AuthorTopic: The Daily Sketch  (Read 1363354 times)

Offline Grimsane

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Re: The Daily Sketch

Reply #580 on: July 02, 2014, 06:34:12 pm
@Ryumaru really love that sketch, totally agree with the discussion on master studies, and picking up on intent, technique and trying to get into the artists' head can be useful thought experiment.

did a quick edit The first thing i noticed even before comparing it to the original was the torso is too long, another thing that grabbed my attention was the shoulders of the woman, in frazetta's work even when they are subjugated, women tend to have strong round shoulders, dare I say it was one of his hallmarks, great work on the study, amazing subject matter.

I did a piece earlier this year heavily inspired by Frazetta, failed quite hard though in many ways, long way to go and all that. it did manage to convince someone it was traditionally done though, they thought it was pastels


also regarding rembrandt :P did this master study last year, it was only a 4 hour study, but i learnt a lot, particularly using background contrast for silhouette emphasis

here's some recent stuff
early start on a bust


a snap of some matcaps i did the other day, in an evening just painting them in 2D i got up to about 80, just a handful


which turned into implementing it in unreal 4, and seems from a running conversation with Epic staff, going to be released into the marketplace to the community for free along side a blog post :)



bit of a stretch to call this stuff sketches but still, more or less started that way ;D

also some turbo assets to test out marmoset and to use in my matcap experiments




proportions are coming along really well Cyangmou, you're progress is very self evident  :)

sorry for the image heavy post guys
« Last Edit: July 02, 2014, 06:39:39 pm by Grimsane »

Offline Ambivorous

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Re: The Daily Sketch

Reply #581 on: July 02, 2014, 08:11:07 pm
Thanks a lot for the advice guys!

I think I will have to just do regular studies for now then until my digital painting is at an acceptable level. Then I can start considering a master study on a skilled artist.
I did notice that the last time I made a breakthrough in my digital painting it really helped my pixel art as well, so it is ultimately worth it.

In the meantime I continued with the daily task of making some art and made a little stone to go with my tuft of grass:


The perspective is off, but I think I got the colour and style pretty close. Again not a polished piece, but I don't want to spend too much time on each bit until I have a mock-up going.
It takes me hours just to make these as it is after all.
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Offline Grimsane

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Re: The Daily Sketch

Reply #582 on: July 03, 2014, 01:23:16 am


another thing about master studies or studies in general is to do thumbnail studies, try to capture the composition, and colors by eyeballing it, if you do quite a few of these it can help with composition and your ability with colour. it will flow on to your other work. to some degree it's about training your eye, your abilities of observation.

I personally find doing a series of 20 minute speed studies during which you just try to observe and copy every aspect that your eye perceives, with painting constructing it as broadly as possible and working from big shapes to smaller shapes, and afterward having a short period of analysis, scrutinizing what you did compared to the source material.

you'll start to realize early on how you have to train your eyes to observe the subtle things.  Your mind tends to generalize things when you don't focus on them, becoming blatantly aware of the subtle relationships between things, intricacies, the subtleties of tone etc. and on larger scale pieces.   As you copy a specific effect you may not notice during,  but in retrospect you can have insights into the technique, and possibly realize that there are some really smart and specific techniques being employed to achieve certain things, and thus you end up adding it to your own palette
« Last Edit: July 03, 2014, 01:37:27 am by Grimsane »

Offline Kasumi

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Re: The Daily Sketch

Reply #583 on: July 03, 2014, 07:58:30 am
Long image of today's quick imagination doodles:

Don't really draw anymore due to an ongoing project. Still got like 200 drawings left of these to do... Could get it done in a night if I had a night.
« Last Edit: July 03, 2014, 08:00:11 am by Kasumi »
I make actual NES games. Thus, I'm the unofficial forum dealer of too much information about the NES

Offline rikfuzz

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Re: The Daily Sketch

Reply #584 on: July 03, 2014, 09:16:27 am


Super quick Kaneda
« Last Edit: July 03, 2014, 03:24:11 pm by rikfuzz »

Offline Ambivorous

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Re: The Daily Sketch

Reply #585 on: July 03, 2014, 07:52:46 pm
Thanks for the advice Grimsane!
As a thumbnail study, do you mean to literally take a reduced size version of a normal image and just try to shade it (the equivalent of using a massive brush I presume)? I'll give that a try.

For now more work on my tileset:


My thought process on this one:
Quote from: my brain
Hmm, what should I add to my tileset now? Maybe... a fence! Yes, I am so massively original with my ideas. I want my fence to look kind of like this. Yes a fence was a good idea, how did I come up with that?

*Pixelling ensues.*

Wait a second.
This looks strikingly familiar to the SNES game I played more than any other game ever!

*Google image search for 'Harvest Moon'*

Oh god damnit.
True story.
Added the Harvest Moon versions for each one.

Slightly different perspective to the other two, but I think this is where I want the perspective to be, so I'll change the grass and rock. I didn't get the style and colours quite right, but I am out of time today, so that is tomorrow's task.
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Offline Grimsane

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Re: The Daily Sketch

Reply #586 on: July 03, 2014, 10:52:41 pm
Nice Kaneda rik  ;D

yeah that can work, but to clarify it doesn't really matter the resolution, just have the full reference image visible, if you have a larger canvas just zoom out of your canvas and just capture the broad strokes with a large brush, set a timer and try capturing as much as you can in the time, a technique is to gauge what the most utilized color in the piece is and lay that down as the base color, then build up the form and composition from there, never laser focus on any one area just work the entire thumbnail, once you lay in the basis and adjust it sufficiently then if you feel there is far more to capture and you have time half your brush size and do another pass. there are countless ways to do studies but i find that type of time focused session can help with your observation.   

Value studies would be taking a piece and desaturating it and then reproducing it with the same method strictly in greyscale so you don't overwhelm yourself with the colors, other exercises are less about the composition accuracy and values per say as it is about recreating the colors by eye alone.then you can always do some eyedropper comparison afterward to see how close you were, with paintings. if you haven't been acquainted with the science and art of light and colour you'll be surprised how relative colors really are, ie grey looking blue in a warm scene and conversely looking a dull warm orange in a cool scene.

I rather like yours better, I'd probably go more top down.


some more render tests, marmoset Toolbag, sub-dermis/heat maps for subsurface work well







just did a quick 25 minute one to give an example.

a point to be made is to pick and choose what to concentrate on, even adapt, in this one i started with an A4 divided into 3, (so i could do 3 seperate studies on the same canvas), resulting in a more vertically compressed panel than the source image, I realized this, so i set a task to myself to compress the composition to this ratio, Also if any details of the source image are not to your taste or liking, or you take issue with it in some way, then you are free to just omit it, or if something like the deer is not important to the intent of your study then feel free to omit them too, just make sure that you are paying attention to the relationship of colors and values, warm and cool, light and shadow as you go :)

a while afterward you will start to notice the discrepancies easier. and if you wish polishing it further can be a worthwhile task. one of the big things about many artists that people forget is they use reference strongly and some artists take months to finish a piece. so you look at Frazetta's work and he had live models and photos, he did sketch sessions with models, and took photos in pose, and he'd take a long time on his paintings.

and artists took their lifetimes finding and honing their techniques, so learning from all that work and experience can be really potent.

progress every 8 minutes or so

just a screenshot to clarify the configuration here. 33% zoom, but you get the idea of the screen space.

is it perfect? no far from it, but for 25 minutes you can be pleased enough for what you manage to accomplish, taking an hour or several hours you can go more in depth and study the details of a painting. but decide atleast vaguely what you want to capture and "study" whether it's predominantly color, or composition, or detailing/rendering techniques. and focus on that, this one was mostly about color and comp.

having two monitors with different gamuts doesn't help, I recently upgraded i now have 2 27" LCDs my latest an IPS (in plane shifting) the color on this one is fantastic :D the older monitor the ref was on not so much.

P.S i'm really tired so if any of this is inarticulate nonsense my apologies  :lol:
« Last Edit: July 04, 2014, 12:15:35 am by Grimsane »

Offline FrostPumpkin

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Re: The Daily Sketch

Reply #587 on: July 04, 2014, 08:45:00 pm
I stumbled across surt's sprite gen today and I was happily surprised to see it had an update with new features, color palettes etc.
It inspired me to make some random shapes designed to be mirrored and assembled as some kind of mandalas.

It's only at an early stage of experimentation, basically just doodles but I think it might get interesting.







I imposed myself some kind of tile based rules as a form of guidance through the process since I didn't really know where I was going, here are the result.





Do you guys have any suggestion on how to make things more interesting using the same process ? Better use of colors would definitely be a thing, it wasn't really my concern for now

Offline Ambivorous

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Re: The Daily Sketch

Reply #588 on: July 04, 2014, 10:38:55 pm
I have lots of things to say and everything is pretty and well done, but I'm really tired so I'll leave that for tomorrow.
EDIT:
Thanks Grimsane for the description and example. I may just go with value studies for now, because I seem to struggle getting values correct.
Also thanks for the advice with the tileset stuff.

Updated tileset:

EDIT:
I made the rock bigger (for no reason) and changed the perspective. I might just make it smaller again, but I wanted the practice of changing the dimensions without losing the style.
Changed the bush/tuft's perspective. Very exciting.
Changed the fence's perspective, colours, and a bit of the style. It seems to fit better now. I may consider replacing it with just one post for when tiling becomes a thing, but I will cross that bridge when I get to it.
Left the Harvest Moon sprites in for no reason.

Tried that thing:

EDIT:
Alright so this thing. I don't have dual screens (although I do have an IPS of course), so I had to alt-tab each time. This was dumb and made it very difficult. Next time I'll just stick the images next to each other like this prior to starting drawing.
As you can see, I suck at values (most notable on the left there. WTF was I doing with my eyes to miss that?) and my colour choice isn't much better. Also my choice of paintbrush (normally I just use the round brush because I couldn't be arsed).
Despite all that this was a valuable exercise and I learned a fair bit. Will continue to do these when ever I have the time.

Yes, I suck. I'll be better at life some other time.
« Last Edit: July 05, 2014, 09:16:25 am by Ambivorous »
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Offline FrostPumpkin

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Re: The Daily Sketch

Reply #589 on: July 05, 2014, 10:12:21 am
I made a new one today