Lines

My main focus this week has been to focus improving my digital sketching skills and line quality through building a portfolio piece and to design a prop/weapon concept. My initial goal was to create a concept for a crossbow and shield. However was not able to complete a crossbow due to time constraints and not full fill this deadline of one week. 

My initial target for the week was to also develop an eye to simplify forms into geometric shapes in perspective, which was considerably a struggle for me but a great learning experience and have considered to implement this practice each time i have a new assignment in future.

1. loose gesture sketch with broad charcoal like strokes ( fast to figure out general shape design

2. refined sketch (slow down to figure out rough design and proportion with aid of angles

3. geometric deconstruction of design in to basic forms in perspective and drawn with grid as best as possible (2d side front design) then 3/4 in to practice

4. refined clean line art of the subject

This assignment has given me an insight of how long i should be spending on certain tasks and to remember to organize a set to do list accordingly. If i was to revisit this assignment again i would try and extend it to 2 weeks rather than one- which i have decided to do and extend my time to create the . Hopefully designing this second man made prop will not be too time consuming since ive roughly sketch out a few concepts already with initial research. And since i have set another week till the following Sunday i shall try possibly implementing some 3D as a base to the concept for speed and quality of accuracy. 

My next set of class focus on schoolism will be value distribution with Jonathan Hardesty and do my best to complete his assignments accordingly for that week with the sunday as the deadline again.

Revisiting Fundamentals

It's the start of the new year and looking forward to what 2020 will bring for me. The last couple of days i have been revisiting my fundamentals and digital rendering techniques. It has taken many tries and many attempts to get angle and structure right therefore i looked back on a few schoolism classes by Jonathan Hardesty Essentials of realism which i would highly recommend for beginner artists because it covers the knowledge of proportion and accuracy so many of us tend to skip over and therefore go straight to rendering. Jumping ahead too quickly without a solid foundation and resulting in often not so satisfying results. There for i went back and tried to implement the three stage Block-In method recommended by Jonathan Hardesty a drawing process that i'm pretty familiar wirth used in classical atelier drawing, and proved to be great benefit in a of my recent drawing. Drawing form and structure is so crucial and evidently the most common flaw in many of my previous works and the ability to develop eye to extrapolate these concepts i have come to realise takes a great deal of time and extensively requires the artist to take opportunity to develop the observational skills to deconstruct the world around them for this is a important stepping stone in creating and designing a subject matter whether that is organic or man made/hard surface.

The task i have set to achieve these coming weeks is to also get better at rendering those forms and planes also by redoing an old assignment instructed by Sam Nielson, His knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals of light and how it interacts with objects is impeccable and mind blowing and feel i have learnt a great deal from practising these concepts that are often very simple to understand but difficult when putting into practice and applying to personal work. 

The images above are shots of what i manage to accomplish these last few day and feel i have a still great deal to learn about rendering but, definitely get a sense of what i should be practicing next. 

Another fellow artist and friend of mine has really pushed me to lengths which i could never have imagined and iam extremely thankful for and his willingness to give up his time to give feedback frequently.I have decided this month i will stick to studying some more black and white images and practice rendering out these basic forms in order to reach a standard where i feel i have grasped the ability to effectively paint these shapes without the necessity of relying of photos. 

Perhaps the next stage this coming week will be to review classes from John Parks Fundamentals group classes and get better at rendering the essential types of surfaces. But who know theres is also a lot i shall plan to be reviewing the next couple weeks including digital line art and rendering traditionally, huh.. now to see how i can manage to split up the time to allocate these practices is the real challenge that me including and many other artist struggle with. Any how till next time 

Matt Surface_Rendering

Practicing rendering Basic forms

Learning objects;

• Casting and Plotting Shadows_ Spot light (radiating light) Sun light (Directional light)
•  Render shadows and ambient occlusion shadows. 

• 

Digital painting Lesson 2: Colorizing Black and White images

Hello all, today's blog post is about is my take and thoughts on Bobby Chiu's second lesson, colorizing black and white images. Bobby does great job introducing a simple and well known technique for colorizing b/w images into full color paintings using various blending modes and by slightly adjusting the values for subtle transition. Bobby provides the psd in the lesson so you do not have to worry about creating, an entire image from scratch, which is great so you can really put focus  on gaining an understanding of how the different blending modes work.

Disclaimer: Original work by Bobby Chiu

This assignment is a great way to experiment with coloring images at a steady and gradual pace in a a methodical way with multiple blending modes, also layers to get a a subtle variation of color.However i personally found it quite a challenge to work in this way as I'm more of an intuitive and direct painter, although i do believe its a great starting point for beginners to work since it really only works if the grey scale values are working underneath the color layers, since the color blending mode doesn't take into account of the values of the color when applied and the image can easily become muddy, therefore concentration on values when working in this method is vitally crucial to get a smooth and vibrant color variation.

My Assignment for the Lesson

End of  part 1

Stay tuned
for part 2

Thanks for reading

Happy Painting

Schoolism-Digital Painting with Bobby Chiu Lesson 1

Assignment:1 
Disclaimer: Original work By Bobby Chiu

https://www.schoolism.com/school.php?id=1

Hey everyone. :)
Today's post is a brief overview of Bobby Chiu's digital painting course on Schoolism and the work I did for the first lesson: visualizing through darkness.

 Block IN

I've had great fun in attempting this first assignment, It taught me not only patience but the unique process of layering paint using opacity and flow levels to create subtle variation of tone.
I really like how Bobby breaks his process down and explains how he thinks during his demonstration, its easy to follow and a great exercise to get the feel of working digitally for beginners. He has even provided us with files and reference to help with the assignments. so we can get focused on the the main objectives of the lesson.

Light dark light

The process mainly involves painting with low opacity and flow and gradually building the values up with tone gradation. He also suggests switching up between dark and light layers and building up layers slowly to create a more subtle transition of forms and tones.

Light direction and details

Once the basic shadows and light patches are applied, the details such as wrinkles and highlights are layered on top with light direction in consideration.

Once I thought I had done enough for the assignment, i thought i challenge myself and create my own image and follow the same process to see what I have learned and accomplished.

 
 Muscle Man needs a Partner

Overall I was pleased with the new knowledge i have gained and learn't a great deal during this first class. I would highly recommend trying out this first assignment, especially for beginners because it really gets you to slow down and think about the form and think about areas of light/dark.

Thats it for this week blog post, let me know if you enjoyed it and found it helpful in the comments, 
Thanks

I plan to post few more of these blogs in the coming weeks.

Have a great day.!!

 Oliver 

Finding a path in Digital painting (Part 2):the tricky stages and developing an artistic eye

Hey everyone! I last left of briefly talking about Ctrl+paint and the awesome content offered on the site, and i began to briefly highlight why i would recommend it for beginners just starting to use the digital medium. I want continue on the topic by next addressing about difficulties of where to begin and why it can be especially hard when there's so much out there online such as Schoolism and Sycra's YouTube channel, pencil kings etc - I shall talk more about these other awesome educational resources in future posts.

I have excessively researched and tried most of these sites and their courses, and i rank Ctrl+paint to be among the top for tutorials for beginner level artist because of its organized learning structure as mentioned in the previous blog and the premium content are really great in not only help building foundational skills but also generating ideas for portfolio pieces in areas of both illustration and concept art.

Add caption

His premium series World Building is a particular favorite of mine at a affordable price and definitely worth the buck to kick start and generate interesting worlds and project rather than just stand alone illustration that don't really mean anything.

Now moving on to the main struggles when i first started out was the fact I was honestly very impatient and wanted to jump right into the fun stuff before building on my fundamental skills first,.. Huge mistake.. In fact really learning the fundamentals is a crucial part of artistic development not only for realistic or representational artist's but even when creating abstract art, which rely on good composition/design and color which are all vital in communicating emotion and story in your work.

The other benefits of always sharpening your fundamental skills is the fact that it can pick out major errors in your piece and in enhance the message you want to communicate through the manipulation of values color etc. Whenever i get stuck on a particular piece or near finishing the illustration i would go back and check on these and see if i can somehow fix the problem, often at times it can be tricky because maybe your  eye still hasn't developed to a certain level yet, therefore certain tutorial i would only recommend suited for certain level of artist's, it can be tricky to avoid when starting out because you can find yourself lost in complex subjects without prior knowledge of some basic concepts and can be a struggle as a beginner starting out, I know i did.

Which brings me to talk about developing an artistic eye, which is best explained by none other than  Sycra Yasin, in his video.

"How to break Through Art Block"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb0g_gWrNf8

The basic idea is that our critical  eye's sometime develop's faster and surpass's our own artist skill level, which often makes us feel that our ability to execute artwork is worse then we actually may think.

When i learned to accept this theory and that I'm on my own artistic journey/growth and never to compare myself to other's growth, it gave me a huge confidence boost and i learned to appreciate what i can do myself and not worry too much about the outcome and learn to enjoy the process.

Which dear reader i hope you can too, remember there is no one in the world that can create something that only you can, sure they can be close copy but it'll be evident somewhere in there will be something different in every artist's work no matter how much we try to replicate someone else's work.

I want to end this post by saying,
Go for it!!, create the stuff you truly love and that intrigues you, take small increments and gradually gain new knowledge as you develop an artist to enhance what you want to say and not be afraid to leave a your very own unique artist fingerprint in the world.

You might just inspire or touch the hearts of someone out there who appreciates what you do and someone who consider your work a huge part of their life.

Thanks for reading, fill free to comment  and feedback, , I have a whole list of discussions/topics that i would like to share, if you have ideas any for future topics i would love to hear about them.

Happy Painting :D