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.