

(once again, I didn’t really do very much with the hair, I mainly added it just to give it a better outline and look less like a floating face)

#9

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