My Road To Mastery

#181

Johan - Kindest thanks, man! That means a lot to me that you enjoy my stuff, and even more that you can learn something new in here. :smiley:

I was going to upload this for the DSF challenge “Nurse” but I think I might have crossed the line with one of the rules… I’m uncertain, but better to play it safe than get in trouble or be accused of being an intentional cheater. I used a reference for the costume, which I know is OK, but the pose reference was a photo of a lady on a bench in front of a wall. I know references are allowed, but there is a rule that says “original composition”. Even if I changed the person/clothes/dimensions of the frame, I don’t think I would be allowed to use the composition of a photo I did not compose and shoot myself. Anyone have any experience/clarity on this matter?

PS, 40 minutes:

I also did some paintchat with some friends last night. For those of you who’ve never been in one, it’s basically a chat room with a big white board everyone can draw on together. Good fun. Here are some sketches…

I’m still working on the backyard painting, and just yesterday I started a van gogh copy in acrylic. I hope both of those will be finished soon.

#182

From a photo of my good friend Nick at a UCLA game.

PS, 2 hours.

#183

Hey Staticpen,

Congratulations on getting Sketch of the Week.

#184

yes Static, Sketch of the week! Very nice.

#185

And a well deserved front page plug it was :smiley:
Awesome stuff!
You are progressing with leaps and bounds… keep at that :wink:

#186

Congrats on the sketch of the week. Well deserved.
Continue like this and you’ll reach the sky, just like in the sketch.
Godspeed.

#187

Michael - Thanks man, much appreciated. :slight_smile:

TedNindo - Thanks! :smiley:

Johan - Thank you sir, and will do.

Razz - Many thanks mate, and Godspeed to you as well.

The weather has been killing me lately. For the last several days there have been some rain clouds and thunderstorms around the area. Since my internet signal isn’t actually coming from the house I live in, the connection has been extremely fickle. It took me a good 20 minutes just to get here from my homepage, and my subscription page won’t load at all.

With that said, I got lucky and was able to upload a couple images just now. Here’s a sketch after Edward Hopper. I neglected to go into details and tried to focus on color and value accuracy. I’d like you to the reference, but as I said, signal issues… so if you want to check out the original, it’s “Room in New York” by Edward Hopper.

Also spent some time on a Van Gogh copy in acrylic. I really enjoyed having fun with the paintbrush in this one. Working on the Bouguereau is so laborious in comparison. I also loved how fast the paint dried. I’m more of an alla prima painter, I suppose. Maybe that explains why I only finish about 60-70% of paintings that I don’t complete in the first sitting.

#188

Hey Static your VanGocgh copy looks really cool. I tink traditional paiting would help me unterstand colors in a completly different way but I still shy away from getting all the material an so on. What is your experience in that regard?

#189

lots of beautiful work and much improvement have been made while i was away. your thread is as much of an inspiration as ever, static.

#190

TedNindo - So sorry it’s taken me this long to get back to you! I try to post an image in every entry, and learning Japanese has taken up all of my time this week, it seems. But here I am! So uh, painting traditionally. Yeah, it definitely helps me understand color better. It’s been a lot of help to just grab the essential colors and do my own mixing in order to create the various compliments, analogous colors, and so forth. The main advantage is that when looking at colors in life, I don’t think about where on a color picker that color is. Instead, I think of which colors make up that color. It’s a handy way to think. I encourage you to try traditional color work. :slight_smile:

lestikitty - Long time no see. :wink: Many thanks. Any chance you’ll be posting more soon?

So yeah, Japanese… taking up all my time. Haha. It’s especially tough learning it on my own. But I’ve been doing it on and off for about 10 years now, so I figured I’d start really trying to buckle down and tackle the language this time. It’s going pretty good.

Anyway, seeing Razz’s oil sketch on paper reminded me how much more fun I have when I mess around with oil on paper instead of canvas. I really dislike canvas. Rigged canvas, anyway. Everyone has different preferences, and I think mine are for smooth canvases with a lot of gesso/sanding layers. I just don’t have any gesso, haha. But yeah, so here’s last nights oil sketches from life:

about 25 minutes apiece. oil paint and turpentine on watercolor/gauche paper.

#191

very soon. hopefully today!

its a really big update cuz i have to catch everything up. i want to keep record of things for looking back on.

and good luck with that japanese. i hear its a hard language to learn.

#192

You too, huh? I’ve been having a lot of false starts for a couple years so far. I find that most of the time I have a choice between practicing Japanese or practicing art, and art usually wins.

A few sites that you may find useful:
Japanese language learning podcast. Much less boring and tedious than pimsleur. A little like a talk show. www.japanesepod101.com
Digital Kana flash cards www.realkana.com
Digital Kanji flash cards www.realkanji.com
Rikichan firefox plugin (instant kanji translation)- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2471
The WWWJDIC (online kanji dictionary) - http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1Clearning
Slime forest (kanji RPG) - http://lrnj.com/

Also, “My Japanese Coach” coming out soon for Nintendo DS. Not sure if it’ll be any good.

Ever tried Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone?

#193

Thanks static for the insights.

Japanese hu? I guess thats rather timeconsuming. My brother is learning Japanese as well and as he told me it seems to be rather difficult. But I guess it is with language as with art or other things. Practice makes perfect. So keep on practicing :smiley:

#194

lestikitty - Thanks. :wink:

velanosangue - Ooh, thanks for the links, man. Those will be very helpful. My brother says pimsleur has been working for him, but I haven’t tried it. I’ve heard him using it, but I haven’t started doing it. I’ve been learning with a youtube series called uuuh… Yan and the Japanese People. Over the course of 23 lessons you follow an american dude moving to Japan, with no subtitles. You watch, then learn, then watch again. It’s really cool. You should check it out.

TedNindo - Yeah dude, it’s tough. Just when you get the basic word and sentence structure down, you have to learn a million new sub-structures and sub-word forms. Psssssh. haha.

So yeah, I’m taking Spanish, too. Compared to Japanese, it’s like I already know the language. :wink:

Anyway, here is an oil painting from last night. I don’t think I used enough turpentine, as you can see… all of the colors mixed together and got very muddy. Once that happened, I just gave up and threw a bunch of paint on it to fill the page and then quit.
I really, really wish I could take a class or something. Trial and error is so tough!
So indeed… I’m pretty sure this is one of my least favorite paintings I’ve ever painted. But in the essence of recording progress, not just the good times… here it is.

Because I couldn’t let myself post an entry only featuring that, I did some figure drawing last night. I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth it to draw with a tablet at all. Not like, Is is worth it to paint digitally, but specifically drawing. It’s so much tougher for me to be precise on the slippery plastic than if I were doing the same thing on paper. I think maybe I’ll start doing all my figure drawing on paper…
These are from characterdesigns.com, and about 15 minutes apiece, give or take.

#195

I finally finished the painting of my grandmother’s backyard! It was a big project, so I saved some steps for you guys.

First, I just went with the Mullins grass scatter technique to get some action going on the canvas.

Next, it’s just using a hard round at high opacities to block in. Not too opaque, though, or all that grass scatter will end up totally covered. Once an accurate color is down, I go in and use a custom textured hard round to add lighting and details. It’s just a regular hard round with the texture box ticked and set to “wax crayon on vellum” and “multiply”. Varying opacities depending on the effect desired.

No real tricks to talk about here, really. Just more of the same… Old fashioned painting on a normal layer.

Here’s the final piece. I used PSCS and it took me a handful of hours. Hope you enjoy!

#196

wow, that painting of your grandmothers backyard…gorgeous. those textures are what really do it for me. i couldnt possibly imagine attempting something like that with this old version of photoshop that i have.

now the oil painting XD i think is cute haha. i bet youll come back to that sometime in the future and laugh.

#197

hey Static,

really beatufull painting. It is no extraordinary subject, no goblin killing a mighty knight or whatever. You were capable of painting an everyday scenery and express something enjoyable.

Good colors good perspectiv. What have been your thoughts about the composition?

#198

lestikitty - Thanks a lot. ;D What version of photoshop do you have? Cause the texture technique described isn’t a very new feature, if my photoshop memory serves me right…

TedNindo - Thanks man. My thoughts about the composition? There weren’t many, really. I took a panoramic photo of the backyard and then just painted it. I didn’t do much else besides go with old photographic instincts when framing the picture. The only compositional element I did change was a bush. There was a big bush/tree thing that took up a huge amount of the left side of the foreground. I excluded that and painted the towel and jeans instead. But thanks again!

I think one of the reasons I’m so slow in PS is that every other image I’m trying a totally new technique or aesthetic. I think it might be a good idea to select a style and work on it for a bit instead of jumping to a new one right away.
So yeah, what I’m doing here other than the obvious value practice is trying to construct a workflow that I can use consistently for solid groundwork. The more I experiment with it and see other people use it, the more I think the gradient tool is a big part of working efficiently. So I’ve used that to some extent here in this first of four thumbs.

Drawing is referenced, everything else is from the head.
I think a negative here is obviously that I’m new to the gradient tool. I think I kind of used it for the sake of using it as far as the garage is concerned… It has nothing to do with the light source at all, and the wall would have a cast shadow if anything, not a gradient. Everything is also kind of this middle-grey value, too…
I think a positive is the hardwood that frames the image. I think I got those values and shadows down pretty good there.

#199

photoshop 5.0 limited edition :stuck_out_tongue:

god how i wish i had cs. i would even be happy with 8.0

i wish i had a deeper understanding of art so that i could really discuss your picture. at my current level of understanding all i can say is that i like it but cant really say why. i think it may be the lines but i cant be sure. i can say tho that its hard for me to tell that you used a gradient tool in it. it looks more like you used a really soft brush. i dont think thats bad tho cuz for a picture like this if you could actually look at it and tell that you used a gradient tool, it would look cheap. how did you use it?

#200

lestikitty - Hey, thanks. :wavey: How did I use the gradient tool? Well, I put down flat colors with a hard brush first. Then I used the magic wand tool to make a selection out of the garage. After that it’s just picking your colors and clicking and dragging to make it happen. For the grass I made a new layer and dragged a gradient over the whole image, after which I erased what I didn’t need and merged down. Thinking back I probably should have used a layer mask… :shrug:
PS 5 LE, huh? That came with my first tablet. Do you know anything about how to adjust your brush properties or anything?

Thumb 2 of 4 from around the house.

I felt I did better with the gradient tool this time. This one has a lot more detail, but it actually went faster than the last one. I suppose that’s cause I was guessing what to do less. So Go Workflow, no? It’s already paying off to try and refine a single method instead of moving on right away…

A negative is that I can’t grab highlights as light as I would like. I’m putting the pencil drawing on a multiply layer and painting underneath it. I try putting down white, but it shows up the value you see in the far window. How do you guys digitally color under a traditional pencil sketch and still have a full value range?