ManicJake's Sketchbook

Hey Manic,
I think you have the base down to attempt painting them. Play with color and use layers!

[Taron]

Good studies, Manic! Some really exciting ideas in them, I'd love to see some of them worked out, Tartan makes a great point there! I'm sure you can pull it off!
Great start!

I wanted to make the chin very slightly more round. Oops
The head starts getting round too low as well. I'll fix that too on the next iteration.

[Taron]

Yeah, man, you're totally ready to go for color!
Do you mind, if I make a totally boring, technical suggestion in regards to posting images? I think, especially as you are getting started with all of this, you may not need to post really full size images, or PNGs. Save them as PNG on your computer, but also as JPG or convert the PNG to JPG with another tool, because my Jpg saver is really bad. If you have photoshop or gimp or any other image manipulation tool, you could then resize the paintings to like 1024 or even 800 wide (keeping the ratio, of course), and then save those smaller images as Jpeg! Then upload those smaller jpegs to imgur.
This has a variety of advantages:
- very fast loading
- it's easier to get a feel for your images as a whole, which is something you will want to get feedback on very soon.
- much nicer display in the forum posts, I think.

You can always add links to fullres images, too, later on, but right now I really don't think that's necessary. If you look at my thread, for example, I only show jpeg images and occasionally scale down, too, when I see that it's not necessary to show the complete resolution. But actually I most of the time don't even go higher than my default res, hahaha...why ever. But that's just me. On a serious painting I might go to 3k, but I don't think I ever went higher than that. I was just thinking about that fact, that's why I'm mentioning it...funny.

Anyway, great stuff and I see that you already understand a good deal about color and light. Piece by piece you are gaining more control, you are making finer decisions and your brush strokes will begin to matter to you, too. That's when an artist gains his traits! Rock on!

Yeah, that is a much better size.
When I made my last post I actually looked up if the BBCode img tag supported resizing. I was getting a little annoyed myself at the size.
It doesn't work on this forum I guess. [img width="800" height="599"]http://i.imgur.com/gZtQgHi.jpg[/img]

I should have stepped back and figured out the proportions better before diving in. Ah well, lesson learned.

[Taron]

YEAH, sweet, man, that's perfect!
And, wow, isn't it amazing, how a smaller resolution can bring out more of the existing potential already!? I love it!

I know, this may sound like a weird advice, but I'd recommend to you to not spend too much continuous time on one painting just yet. Consider the old masters, who had to leave their canvases to dry and started others in the meantime and worked in these rotations. I love doing quick studies on smaller subjects, simply to quickly go through different concepts, explore more about myself in terms of what I already understand or how well I can translate what I thought I understood about lighting, colors in light, shadows, colors in shadows, substances and so on. You still want to go calmly about them, of course, always as relaxed as possible, but the more you experiment, the more control you gain.
Sometimes, when you keep spending all your time on one painting, it begins to control you instead, but the painting is not the artist and it takes a long time before you can really speak the language of your painting and until then it seems to know nothing. Soon you'll try to react only to what it seems to want from you... ...it starts to warp your mind... ...it lies to you... ...so you have to shake it off , gain the upper hand again and let it know who's the boss!

No doubt you are on a roll, though, so understand my advice to be for an artist I already expect much from!

Mark Twain referred to the idea of letting the paint dry while working on another project as his "Shipyard". He would work on other "ships" while his thoughts settled and he could go back and look at things with a clearer eye. I try and do that but my eye was never as sharp as his By all means go back to it later. I will be doing something of the sort also. I want to update an old image I did back in the 90s and will be asking for thoughts on it. Ummm DON'T wait that long

When you do, try blending by using the number one brush and shift. when you hit an area where you want it to blend more you can move mouse or pen with a fast side to side motion to get those areas to transition. I really like your second paint better. It is starting to capture the drawing.

Finished!

I must be getting faster at verve. I thought it would take 2 or 3 more sessions to finish.

@Taron:
I think I know what you mean, step away long enough to forget your ideas about it so you get a new look at it when you come back.
But, how long would you consider to be too long spent continuously on a single painting?
This took me roughly 8-10 hours I think. It was 4 sessions at about 2 hours each.

@Tartan:
Yeah, I think I'm starting to figure out my method of using verve better. Before I was putting on way too much paint and spending 80% of my time trying to smooth it out. Now I found out that I can just put a small dab and use shift to spread it out. I personally like to keep the settings changes to a minimum though, not even switching brushes, just staying with #9.
Aside from the default settings, I have fluids at 26% and minimum brush size at 78%.