Wow. Like the way you’ve used the star. I think maybe I would like to try composing using these shapes.
I think maybe his shoulders are a little too squashed width wise, try widening them to fit. If you cut down on the back it’ll make his head look too big.
Great start there! Love to see more!
I’m back! Alabama was a great place to spend thanksgiving. Had a lot of fun with my giant family and ate a lot of good food. haha. Hope all your holidays were dandy.
I managed to get some painting in amidst all the catching up, though I didn’t get to it every day as I’d hoped. So let’s get right to it, cause tonight’s a 3-parter!
First, I went to town on the angel’s anatomy and fixed a lot of errors. I’m still not happy with it, but again, there’s still more work to do, so I’m confident it will shape up by the end. I also have a texture thrown over it on layer mode>linear burn. The texture is stretched quite a bit to cover the whole painting because of the color and contrast changes it provides, so keep in mind these large gashes will not be in the final piece. Here it is:
Here is a crop of the face with the texture layer at regular size (not stretched). It gives it an old, worn-out painting look that I think I’m going to try and refine in a later step of the painting. Some detailing has been done, and several anatomy fixes were made.
And finally, I was showing my collection of paintings, old and new, to my relatives over the holiday. It turns out that among friends and family alike, one of the most-liked paintings of mine was an old oekaki I did several years ago. Just a little thing that came out of nowhere, and pretty far from my usual style at the time. I like to think this particular image took me in a new direction with art, and I’m happy for that.
But anyway, since the image here is actual size (eep!) it’s obviously far too small for printing. Over the holiday I started painting over a blown up copy of it with PS to make it nice and clean, and most importantly big enough for printing. The new resolution is 2533x1667@400dpi. Should be big enough. I hope. @__@ Never really printed a PS painting before.
Anyway! Here it is:
I was up til 3:30 last night working on the angel painting. I’ve simplified the background a lot, and I think it balances the painting. I think all of the random colors everywhere weren’t helping to keep the color palette uniform, and they certainly weren’t accenting the figure. I think they almost overthrew it. So let me know what you guys think of this new background.
I also made more anatomy fixes, changed the wings, and repainted the baby. I also added some texture, which you’ll see in the detail crops.
Of course, all helpful criticism is more than welcome. It’s one of the reasons I do this!
Heya,
My two centimes.
By the way, the draw over on the bottom is just me being paranoid about the anatomy, I realised it just looks strange to me because you haven’t finished painting it.
Hope it helps!
Ah! Thanks so much for those pointers, jeanshade! I went over the painting with a friend tonight and we discovered a lot of issues, neither of which you just mentioned, so I’m very glad you’ve pointed those out to me. I’ve been so focused on the face tonight that I haven’t been able to see anything but the face. I flipped the canvas horizontal and saw a TON of mistakes, so I went crazy and repainted a lot of it with a reference.
Next time I’ll take into account what you’ve drawn out, but for tonight this is what I have:
what a change! I think I’ll go in with a hard brush and add some more definition next time.
also added light to the baby’s cloth
this would be a whole lot easier if I knew how to do image rollovers with these “[” “]” forum tags. I try the html “<” “>” tags and they don’t work. Does anyone know how to put in an image rollover here?
I was looking through helzer’s (spelling?) sketches in the WIP forum the last couple days and I was just completely amazed at what he produced in a short amount of time. I also found his color wheel thread very interesting, so I went ahead and put in 30 minutes for a sketch. I figure it will help to balance this thread and to help me learn faster, too, as opposed to being too focused on one or two large projects.
I was going to just go to bed tonight after a long football game and drive home, but I sketched instead. Still trying to work out limited color palettes and being able to make something simple and interesting at the same time.
I’ve got to learn something about workflow… I meant to spend 30 minutes warming up with a sketch and it ended up taking me an hour and twenty minutes… and it’s not even something complex or neat. I spent most of the time painting and then undoing because I kept doing stuff I didn’t like.
I like the monotone image better, but I could use some advice on what I could have done better with the colors, so I’ll upload both.
what do you guys do when you sketch? do you continue to paint and hardly ever undo, letting things layer and stack up? Or maybe just use large brushes and then continually go smaller for details, or… I don’t know. I’ve just got to figure out some way to get something done in less than hour. haha.
I tried to do another sketch, but again, I spent over an hour on it. I think I need to somehow MAKE myself not care about how the image turns out, just so I can learn about workflow.
EDIT: I changed her arms to balance the composition, and added some greek to create a triangular interest. ‘hell’ is on her left wrist and ‘heaven’ is on her right.
Staticpen, what a wonderful thread you have going 
Beautiful work! I’m totally awed by the the woman in profile with the graceful hand gesture. Keep posting!!!
Ferril - thanks very much for stopping by! hope you’ll come by again soon.
Daniel - wow, you have no idea how great it is for me to hear that from you. haha. I really, really admire what you’re doing in your sketchbook thread, and I’m so happy that you’ve come by to check mine out. Stop by again soon! I’ll be here posting all the while.
Tonight I finished the bouquet repaint I mentioned earlier. The original was pixel art at about 400x300, and this version here is hard brush at 3000x2100 or so. I’m going to print it for a friend this christmas, so I’m excited to have it done.
I decided I was REALLY going to do something quick tonight… and I did it. I switched to a random brush every minute or so, and it helped me work loose and fast because of how little time I had with any given brush. Also tried some new texture techniques.
about 25 min (yay me)
Jason,
Your work and enthusiasm backing it is outright inspirational to me.
um so yes hello and I’ll be here with you to the bitter end… awesome!
Hey good idea switching up brushes with the last piece! I sometimes find myself in a “afraid to break it” rut in which just going nuts on the canvas can generate new leads.
Saw earlier you where talking about undoing lots or something. I recommend using the ol’ ctrl-z sparingly, maybe for those epic strokes that are really important that you want just right. What I’d rather do is when stepping in the unknown use a new layer. This saves your ass as well as allows you to erase out your work. Sometimes adding too much and “pulling it back” is part of the backwards/forwards development with digital tools. Stephantalks about this as well I think.
I see you’e posting lots… could be more though 
Meet you here again soon,
Matt
just popping in to tell you how awesome it was to follow your progress over the three pages this last 20 or 30 mins…!
Keep the hard work and dedication up - the two can take you anywhere you want! The road to mastery never stops… once you arrive you know you took a wrong turn somewhere…
So, keep going!
subscribes
Matt - Hey man, thanks very much! I’m very happy to have you here. And I kept in mind what you said about holding off the undo for this one. I decided it might end up better in the long run if I just let errors stack to create texture and character for the image. And I just read the article about Stephan. What he says at the very end about erasing is exactly what I was thinking might be a good idea, haha. I think it turned out well!
Mu - Haha. Definitely agree with you about mastery. I don’t ever expect to get there, so I guess that means this thread will be up for a long time coming - fingers crossed! Glad to have you around, and thanks a bunch.
Here’s tonight’s sketch. I posted it in a DSF thread for “colossus” themes… are those challenges or just community sketchbooks?
75 min
I discovered after doing this that coloring over grayscale still has me beat. When I throw on colors my whole value setup gets shot. I either get the color I want but the values get super dark, or the values stay roughly the same but the colors look like an extremely low opacity, with no saturation. Does anyone have any suggestions for applying color to a bw sketch while maintaining your values? Multiply makes everything dark and overlay makes the color washed out. I dunno.
Nice composition there Jason. Kinda made me laugh (damn dark sense of humor… we all know he’s screwed… or is he??)
I use overlay on top of value sketches sometimes. If you run into issues with darks or washouts remember you can tame them by adjusting levels and curves (in photoshop). I’d recommend adding them by hitting the half moon button on the layer box so you can also paint in and out with the mask (just like the erasing out technique I mentioned earlier)!
or
try something backwards such as:
-polishing details (normal, etc)
-values (mulitply)
-colour unpaint (normal)
-bg
Check out the pro’s source files over at:
http://conceptart.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=88
such as EL Coro’s psd’s -> http://www.conceptart.org/psd/coro
What I’ve found is that overlay’s are great for lightening up a piece and splashing a different direction with colours and multiply good is for darkening.
Post more mate!
Matt - Ah, dude. Thanks so much for the .psd links! I’d always wanted to be able to watch someone paint in person so I could see their layers and such, because the speed painting videos on youtube are too small and quick to make out the ‘how’. I’ll be spending a lot of time with these, so thanks again.
I decided it was time to go back into my angel painting again. Luckily, I found that other than a few small fixes I still felt rather finished with it. At least this is about as far as I’m going to take this one. I could continue to improve it as my skill improves, but then I’ll never finish. So here it is.
Just a fix of the drape angle of his sash and some cleaning up of textures/stray paint, mostly. I’m not going to include a giant detail crop this time, though, cause there were only very minor changes to the face, as well as the addition of irises. If you want to see the texture up close, feel free to go back a page.
ITs been awhile since i have seen your thread but it is looking very good. love those sketches!!! Keep it up will check back soon!
I changed my mind. I was looking at this .psd links you gave me, matt, and I learned quite a bit about adding details to images. A whole mess of detail can be added without getting carpal tunnel - all you need is a texture and some paint thrown over it to make it look less obvious.
So… yeah, I changed my mind and went back into the Zeus’ Request painting. All I really did was vignette a couple corners to give the light some direction and clean up/add texture to the cloud he’s sitting on. I also overlayed some angel wing detail.
