I kind of miss giving , so I just decided that I shall post a blog like this whenever I feel like it, as a place where you can comment with your work or questions.
I'm happy to give /critique, answer any art related question to best of my ability, offer advice and suggest exercises/resources for practice and so on!
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Not "first come first serve", and I won't necessarily answer every request (if I don't have a productive response, of if I'm just too busy). I'll answer these slowly during the next few days / week or two, whenever I have time.
You can improve your chances by reading this post carefully, and following my guidelines to make your request easy to answer to.
I geek about colour and light, and I mostly do digital painting myself, but I'll gladly discuss a wide variety of subjects related to art and learning art.
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guidelines
:black_small_square: if asking , choose only 1-3 artworks to show; don't just drop a link to a gallery full of your works. You could choose your best work, or something specific where you need help.
:black_small_square: be specific, let me know where you need help, what kind of artwork you'd like to do, or anything that you feel is relevant, though keep it short please! If you don't have anything else to say, tell me how you feel about the artwork you're showing or any issues you have with it.
:black_small_square: I don't enjoy discussing superficial matters, and won't answer questions like "how to improve my art style", asking for "tips and tricks", or anything that is purely about technicalities like what brushes are the best or whatever.
:black_small_square: I do enjoy discussing fundamentals. Showing appreciation of fundamentals and/or right attitude to learn fundamentals will make me more likely to answer.
:black_small_square: while I'm trying my best to be as helpful as possible, I generally don't sugar-coat anything and am very direct with the critique. Don't ask critique if you can't take it, or if you're just seeking compliments.
:black_small_square: any visual medium welcome (digital, traditional, 3D etc.), I can also do redlines for fursuit bases.
Comments (39)
sorry if i'm late !!
I'm really interested in doing paintings. but whenever i do it, something that i can't find what exactly it is, bothers me alot.
i tried grayscale to color painting, but i decided doing with colors providing a much better result. so these 3 are normal paintings.
i feel like you might not say anything about humans but
can i ask critique for them and i feel like I'm insufficient on lighting as you see at first one. I tried many styles of painting like, using different brushes, less / more detailing, using different hues, grayscale to color etc. the thing on grayscale, i can't give the colors best, struggling on contrast things. and tried using different programs.
currently using paint tool sai
I'll be glad if you give critique, i'm working on another painting and so scared about it'll end like these too. [Third one is the wip] i can't use lights n shades. how can i improve my painting ??
you have a nice painterly quality in your work, but I think the problem is that you focus too much on this, and too little on the foundations underneath: painting fundamentals.
One of the best free resources for digital painters is Marco Bucci's channel on YouTube - especially his 10 Minutes to Better Painting Series, which is basically an introduction to painting fundamentals.
Word of caution though: his videos are very entertainingly informative, but they do not provide "education", that's up to you - you need to put in the work. Make sure you embrace the concept he's trying to teach. Apply the knowledge; practice.
I'd advise focusing on one video at a time, make thorough notes and make sure you understand the concept (could you explain what it is and why it works to someone else, in a way that they'd understand it?), and practice! Sometimes he does a demo which could be used as an exercise, but otherwise you should try to come up with an exercise yourself. And don't just do it once or twice, keep coming back at it until it becomes second nature.
So check them out! See if you'd find it useful, and just start studying.
Additionally, I think it could be really beneficial for you to practice doing greyscale paintings - and I don't mean that you should switch doing greyscale-to-colour - it's completely fine to prefer doing colour paintings otherways - but working in greyscale as an exercise is valuable. Maybe gather different references (photos, artwork you like, movie screencaps etc.) and start doing 30-60min greyscale studies of them:
:black_small_square: Keep them quick and simple: focus on big forms and shapes, no details etc.
:black_small_square: Don't make the reference greyscale as you work, but try to interpret the values yourself as accurately as possible.
:black_small_square: When you're done, turn the reference greyscale, and compare: make notes on where your values are lacking. You could even rework your study to match, repaint the incorrect values - and I do mean repaint as in actually paint the correct values on top of it, don't use any adjustments or layer modes to fix it: you'll learn better when you need to pick the correct value yourself.
The purpose of this exercise is to develop your eye for good values. The more you practice interpreting values, the easier it will be for you to see and use them.
Lastly, I've been speaking about lighting/shading on my responses to LuckyFeline, Ali and DivinityBrainr0t. It's pretty much same stuff as Marco speaks on his episode about Light & Shadow, just with more concrete examples, so give them a read if you'd like.
Reply to: revioLATE
Thank you so much !! i'll do what you suggested. again thank you for replying, spending your time and giving advices. it means a lot.
Reply to: 🦇catgang
you're welcome :)
I know that I’m not alone when I say this, but one of the aspects I struggle with the most is color and aesthetics. It sounds like it should be simpler than it is, but it’s really my Achilles heel. I am aware of color theory, or at least it’s basics, and I’ve certainly kept (and still am) experimenting with color palettes and combinations. I also know a few things like how colors can grow cooler the farther it is from the viewer (for atmospheric purposes) - although I still find myself heavily relying on premade/generated color palettes/mood boards from free to use sites. I want to be able to come up with my own accurate or even stylized colors. To give an example - it’s easy to say a rainforest forest has a mix of vibrant greens and browns, yet colors will vary depending on temperature, time of day, season, etc.. I could easily throw in a bunch of greens and browns or slap on a filter to make it look warmer/cooler. Not to mention how to shade with color accurately and aesthetically.
I’ve got a couple of examples here where I actually drew a background. One of a forest another of a simple cloudy background. You can see with the forest I didn’t exactly put in all the tiny details but more so generalized some aspects, as well as warm it up a bit with photoshop express.
sorry this got little long, though you can blame yourself for that for bringing up colour haha :'D I have to divide this to multiple comments.
okay let me start by saying this: there is nothing "special" about premade colour palettes/schemes; you can combine pretty much any colours you want and make it look aesthetically good if you know what you're doing.
Another thing to note is that colour palettes, especially popular ones, look good as is - they get favourited/shared because the palettes themselves look cool - but good-looking palette doesn't guarantee good-looking colours in full artwork, because artwork is likely much more complex than few solid boxes of colour in a row.
So let me introduce you to the principle of "harmony and contrast"; harmony stands for similarity, while contrast is of course the opposite. Too much harmony is boring, too much contrast can get chaotic, but when you make sure to use both of them in a meaningful way, you get -visual appeal-.
This principle applies pretty much to any aspect and any field of art when you start thinking about it, but let's look at it from the perspective of colour. Colour has four main qualities: hue, saturation, value(lightness/darkness), and temperature. There is an infinite number of ways how to combine these qualities to make either harmony or contrast, but some examples to demonstrate:
:black_small_square: you often see colour palettes that use some kind of gradient from one hue to another, the steps between the two endpoints give harmony, while the endpoints likely contrast.
:black_small_square: temperature is a powerful quality as well, you can unify colours by using mostly either cool or warm colours, while you can add contrast by adding elements of the opposing temperature.
:black_small_square: value is also very important to consider. Often it is used by having the most value contrast on the focal points of image, while having less value contrast elsewhere.
Reply to: revioLATE
Most often you see contrast used to enforce focal point(s) in an image - this works because our eye automatically looks at contrast, but you can also use it the other way, basically by having harmony as the contrast in otherwise chaotic image. This is much more challenging though, so I'd suggest focusing on learning to use contrast in harmony first, but just be aware that it's not the only right way to do things!
There is nothing wrong in using filters, but they can easily give an image kind of fake, filtered look, especially when overused. If we now recall the principle of harmony and contrast, I think it's easy to see what a filter does: it gives harmony. So, from that we can reason what's the issue: there is too much contrast. Before going for a filter, you could consider how can you change the colours yourself to improve them: where could the image use some harmony? How could you change the colours there to make them more harmonious?
It's also possible to use filters only for a part of an image. This can give little more natural look, and you can use the harmony that the filter gives more meaningfully, or add different kinds of harmony on different parts of the image. Like consider the artwork with the forest, what if instead of using a warm filter over everything, you would only apply it on the foreground and the character, but then add a cooling filter on the background? You mentioned that you have thought about atmospheric perspective, you know why this works!
Reply to: revioLATE
The one aspect of colour that needs much more attention from you is value. You rarely get good value from colour palettes, yet value is usually very essential for good colours in artwork. You usually want that the artwork reads in greyscale as well, and so well that you can squint your eyes and still have a clear idea what the image is about.
So always check your artwork in greyscale. If your app/software has the layer mode "saturation" or "color", you can add a completely grey layer on top of everything with one of these layer modes. Keep it hidden as you work, but whenever you want to check the values, you can just turn the layer visible.
You could also study artwork from other artists in greyscale. Analyse where and how they use harmony and contrast, and try to repeat the effect in your own artwork.
Lastly, if you want to get to how light really works, James Gurney's book Color and Light is everything you need, that and a lot of practice from observation/reference. With study and practice, you basically widen your colour relationship vocabulary, and it becomes a second nature to know what colours work with each other. Like really I don't think about colour itself this concretely as I work, I just throw in colours and adjust them until they work haha. But in the past I have thought about colour a lot and practiced it, so my eye for colour and the "vocabulary" is pretty decent.
I attached two images here, one is rework of the forest image to demonstrate the points I made; second is an exercise which I hope you might find helpful, both in developing your eye for colour and maybe giving a change from the premade colour palettes.
How should I go about learning anatomy (especially human anatomy)? As a self taught artist most tutorials I find aren’t super helpful because its not how I normally draw, and it just frustrates me. Idk maybe I’m just stuck in my ways.
I gave out this exercise to someone else already down below, so sorry I'm partly copy-pasting here, but I'm adding some more detail, and relevant stuff for you:
Anatomy exercise:
> Choose a photo reference
> Draw the subject from the photo, as accurately as possible, and just the outlines, nothing fancy.
> Find skeleton references for the species you're working with, and now draw the skeleton into the outlines you drew, like x-ray vision. Take your time with it, be as accurate as possible, and don't be afraid of erasing and redoing parts that are not working out (that actually helps you learn a lot faster!)
> Find skeleton references with labelled bones, and label every bone in your drawing
> Repeat for muscle anatomy, also the labels.
When doing this exercise digitally, drawing everything on their separate layers is the best way to go!
And ah the labelling, it is frustrating and time-consuming, maybe it can feel pointless, maybe if you want to ease into it you can skip this part, but if you want to truly learn, it's the best way to "save" the anatomy into your brain - with repetition of this exercise, you'll start ing everything in much more concrete way and can anatomy accurately without references as well.
I don't know if you have a concern that you don't do realistic art and this is "too realistic", but this is not about that. This is an exercise, not a regular drawing. It's also fine if it's not perfect, and it's fine to simplify the anatomy, as long as you keep the general shapes and proportions accurate.
Then when you're starting to get the hang of it, that's when you can start applying it style-wise. When you're drawing otherwise, keep the anatomy in your mind and respect the shapes of it as you draw. You can also try doing the exercise in your style, seeing how all the anatomy fits your style.
here's my artwork, I'm going for an geometric, semi realistic style
I always feel like there's something wrong in my artworks so I'd like to have an outsider's perspective on it, it'd be nice to have an honest opinion on how skilled I am & if my colours, shading, use of angles & style look good together & what I should improve on anatomy wise
I have a hard time commenting on your art because what I generally do and my aesthetics are so different, so take everything I say with a grain of salt!
One general criticism I could have for you is that everything you do has kind of a "same-y" look to it. There is of course no one correct answer on how to add more variation to art, but let's see;
I'm thinking of the same I've got from a teacher of mine, (who got the same from a teacher of his, so I'm guess I'm continuing the train haha), is that maybe you're focusing on too much on making good/interesting-looking art, "doing a style" or whatever, instead of the emotional quality of it, the message, the feeling etc., which is what actually what matters. Impressive skill or interesting style might get you a "cool!", but it's when your art connects to the audience on emotional level that really makes them care about it.
Especially with geometric stuff, you could try to apply shape language more, and with more intention - you know how different shapes (round, square, triangular, organic) have their own characteristics, or how different dominant orientation of the shapes/lines in the image can change the feeling etc. I'd suggest to really experiment with shapes, take it to the extreme and see what you can discover, and try to apply it.
There are probably bunch of resources online as well, but if you can get the book Vision: Color and Composition for Film, I'd warmly recommend it. It has bunch of other stuff as well, but I could see at least the chapters about lines and shapes being useful for you.
Shortly about anatomy/shading etc.
I could nitpick on issues I see but I don't really see the point because with your style, it kind of works, though some of it, especially shading-wise, does leave me unsure whether the inaccuracies are intentional or not. If you're wondering what "issues" I'm talking about, then of course do read on, otherwise you probably know better what you're doing.
On shading/lighting, check my answer to LuckyFeline below. If you're ignoring how light works intentionally but can do it correctly, that's fine imo; otherwise I'd recommend you to practice it in a similar manner until you get it.
If you want to improve your anatomy, I've described a good anatomy exercise now twice here, in more detail with my answer to Diamond_wolf152, check that out if you're interested.