It is approaching

I've been doing a lot of digging into color, value, form, and shading lately, I do think the time is near to make something worth looking at, or at least I've been getting that feeling lately. I want to do the whole nine yards, meaning composition, perspective, value, lighting, color, and top it all of with arduous rendering. I want to make something like this so I can figure out where I need to improve in general from there. Also, I plan on doing more drawing/sketching.

Try to solve one problem at time challenge (impossible)

Some render spheres to test light effects on and practice my airbrush shading. Still having my reoccurring problem in rendering halftones evenly, I don't know how the pros do it, I'll try to do some in-depth digging/studying on that tomorrow. My goal with this was to try and communicate what the local color of the sphere was to the viewer using color relationships. I set out my local color first thing for the sphere and the ground plane, then just started rendering. Hopefully I made it clear enough what the local color was, I think I did a better job on this on the top sphere than the bottom. On the bright side I think I am really grasping what makes "muddy" color and how to avoid it.

Improving but in small steps

Sorry if you can't see the drawing well, I draw lightly because it's harder to find any mistakes that way. Although that is kinda one big mistake.

Definitely the goods

standardanimeface.jpg is definitely the goods, and not a substitute for further postponing.

It's Nyx!

Almost forgot about this, the answer to yesterday's post was Nyx. I don't play her much but I really like her aesthetic, kit and looks wise. Also, the "good stuff" was postponed to tomorrow, rip.

Who's that Warframe!

A crude head portrait of a Warframe, can you guess who they are? Hint: it's the non-primed version. Tired for tonight I'll upload "the good stuff" tomorrow.
 

Getting the hang of it, kinda.

I think I made a lot of progress the pass week or so in terms of color. With this one I did it systematically so that I could possibly use some parts as a workflow from imagination. Although that was nothing special, it was the usual drawing, selections, local color layers, key lighting, passive highlights, ambient lighting, etc, etc. But what was different this time was that I was making my color selections way more educated and calculated than before.

I made sure that the light side of each "material" was for sure warmer than the shadow side, finally making progress in that area but I still have to nail the degree of temperature shift that occurs. My line of thought is that all objects shift a similar change in temperature because of the light source and that's what makes the light side of objects look like they are all illuminated by the same light source.The reason why I think this is because, when I painted those pink patches of light on her shirt, they didn't look convincing at first. But then, when I painted the skin and hair with a similar temperature shift (compared to their individual shadow side) it looked as if a light source was lighting them up in unison. I toggled the light layers off and on and it looked like someone was turning a flashlight off and on, very cool.

It feel's like I'm finally learning color for a change, I can see some progress even with my eyes (I think). When I wake up the next day and look at the colors again, I sometimes see a way to fine tune the colors a little more, or maybe I just see the reference differently, not necessarily better. I'll stop putting hours into this when I burn out on it, It's a shame I didn't learn about it earlier, I always thought I was just never good at color and other people were due to my lack of talent in that area, but I can believe my younger artist self just ignored what everyone with experience said about color and thought "why am I not good at it??".

Those hair highlights I know aren't painted well though by the way, I just couldn't figure them out. Also if this looks unfinished it's because it is kinda, let's call it a "color study", yeah.

Speaking of color mixing

 

Going to focus on color and value for the foreseeable future, whenever my drive for improvement in that area runs out. Consistency and mileage will be key... and also sleep, which I should get right now. I'll talk more about some problems with color I'm having tomorrow.

really could use some color mixing skills by now

 A render assignment for Sam Nielson's rendering class, work in progress. The PSD file was provided with the shapes and local colors already picked out, all I have to do is the rendering portion. I'll finish it tomorrow, in the meantime, can you guess what temperature the lighting is? There is no wrong answer really, it just means I didn't do my job right.

Last year me wouldn't have posted this for sure

Take this VERY bland and uninteresting head, and this daily, haaaaaa.

But for real I did draw for a few hours today, woke up late and wasn't feeling anything intense.

These may be too low quality

 

I was doing another value study but realized this seems kinda low effort. I mean, I did it just like the others, there's just not a lot of detail in the image to group. Hmm, not too sure, also did some figure drawing studies today, but I'm sure you're tired of looking at those.

Lost progress AGAIN, and it's alot.

 

After I saved this drawing, clip studio asked me if I wanted to save my progress and I clicked no thinking that I just opened up the file. Not only did I not just open it, I opened it up like 7 hours ago, apparently I've had clip studio open this whole time.

And today I woke up after a rough night's sleep and said I would take it easy today on the studying, but I didn't even draw for more than half of that time it was open, it was just on my desktop. So a little more than 2 hours of work gone, wow.

It wasn't anything that special anyways, I was just drawing what I wanted, testing some new ideas. I think I've gotten better at anime faces again, kinda. Anyways, expect the grind again tomorrow, fingers crossed that progress will be saved at least.

5 or less values, guaranteed.

Alright, 5 or less values guaranteed if you don't count the gradients. This is everything I did today so far (took about ~6 hours), I might do some for fun sketching here for the next couple hours. I take daily morning walks now, takes around ~40 minutes from start to finish, trying to help that circadian rhythm figure out what time of day it is. Being cooped up in my house most of the day is likely not doing me any favors, hopefully the exercise helps with my daily energy as well. I use to fall asleep a lot while studying but today felt pretty good with little fatigue.

Also, the references used are as goes left to right;  Slack Bay, Up, Mill of the Stone Women, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. I haven't seen the first or third, but the compositions looked nice, I browsed and took the references from FILMGRAB.

Color is theorying

 

This is NOT my drawing (originally).

 

Long story short I found someone's speed painting on youtube and painted on top of it to test some theories I learned about color, whipped it up in a little over an hour. I'll post my screengrab below to show where I started from, note that they only just started on the screengrab, so if you want to see their finished work I will post the link to the video as well. I tried to stay close to the originally drawing but I did end up pushing and pulling some form/edges.

Basically I just wanted to test how well I could abide by color temperatures, and basically just choose what colors I wanted accordingly. I never really thought in temperature before while painting and oh boy was that a mistake, several years worth. I still don't think I'm great at it but thinking in temperature is way better than not doing so. I also tried to stick to their values they created in the value study they put on the side, which was very well done.

Here's the screengrab and the link, make sure to check out the finished version from them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dP2PWLlQ3Q

Just another value study

 Did the study of that vermeer painting... again. It's from Bill Perkins' Color Bootcamp series, just trying to grasp the value grouping concept. I think I'm decent at values, but I wanted to go ahead and do it to prep myself, for the color work that comes later on.

Who is this person???

 

 

 

I swear I sketched this face before a while back, maybe it's that sameface syndrome kicking in full blast. Also, pretend that scythe or whatever is angled properly, I drew it originally for a different pose but thought the arm looked better this way, so I changed it but not the scythe. Was thinking about making some part of her face/body showing her skeleton, but then I realized how much work that would be and just thought "no". At any rate, looks like those skull/head studies yesterday paid off, it looks decent even when I flip it. Very rare I know.

Is this really in my head.

 Some head/skull studies, I originally did them against a white background and a low opacity line brush, but it was too hard to see. After I did these I made the background gray and made multiples of the same drawing layer, then set them to multiply, made it much easier to look at. Also, if it has a green I next to it, then that drawing was from imagination. I did most of these today and it took a little over 4 hours.