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

 

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?

Kill Bill Study

Hi guys, here is a film study from Kill Bill. I've never done hard surface type stuff before, so it was a bit of a trip. At the end, I applied a tiny bit of chromatic aberration. This is far from perfect but I hope you enjoy seeing the process.

Lady Eboshi

Lady Eboshi

Hope you guys enjoy! Done in photoshop.

Bouguereau Copy

Photoshop copy of "Moissonneuse"

View full painting and details here.

This was very fun!

Imho, the most important color here was grey. Bouguereau was a master of color (and everything else), the juxtapositions of hues and saturations is what makes this sing!

25 Master Color Studies

View large in new window

25 Master studies that took me a lot longer than it should have. I got very very tired doing these. They were done over one week in between a 30+hr a week job and a life. I originally woke up very excited but by the time I was done, it felt like drudgery, which is good, which means I got what this exercise is supposed to do; it's time to move on.

Original image was 13.2x19 @220 dpi, and usually not zoomed in more than 50%. I did not color pick from the original image, but I would sometimes color pick within the rough color I established. It was easier and faster to establish color by eye and was a great confidence booster (I can see!!).

These are by no means perfect and juggling drawing AND color at the same time caused me to lose some accuracy. As long as big shapes are in place and the value was reasonably accurate, things came along nicely.

How did I know I was done? I essentially stopped (read: gave up) when I felt all the basic hues, values and placement were there. Also, I HAD to know what was going on in the copy. There's a reason each of these master paintings work so well from far away, despite detail, or simplicity, or whatever, they WORK, and tapping into that in an economic way was so important. (not that I succeeded so well at the economy bit).

Focusing a lot on occlusion again. To me, it's the thing that establishes the illusion of an object's weight and a reflection of the type of light in the image. Also used a lot of funky texture brushes to imply detail and inject information. Being able to decisively establish shapes on top of random texture was great, it created hierarchy within the composition (provided the edges and values were ok). 

Below, you can see I did these in basically two steps, which helped speed things up. I did all the first versions together at the same time, and did not take them to finish one at a time. I didn't give a crap about them at first, I just wanted to show the kind of hue-ether of the picture (like if you're extremely myopic and forgot yer glasses) and work into it from there. I also used clipping masks for neatness. Download the .psd template for this exercise if you like (about 28mb).

View large in new window

Next is some imagination stuff where I will apply as much as I can. To me, this is a big showdown as I will be tackling stuff I've been afraid of (mainly big questions like "what do you really want to do?"  and eventually, "WHO ARE YOU?"), but I've prepared as much as someone could, and it'll be a battle, but one I know is in the right direction.

Again, useful links for you:
Library of Brushes to share: http://www.pandemoniumart.net/brushes/
Amazeballs Brush Presets by Sam Nielson: http://artsammich.blogspot.com/2013/03/photoshop-brushes_11.html
Shaddy's brushes with explanation (for someone starting from scratch): http://www.shaddyconceptart.com/download
Zedig's packs 1 and 2 (not included in 1st link): http://zedig.deviantart.com/art/My-brushes-346476394 and http://zedig.deviantart.com/art/Brushpack-numbah-two-373428542

See the post of my master value studies.