Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[jarathor]

This sounds like a great idea - I'll try to get something up later this weekend.

[Deon]

Great idea! I somehow missed it at first.

Anyway, here I am. I have no art education at all, I've never been to any art school or anything, so I lack skills and experience on a major scale. However I have a great desire to draaaaw. Daaaw!

I've never tried to "paint" on PC at all, I mostly colored my pencil lineart, that's all.

So here goes my first attempt at speedpainting (took 30 min... Speed... lol):
"Into the cave"


P.S. Hey Davion, Thanks! I am going to look in these books.

[Balathustrius]

This is a good idea; I would like to participate.   

That's a good painting, Deon.  I have a few suggestions and critiques, and have done a quick paintover to demonstrate.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(I desaturated it and flipped the canvas, just to make it quicker to work on.)

I added a some pixels to one of the sides to balance out the composition; it was leaning pretty heavily to the right.  It's easy not to notice this unless you're flipping your canvas horizontally every once in a while to check, so that's a good thing to do.

I upped the contrast, brightening the lights around the figure's torch and adding shadows elsewhere.  Especially in a dark environment lit only with a single point-light source, you're going to have a lot of contrast.  Plus, it makes the picture 'pop' a bit more.

-remember the rule of atmospheric perspective, especially when painting large environment pieces.  The closer you are to the foreground, the more contrast you get; you find your lightest lights and darkest darks in the foreground.  As you recede, contrast decreases; lights and darks get closer together.  This is because the atmosphere (air, smog, etc.) has a blurring effect and decreases crispness, and the more air between your eye and what you're looking at, the greater the effect. 

I added some foreground elements, which serve to frame the composition a bit and integrate the viewer into the picture.  As a general rule, pictures benefit from having a foreground, a midground, and a background; the original didn't really have any foreground elements, which detached it somewhat from the viewer.

I added more stalactites and stalagmites, especially to add some noise to the cave maw, which was a somewhat boring, circular shape before.  This just gives the eye more detail to look at and makes the picture more engaging.

That's about all.  Hope that's somewhat interesting and maybe gives you some things to consider with your next piece. 

[Aqizzar]

Okay, so I decided I'd start with something simple, just a Minerdwarf standing in a pose.  However, it's going to Hell in a big hurry.  I'll probably just get out one of my old anatomy books for a figure study, I thought I post the halfway picture here as an example of what I'm doing.  I'm trying to practice my technique and any help there would be appreciated too.

Spoiler: This drawing is total crap. (click to show/hide)

I'll draw black over the gray when I'm ready for the real lines, but right now I need to make it not look retarded before I do more detail.  Perspective is my biggest problem, especially with the straight-on leg.  It's going to look pretty cartoony, which I'm fine with, but I want to make something more than napkin sketches.

I've include some examples of my mouse-handwriting to show why I'm not doing this freehanded, or with a pencil.  Like I said, it's MSPaint.  I enjoy using it for it's simplicity and familiarity.  Namely, I can just make as many curved lines as I want, tweak pixel-by-pixel, and block stuff in with gray to be erased later.  I've tried using other stuff like Paintshop and Illustrator and GIMP, but I've scoured all of their interfaces and I can't find any kind of "alterable line tool" or "don't anti-alias everything" or "edit individual pixels".  An alterable-vector system like Adobe Illustrator but with sane, comprehensive editing like Paint would be great if anyone knows of such a program.

[Armok]

Wow, that cave is awesome.

I've tried using other stuff like Paintshop and Illustrator and GIMP, but I've scoured all of their interfaces and I can't find any kind of "alterable line tool" or "don't anti-alias everything" or "edit individual pixels".  An alterable-vector system like Adobe Illustrator but with sane, comprehensive editing like Paint would be great if anyone knows of such a program.

I routinely do all of those in GIMP, I think you just need to read the manual and/or practice with it and/or look more closely at/in the various menus and toolbars etc.
- for non-antialias, use the pencil tool.
- for editing individual pixels, also use the pencil tool, with the size turned down to be LESS than one pixel, and zoom in properly.
- alterable lines is the "paths" tool, then when you use "stroke path", under "Line style" you can turn of antialiasing.

Also, learn to use layers, they are what 99% of peaple use for the type of alterable sketch type things you seem to want.

[Aqizzar]

I routinely do all of those in GIMP, I think you just need to read the manual and/or practice with it and/or look more closely at/in the various menus and toolbars etc.
- for non-antialias, use the pencil tool.
- for editing individual pixels, also use the pencil tool, with the size turned down to be LESS than one pixel, and zoom in properly.
- alterable lines is the "paths" tool, then when you use "stroke path", under "Line style" you can turn of antialiasing.

Also, learn to use layers, they are what 99% of peaple use for the type of alterable sketch type things you seem to want.

Manual?  Who needs prewritten instructions?  I'd rather just poke around blindly until I ragequit in frustration.

In all seriousness though, I use MSPaint because that's the level of complexity I'm willing to deal with.  It can't do much, but it does exactly what I tell it to with just a couple clicks.  I'm trying to use GIMP's path tool now (I admit I had no idea what it was for), and it is sure as hell isn't doing what I want.  Namely, I can't seem to add new points in the middle of paths, connect two paths that weren't originally connected, delete points once I've placed them, or for that matter delete anything because pressing the delete key just wipes destroys the blank layer because no matter how many times I hit "select nothing" the layer is always selected anyway.

And if you have anything to offer on this, you'll run into my other problem, that I hate manuals because I can't ask them questions, but I'm also a total bitch to work with live.

[Deon]

Balathustrius, my friend!!! Thank you very much for dedicating your time!

I have big problems with placing lighter/darker colors together to indicate shadows and lights on a big scale, also it's a bit hard to make parts of a piece to be interesting (like you did with those stalagmites and stalactites). Also, a good tip on the foreground! The painted over picture is much better!

This is what I need, more critics to learn. And critics from a talented person like you are priceless.

[Hungry]

A draft I'm working on, dont know quite what it is...yet.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[JoshuaFH]

I take that is the first of a line of phallic objects you're drawing?

[qwertyuiopas]

Aqizzar, since you are using paint, did you notice the ability to multiply pixel size through zoom and screenshot? The result is true non-antialiased scaling for powers of two(and 6)

[redacted123]

-

[LegoLord]

I already know what it is, it's that magnetised fluid stuff. Iron filings in water or something. Then you magnetise a drill or something and is flies up into this weird spiky mass.

Ferro Fluids?

[redacted123]

-

[Hungry]

I enjoy that stuff....

Spoiler: and some color...to make it, yeah. (click to show/hide)

[Spreggo]

I have big problems with placing lighter/darker colors together to indicate shadows and lights on a big scale, also it's a bit hard to make parts of a piece to be interesting (like you did with those stalagmites and stalactites). Also, a good tip on the foreground! The painted over picture is much better!

A good way to get a full tonal range is to do the whole image in black and white, then add color after words, using a multiply layer in PS, then redo the specular highlights on a new layer. The benefit of using a multiply layer is that you can use the colors to touch up the shading and add texture et cetera...

Aqizzar: You should put some clothing and some basic shading on that figure before you decide its bad. Once you have the shading to indicate the depth and shape of various parts, you can push them around a bit until they fit. That stuff never looks right to me without shading.

Also I don't think you should feel pressured to switch what program you are using: if you can get it to come out well with mspaint, then you can get it to come out well with anything. You could always move on once you start feeling like its limiting you, anyway.

Hungry:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Ferrofluids yehboiii:

Wow that's a big image...