Anatomy Thread of Xiannc

#21

Hey Lute! Thank you very much for your comments. Your thread was actually the inspiration for that last one. I was looking at your Loomis(?) head sketches and thought I would give it a shot,… but I got side tracked and thats what I ended up with. You keep up the good work as well. It sounds like we both have similar stories and have a lot of catching up to do in our artistic lives.

ooh, it looks like I violated the photobucket TOS. I will try to find a new spot for my pictures tommorow.

So Ive been working on a new peice for about five hours. I found this great ref on stock.xchng.com Hopefully I will be able to take it to a point of satisfaction. As always… comments and critiques/paintovers are always welcome. this is my first attempt at painting in some skin tones.




#22

Hey your work is really solid, I especially like the painting with the nude lady and I think it’s really cool that you show your process.
Since you don’t mind people painting over your work I took the oppertunity to do a little paintover of that last portrait (which actually is really good) and tune it up a bit.
I added some subtle shadows and light areas , I haven’t seen the original photo so I could be a little off here but I think it gives a little more life to the painting.

#23

Thanks rudeone for your comments. You have made me think that i might have telepathy now, because thats exactly what I was thinking as I couldn’t keep my eyes open last night. More highlights, more shadows, more lifelike. It’s still a wip, but I think I got closer to what you were talking about tonight.

And once again my eyes are closing.

#24

xiannc,

I think your grayscale > color piece turned out quite well, with the rendering of the face being really impressive. :slight_smile: I think you might be able to soften the modeling a little bit with softer brushes at lower opacity, particularly around the stomach area and the left half of the cloth. The super smooth background is a bit of a contrast with the rather scratchy texture of the foreground figure and cloth, and I’m not sure even how you achieved this sense of texture, but I do think it works in the figure and would like to see it carried over into the background. :slight_smile:

Nice start to your new painting ~ it’s a bit early to crit, so I look forward to seeing how you develop this piece. :slight_smile:

Cheers,

~Rebeccak

#25

Hey Rebecca,
I hope you enjoyed your trip wherever you went off to. Thanks for the critique of the grayscale. As far as the texture I acheived… I thought they were just scribbles when I did them, but acheiving a texture sounds much nicer. Thanks.:slight_smile: I might go back and scribbl on it some more.
The one I’m working on now is tough,… I feel like Im getting lost sometimes in putting down the tones in color. In time hopefully this will help me to develope a system of painting. In time. It wasn’t too long ago that I figured out that skin tone was alot more than the skin colored crayon in the crayola box plus black and white shadows and highlights.:slight_smile:
Thanks,
Christian

p.s. Another figure drawing session tonight and then tommorow I start my class!
I can’t wait.

#26

Had a great time at class tonight. I’ve never drawn standing up before so that took just a little bit of getting used to. Once I was used to it though I can see the advantages of drawing from your shoulder. Please C+C. Thanks!

-Christian



#27

Hey xiannc

Great man - love the coloured works: like the way you are handling colour. These last ones are also taking great steps into the right directions. Remember though that taking a line a shape doesn’t do much to describe it - it just tells you were it is. Also vary the thickness/darkness of the line according to the light source. No line variation will result in a flat figure - so vary your line and avoid petting it - don’t go over the same line if you ca help it…

hope that helps man

  • d.
#28

Christian,

Good to see your first drawings. :slight_smile: Do they teach you a specific method, do you know, or do they just let you draw as you wish?

Cheers, :slight_smile:

~Rebeccak

#29

Thanks for the comments!

Demented, how could you not pet those lines? They are so cute!! Sorry.:slight_smile:
I do know what your saying. I want to be able to just lay down a line and let it lie, I think its my bad habit of finding where I want the line to be, but by the time I find it I have a petted messy line. I will work on that.

Rebeccak, our instructor is Paris Alexander, he is a sculptor here in NC. He said right off the bat that it was an academic study. His words were "Most art books will begin by talking about head heights and proportions of the body, but if you have a live model, all the reference points you need are right in front of you. While we were drawing and inbetween poses he talked about the references of the scapula on the shoulders and then finding where the rib cage is. He talked about the triangle on the small of the back which would help you find the tilt of the spine. Towards the end he talked about using the center line of the body to think about what view you had of the body. full frontal, 3/4, side view or anywhere inbetween. He also told me to work big on my canvas. The drawings I posted grew bigger and bigger. The first took one scan, then two scans for the second, and then four for the third!:slight_smile: Tell me what you think and if there is anything you would like to add to my first weeks lesson.

I’m sad the class only lasts for an hour and a half, and then only for six weeks.:frowning:

I will continue with the color portrait soon, but for now it’s time for bed.

-Christian

#30

Hey looking good here, great skecthes, I in particular like the last one.
The portrait is turning out great aswell. I do think her upper lip is slightly too big, it usually looks smaller than the lower lip, but it might look like this in the ref image because of the camera angle. Also it would work better IMO if the upper lip is darker, because it goes inward it catches a little less light than the lower lip. You also might want to paint some subtle bounce lights along her jawline and neck and some subtle lights in the corners of her mouth.
Keep it up! :thumbsup:

#31

Good to hear your comments again Rudeone. You were definitely right about the lips. I started changing it tonight. The lower lip is a little bigger and I made the upper lip darker,… I’m not sure if its dark enough but I will get there. I also started working on the hair tonight and went darker in the shadows. Another thing I changed is that I have been working at 72 dpi and 480x720 pixels, tonight I went up to 300 dpi @ 2000x3000 pixels. I read that in a tutorial the other day, and I knew it was better to work at higher resolution I just hadn’t applied that knowledge to this image yet. Beleive me, it makes a difference.

Im also posting a quick sketch I did on a post-it note of a little girl that came into my work tonight. Didn’t quite get it right, but I she was only there for 2 minutes.

Thank you guys so much I have been learning tons just by posting here.

#32

xiannc,

Good progress on the digital portrait so far ~ one thing that you might try is using 100% opacity and flow and carefully selecting your colors. You might pick 3 or 4 for each area of the painting ~ for example, for the shirt you might pick a variety of lighter and darker blues, and create small swatches from which to color sample. Looking forward to seeing your updates! :slight_smile:

Cheers,

~Rebeccak

#33

Hey rebecca, thanks for the advice. Im definitely putting it to use in the OFDW. Its helping me from getting too chaotic with it. Will post a second WIP there later tonight.

The second night of class was tonight. This week was mostly like last week except we did an excercise where he covered up a part of the page and had me work on getting the proportions right on just one side of the body. That’s why half is shaded and the other half isn’t. The second scetch, the chest is too high. The model did have it arched up, but not that much. Next week, I will have two nights of figure study to show work for.


#34

Wow, another week has flown by. I have been drawing tons. Where do I start. Ok, so the anatomy and figure study class was tonight. He talked about shading and highlights. I think he will go more indepth into shading next week. He just loosely went over both tonight. We also did a scetch by laying down a midtone over the whole paper and then adding shade and subtracting highlights. I enjoyed doing that.

I was working on a peice yesterday which I think I won’t be working on anymore because the original work is copyrighted and it would be sad to work for 80 hours on something and not be able to use it (except for the experience.)

I just saw the head study challenge a couple minutes ago. I’m in! I will try not to use a grid, I need to hone my skill of just making the lines. They might look bad, but thats alright.

-Christian

#35

Christian,

That head study is such a lovely piece, it’s a shame to abandon it. But, there are plenty more opportunities with the 50 Portraits thread, so I look forward to your participation in that! :slight_smile:

Cheers,

~Rebeccak

#36

Time is going by so fast. I would like to kick my kid self for wishing time would speed up. It’s wednesday night again. We ran through more techniques on shading. I didn’t put the new stuff into practice. He told us about crumbling some charcoal on a cloth and using that to model in the forms. The stuff I did tonight was just a continuation of the last peice I did last week. C+C please.


#37

Christian,

I like the serene mood you’ve lent these drawings, an artist you should look at is Manuel Neri:

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[left]A wonderfully expressive artist. :slight_smile:

Figure drawing is as much about expression as it is about Anatomy and basic drawing principles of form, shadow, weight and balance. Trying to combine everything together can take a long, long time but it’s good to see that you are on that path. :slight_smile:

Cheers,

~Rebeccak
[/left]

#38

Thanks for the comments Rebecca. I got a complement from the instructor on that first one. Not that he’s overly critical, but he is teaching and telling me where I can do better. When he came around the second time while I was working on the first one he just said “That’s good.” I enjoyed that. The Manuel Neri peices you posted ar beautiful. I wouldn’t be dissapointed if my peices were that expressive. I do like realism though.

I posted a head copy that took me a while to do. I thought I would repost it here since I love the original peice.

#39

Christian,

That’s a lovely copy. :slight_smile: I think the trick will be translating the close observation that you’re doing with the master copies to your life drawings ~ to a large extent, it’s the limitations of the medium which you have to learn how to get around and exploit in order to achieve what you want with the traditional medium which you are using. For example charcoal is much more condusive to being able to get a good sense of overall gesture, whereas the digital medium allows one to explore detail in depth, pretty much ad infinitum.

It’s definitely tricky to bring them all together, but it will be interesting to see how you play with each, and how they inform one another. :slight_smile:

Cheers,

~Rebeccak

#40

Thanks for the compliment Rebecca. I really think the master copies will help my life drawings, but it’s also a time issue too. I take 20 minutes for a figure drawing in charcoal while I can take hours on a digital mastercopy.

Did a head study at work. I’ll post it here to. It’s got some problems but I like it. C&C if you will.