/dpd/ - Drawing, Painting, and Design

>>162
Cool stuff man, I can tell you are thinking in big value shapes and so the whole thing reads well and has nice colours to it! I especially like the restraint shown with the background cloud–you kept the value contrast low so it doesn't interfere and it works perfectly.

I have a couple compositional nitpicks though…feel free to ignore them, but I'd like you to be aware of them so that you then have the choice of having them in your image or taking them out. So, the way the cave goes behind his head, it feels a bit awkward, almost like a tangent. Like it splits his head in two and then the rhythm of the cave continues right through the rhythm of the side of his body. The other thing is you cut off his feet at the bottom of the image. I think if you want to cut off the feet you should do it a bit higher on the legs, or you should just include his feet. At the moment it is almost like he is standing on the frame but not quite, like they are just barely out of the frame and it feels a bit off. It might be good practice to include the feet when you paint so you can try to make sure they are grounded properly and in perspective (this will help the whole figure actually) and then if you later want you can always recrop it and remove it.

Anyways, glad someone else is contributing to this thread. I know I said I would try to post here daily but today is actually a busy day so I probably won't have time to do a painting :(

>>186

This is really good. Mind posting ref?

>>192
Thanks! I didn't use any ref though on this nor on the other speedpaints I did here. At least not any direct ref. About halfway through painting the image I decided it was a bit boring so googled some images of gardens and got the idea for more colour variety in the flowers (before they were just white) as well as the pathway and benches (before it was just grass).

>>186

I think a lot of people have told you already that you really need to buckle down and study some fundamentals instead of polishing shit with nice brushes. You can't keep hiding your lack of skills behind fancy brushwork, while you copy some masters style and think you are good. Try to really put some thought into what you are doing, don't just hide your dissability under bright nice colours and such tricks to fool stupid people.

>>199
Yeah I'm trying to work on my draftsmanship a bit more by doing sketchbook stuff, but I think the drawing/fundamentals in these speedpaints is still lacking. I'll try to focus more on the drawing aspect of things in the next ones though, cause as you point out I do tend to let it slide a bit in favour of lighting and colour since I like that aspect the most. I will disagree on the fancy brushwork comment though–my brushwork I think is one of my worst skills, I'm really not very economical or fluent with it and have a lot of sloppy shapes and marks I put down.

But yeah, thanks for the comments and I'll try to focus more on good drawing and not hiding it behind my lighting or just rendering the crap out of stuff like in finished work.

>>200

oh come on, i was just fucking with you. i'm sure you are aware of that.

>>203
Oh, I was sure you were serious! For what it's worth, I do think my poor draftsmanship is dragging down the quality of these paintings…it's something I am struggling quite a lot with actually. I am trying to draw things more clearly, accurately, and also get some better perspective. But the easy route is to just use a brush that sort of gives an ambiguous mark or edge so you can lay in a pretty colour and not get the drawing quite right, so maybe it reads okay in thumbnail but in actuality it is not clear at all. Or even using a brush that does lay a nice mark, I may lay in several marks getting the gist of the thing, but not actually showing it properly! Digital has given me some bad habits and now I am trying to unlearn these things and boy is it tough and I think it is very obvious in my work.

>>205
Yeah I did that pic and I think I did the greyscale one you're referring to as well.

>you are crazy
Yup, I talk to a therapist weekly now and 99% of what we discuss has to do with insecurities surrounding my art.

>is pretty damn advanced both in relation to your age and years studying seriously
Well I don't want to be just "good for my age", I want to be genuinely GOOD. Period. Which I'm not. I can't draw well and I can't design for shit and still struggle with basic things like perspective or painting without reference. I think my lighting/values are decent but that's about it. And man I've been doing this "seriously" for a while now, maybe like 6 years or so? (with some breaks in the middle at various points, most notably one 8 month period). Hell, Whit Brachna did in 2 years more than what I did in 6. But I'm still nowhere near his or Jaime's level when they were my age. And if I'm nowhere near Jaime, and Jaime isn't at Sargent level, then how can I ever expect to surpass Sargent or other old masters? Hell, I can't even paint digitally well, so I dunno how I will ever pull off giant oil masterpieces when I'm older.

I never attended Watts btw, not enrolled that is. A few years ago I attended a week long workshop thing where basically I got to try out a single session of each class they offer, and then at night do a life drawing session. So it was an intensive week, but only a week. I did learn things though, and have studied the Reilly method a bit on my own as well (I did it before it was cool and known hehe), though these days my opinions are shifting and feel what they teach is a little too formulaic despite what they claim about flexibility.

About your comment on goals and creative work, that's something I am struggling with a ton actually. I don't know what my goals are really. I sort know what I like and don;t like, but it's not enough to fully say "THIS DIRECTION is where I wanna go". I feel incredibly lost. I don't even know WHAT I want to paint. I actually do have some polished stuff though it is still locked under NDA so on my site is under password protection and you can't see it. I never really bother fully rendering my own images though, I just get bored partway through and want to move to the next thing. Once I can see the general composition and mood in the thumbnail I lose interest in a piece. I also get frustrated with myself that I use rendering on pro work as a solution to an image rather than a more elegant one or something that really gets to the base issue of an image. I'd be happy if I could do it like you say and get sort of the same level as the portrait studies, but the difference is the studies have the info in front of me, and the creative work I ned to invent the info so they take longer and come out less clear. I've debated going more the route of like colour scripts or something, so that I can get a fulltime position and also not have to render as much, but my skills are a bit far off from that I think…though Sam Nielson told me like a week ago my skills are there, just my portfolio is too broad (I showed him a ton of sketches and finished pro work that's not publicly shown yet).

Sorry for cluttering the thread with text btw.

>>206

Whoa. Man you are way too young to put yourself through so much stress. I mean it's pretty obvious you are an extremely competitive person and you have an insane drive to suceed, but maybe that's exactly what's hurting you now? I don't know, I hate to sound like I'm giving life advice (not that I was in a position to do so, I have no life whatsoever) but shit man… you are inversely delusional. You are so obsessed with perfection and juggling all the aspects that are part of amazing art you completely fail to see everything you've accomplished already. I don't want to say too many nice things because It's just gonna sound like I want your number or something, but I really think you are tremendously underestimating yourself. I mean, shit, Sam Nielson told you your skills are there… what more could you ask for. If you spent some time channeling that technical skill into a couple of job-role specifc pieces I'm sure you could easily get a position worth your time. On the other hand you don't even have to choose a direction… The SMV guys told me that things tend to fall into place if you just do the type of work you want to do, and thus inevitably become really good at that. Eventually somebody will offer to pay you lol. And having a large body of work is also kind of impressive in itself, so directionless productivity can't be that bad.

Anyway, hope you manage to find a little inner piece in the realization that you don't have to become the next Mullins by the end of the Month. It's okay to take a decade. I can relate to the overwhelming pressure though.

Maybe learning how to handle that pressure is a bigger part of the equation than we realize.

(Sorry if I forgot a word or wrote nonsense here or there, I'm drunk as F)

>>240
That's really good, love the warmth in this picture.

>>243
I would love to be more active but I have no tablet so all my "art" (if you could even call it that) is on paper and I don't have a good camera to take pictures with.

>>243
I check it pretty much everyday, but I don't know enough about art to be able to give good advice and my own drawings are still too ugly to be shared at this point. I don't mind that /dpd/ is slow, it's when it gets popular that I'll start worrying…