Jumpstart

I need to find more ways to study to improve. I did '10 weeks': divide time into 10 week chunks and come out the other end with 10 satisfactory pieces, a goal of one or more pieces a week. This was in preparation for the duo show I had with Studio Gallery. It more or less worked in that I needed a large amount of work, had to allow myself to work, and accept whatever outcome and have enough work to drop the weakest pieces if need be.

Now I have a full time job, work a little overtime, and have a long-ish commute every day (1.5-2h total in the car daily) and I have way less time. I need more focus but am confused if it's the right thing to focus on.

So for this approach I've decided to work backwards... Dream up the portfolio I want and take the steps to get there-- as if that is a finite journey-- but currently I am starting at the beginning.

To summarize, here's what I've done:

1. Took a hard look at my skills- What i'm good at, eh at, and poor at. The good was just as important as the poor because I need to force myself to focus. Throwing the things I'm 'good' at into a piece on an 'eh' or 'poor' drill or study turned it into a scrimmage, which was impeding my progress. For more context please see this article by Paul Foxton-- his post put some words to many issues I've been having: http://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/how-to-get-better-at-painting-without-painting-anything.

2. Prioritized which of these are the most important to work on. It doesn't really matter why I consider myself weak in an area. Why beat myself up? The only thing I should focus on is improvement. How could I get started? I borrowed this book, The Big Bad World of Concept Art for Video Games: An Insider's Guide for Students, from the library, which helped me along a bit. I also work for a game company so I was able to have a vague idea if the information seemed accurate-- and I can say yes, it was. http://www.amazon.com/Big-World-Concept-Video-Games/dp/1624650201 

3. Decided what sections the portfolio should have and how I can show breadth within each section.

Characters - eras, age, genre, gender, T-pose/Apose, dynamic pose. Show iteration

Props - isolated. Weapons, everyday minutae, fantasy objects

Environments/setpieces - interior, exterior, urban, rural, contemporary, historical, abandoned, scale etc.

4. Define approach, style and desired results... Realism? Cartoon? What draws me to create? And practically speaking, with which do I have the best chance of pursuing a career?

5. Pipeline - creation and iteration

Need to figure out a way to generate a lot of content fast so I can get going. 

Took a look at The Skillful Huntsman. Applies to some categories more than others. http://www.amazon.com/The-Skillful-Huntsman-Development-College/dp/0972667644.

6. Define work structure. I have a limited time and how can I fit stuff in and still be productive? Trying out the Pomodoro technique http://pomodorotechnique.com/

7. Scheduled: Timeboxed areas of study (see step 2) and created tracking sheet. Goal: 8 pomodori on day off, 4 on weeknights. Goal is to take frequent breaks and avoid burnout. I need to carve out the time and focus.

8. Here we go!

Study of Gerome bust

This is 'Bust of Jean-Léon Gérôme' by Jean Baptiste Carpeaux which I studied. Here's the process.

My goal was brush economy... not to overpolish, and interpreting reference, not just a pure copy. It took several hours-- longer than I'd like. But the brushwork came out ok (still want to get more economical), forms look readable. I had awesome reference, the photo below.

ps. transparency lock and guides. any means necessary!

1. Blobs.

2. I used vertical downward textured brushstrokes to try to preserve gesture and carve the form in an interesting way

3a. Rendering. I worked with a grayscale adjustment layer on top to focus strictly on value. That's why there's pink on his forehead.. but it didn't appear that way while adjustment layer was visible ^_^... 

3b. More rendering. The double looking edge on the right of my drawing is cause i had to do major surgery to make his head thinner (copy the layer and transform), and then I merged layers. I'll clean that up later.

4. I had polished my render and then added color (color layers). Further polish with normal, screen, multiply, whatever I needed in that moment. Needed to repaint some hair, some of it is grey 'cause I went back to grayscale to fix stuff

5. Surgery to correct hairline and polishing lights and darks. Used lasso to nix that weird edge i talked about in step 3.

6. Final lighting polish. Done

Start

finish

 

Chris Pratt, everyone

Hey guys, this is Chris Pratt, I drew him from reference in photoshop. This took like zero minutes. Just kidding. It was about 5 hr spread out over a few days. Speed level up! On the next illustration, I might unsharp mask a little. Some of this feels a tiny bit mushy.

Here's how it went down:

 Drawrwring. (ps, it looks like donkey dump.)

 Corrected the drawing. Yes, the photo ref is placed over top on low opacity. Every time I felt the illustration was getting away from me, I ticked it on just to double check. Also saves craploads of time. I would do this traditionally as well. The nose, eyes and mouth placement was decent, but wow I apparently forgot to give him a brain. Also I kept wanting to make his jaw too tiny. Derp.

 Value establishment and first indications of light and shadow. Still looks like dump. Anyway, I'll just carve it out as I go along, keeping in mind lightest light and darkest dark. I learned in school that you *should* establish them both first but I'm old enough to know and old enough not to care. I want to eventually get away from the line drawing and the only thing to do is render. Using the lines I already drew helps to see where the darkest darks are (eg crease of nostril, pupils, mouth line) or else I start to estimate what value they will be eventually (stubbly sides of face are not that dark).

 Rendering (normal)

 More rendering sorcery (normal). I want to channel my inner Gil Elvgren (and other living inspirations, Ayran Oberto and Even Admunsen) but I was getting cranky that it was more like Mike Butkus or Drew Struzan. Not bad complaints per se (and I am getting ahead of myself if I think for a second it's anywhere near as good as ANYONE-- but I digress--), but I primarily want to get better at painting in big, confident, opaque shapes than just drawing and blending. Old habits die hard. Also hair, just wanna get the big shapes and movement in.

 About done! Seems good. By this point I had also used Liquify to mush around a couple things a millimeter or two, jaw was wrong again, had to wrangle that...

 Added beard stubble on a multiply layer with texture brush. 

 Color layer added in -you guessed it- color blending mode. First time I ever did this, and saved me literally days of on and off frustration. It's like cheating. BUT IS IT? bawhawh-- All I had to do was pick a local-ish (seriously, not even so exact) color and my values are kept in tact.

This is what the layer looks like when the blending mode was changed from 'color' to 'normal', btw. he's like, freakin' pink and tubed 'flesh color', and it totally works.

 Kay so I had to rim light something. Turned off the color layer to tweak this. Messed with his tousled locks a tiny bit (multiply).

 Little overpaint tweaks (mostly normal, otherwise a molecule of multiply or screen, hint of color dodge for xxxxtra rim light obvs)

And after a few more tweaks (multiply around eyes and jacket), re-saturated the background to a subtle yellowish gray, screen for shirt texture, now we're teh done.

Sometimes he was looking like Harrison Ford, Michael Hall, a dash of James Dean, and voilà!

Hanbok photo study

Shapes

Blocking in

Developing the forms

Left: photo;   Center:2nd attempt;   Right:first attempt.
I had to go back and paint it again from scratch. It just wasn't working out.
The model is still much much nicer than my painting.

This exercise's purpose was not 100% accuracy, instead it was an attempt to interpret reference. I fell back on trying to get more accurate in the face-- I'm not totally satisfied with my results. Very good practice nonetheless.

Also, I think it's important to be completely transparent with your reference. Too many times I see pictures that are obviously referenced and in showing the making of those pieces, there is never the reference shown. I am uncomfortable showing the reference photo here (as it is still a lot better than my painting), but for the sake of learning, it's important to see what the artist is working with and how they interpreted it.

Final study

Source photo: Andrea Scheidler

Ice King still life

Hi all. I am currently focusing on improving my workflow in Photoshop. So I made this (from life):

Perspective correction-- everything's gotta vanish on the same horizon line

1) rough drawing in photoshop
2) pen tool shapes/selections
3) local color
4) first rendering pass
5) second rendering pass/finish.

And now some thoughts, the tldr. I write this because art is hard.

I have to admit, every time I see a great piece I am baffled and ask myself, "How?? Just... how?!" Huge amounts of detail, crisp edges, very good drawing, excellent color handling, juicy ideas....and they make them at warp speed. And then there are so many people out there at this crazy level. And I'm not there with them yet.

So I learned a couple things-- that my workflow is not efficient, and not leaving me space to just work on a piece-- whether it was searching for the layers that I wanted to paint on, edge management, my paintings somehow are always a mess. Everything I brought to the photoshop table I had from working traditionally-- the motor skills and perception part. I've been using photoshop a long time (about 12 years), but, embarrassingly, I've never fully utilized it to my advantage. Traditional process is no longer linear; though it has some things in common, you can go back and forth among different steps in your process.

A couple techniques I leaned cut out lots of time and frustration. I have a crapload more to learn, but I couldn't believe the holes in my knowledge of photoshop which were costing me countless hours. Eg, you can ctrl+click an area on your canvas while in move (v) tool to select that layer. Basic, I know, but whaaa?? I know I sound like an infomercial... so while I'm at it, I recently purchased Alex Negrea's Playstation tutorial.. it's FIVE HOURS... for $15 (whaaaa?) and that helped me out a lot. 
Blahblah and, "Good reference makes good paintings." Didn't Robert Frost say that or something?

Jessica Rabbit

Persona 4 Easter Egg! ;)

Well... Jessica Rabbit was pretty fun. Boobs, hair, shinyness... boobs.

Photoshop

Process:

Importing contacts to Linkedin

Hi guys, no art for this second, but

If you are trying to import your contacts from FACEBOOK to LINKEDIN (which is a firey hellstorm of bile), you CAN. It seems impossible because the file uploader at linkedin doesn't work, and yahoo will only export a blank csv. Linkedin will import your contacts from Gmail (but I had not exported my contacts from facebook to gmail yet!!):

I have hundreds of contacts to sort through. I needed a way to migrate everything at once.

You can probably find something that just exports facebook data to gmail directly. Should have thought of that first. http://techland.time.com/2011/06/02/how-to-export-facebook-friends-for-import-into-gmail-contacts/. I took the long way-- and after skimming through this link, it seems like vital info (like email addresses) is left out using this method.

So F that, here is the long way:

1) Create a yahoo.com email account (I connected my facebook to a new yahoo account).
2)Import contacts from Facebook.
3)"Print" your contact list. Sort of. You want to print a DETAILED VIEW. After bringing up the print dialogue for printing the contacts, hit cancel. The page with ALL your fricken addresses will be staring you in the face, but you can't SAVE them yet. So highlight everything but the header ("yahoo address book") and COPY (ctrl+C). Tables, cels and all. It's fine.
4. Go here to generate the CSV. http://www.funbutlearn.com/2013/01/export-your-facebook-friend-list-to.html (Paste what you copied in the first window).
5. Copy what's GENERATED below and PASTE it in NOTEPAD and save as a .CSV. Type .CSV after the file name as this file type is not listed below (just leave it at "all files").
6. Open your new CSV in Excel.
7. Name your columns by dropping everything down a cell and naming each category. Google explains this better: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12119 IT WILL NOT WORK UNLESS YOU NAME YOUR COLUMNS!!!!
8. Import your newly edited CSV to Gmail.
9. Import contacts to Linkedin from Gmail.

Boom.