Questions From a Beginner

#1

Please excuse me if I’m posting in the wrong place.

For medical reasons I can’t do any painting in the traditional manner for nearly another year. Meanwhile I’ve got to do something and it’ll have to be digital art.

I learned my craft in traditional art by reading books and studying the Masters, pre 20th century. This is how I do best, i.e., by reading and looking.

Unfortunately, the digital art I see has a sameness that, although amazing in the various artists’ imagination, doesn’t appeal to me much.

Sasha Beliaev’s work has a traditional style I’m looking to create This is what I want to learn to do. And I need to find the best book out there on how this kind of digital art (that looks like traditional art) is done. Tutorials would do if they are detailed enough, but they never are, or I haven’t found what I’m looking for.

See my traditional work here.

And here’s an example of my first work in progress. The background is from a photo; likely I’ll change that to a digitally created sky but will want to retain the concept of the young girl shooting upwards into the sky. I realize this is awful so far. I need to know how to do the cloak, hair and skin. I have each of these three on separate layers. I started this as a line drawing working from a photo I took of my daughter some 25 years ago. My main problem is the cloak. I’ve invented that. It’s not in my reference photo, as the hair and face are.

I’m working on a Mac G5, 23" screen. Adobe CS. 6.5 x 11" Wacom.

Suggestions please?

#2

Moddeling the cloak, her hair and face for sure.
Layers that you’ve created are simply to retouch more that’s all imho - adding more brushes would work fine here.

Cheers.

#3

Thank you.

By “adding more brushes…” please tell me how to do that. If you mean for me to create my own brushes, that too is a question. How do I do that?

All the best,

Bob

#4

It depends of what brushes ya need - you can easly google for em.
What I ment about that “more brush” it’s just to operate with her pose trying different styles - all in all to create a painting, ofc if you want to get such effect. You can also change background instead of fore one. It maybe will be much easier to do, getting same effect from back (scretch) in stead of getting artistic painting from this girl.

Hope you understand that post, my thoughts are quite strange even for me - that’s why they can be prolly chaotic :wink:

Till next text, later Mate!

#5

I dont know any books. but what you are looking for is brushes. there are some to download or you can look at creating your own. 2dartist magazine , imagineFX and advanced photoshop are a couple of magazines worth looking into.

#6

Ok - looking at your traditional work I think that you really need to learn how to create custom brushes, so that your digital work is up to par. But more than that - the smudge tool is your friend. I love that tool - you can smudge refine and totally recreate what you normally would do with pencil, or oil or even watercolor. But you must play with the settings and use different brushes to achieve that effect. Another thing you may be missing out on is using an overlay layer and using the burn and dodge tools. Those are great for adding shadows, creating highlights or even just adding in details.

Here are a few links to sites that I love:

http://www.3dtotal.com/
Click on the tutorials and then photoshop or digital painting, it’s all free and it is all good. They also publish digital books that you can download - but they do cost money. Although if you do this as your job - it’s all deductable.

http://www.imaginefx.com/
Click on the workshops and there are some great tips and downloads available for free

http://www.computerarts.co.uk/tutorials
Great magazine - great site. This place is chok full of tutorials and downloads.

http://www.ballisticpublishing.com/
Great site for finding source books and DVDs - although not free a lot of artists there use traditional techniques or switched from traditional to digital art.

Free brushes and what not:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=productHome&exc=16&loc=en_us

#7

Thank you very much Suzanne. You offer much of value here.

Best,

Robert

#8

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