With verve into the light

Oh thank you guys. Painting marathon of last weeks starts to pay off.

@Eduardo - No. In verve you can position light also on z Axis. Just try it.
It's a bit confusing as you have no reference than canvas look to see where you are, but's fun.

@Lemi - Thank you so much. It was your watercolor preset btw

@zero You are too kind. Thank you.

One more of this black and white series, after the Shaman.
Had those 30#s working class child in mind.
Missing a bit vitality in look though.

I think you achieved very good result, Knacki. I like vitality in his eyes. BTW The cap and overall light and shadows are fantastic!

You are such a main art contributor for this forum nowadays!

Thank you very much Lemi, but the face looks dead. The eyes are ok, but do not convince me. The skin is probably way too clean and therefore not perfect enough, or not loose enough done.
It‘s hard to say. Everything seems to be there but not well enough placed. Or maybe too much. I don‘t know.


Haha, you mean almost the only contributer. Beside zero, and very few pics from others, there is nothing nowadays.
This site slightly fades away if no one cares.
I tried to activate the boys & girls at Deviantart a bit. But well, I have almost no follower so far and my art is wether not good enough or not Manga enough to change this rapidly.
Nevertheless, I got some Favs...from zero, hurray. .........

I try to sell verve where ever I go. But it‘s not really happening a lot.
Today, I made my best cloud study ever made in a doubled default verve canvas with 7 layer.
Verve crashed on saving. Gollum.
One hour lost.
It‘s hard to be a friend of an invalid whose doctor didn‘t took the chance to push him all the way to the top as he was shiny and famous.

Now the sky is grey and besides all the wonderful possibillities I love so much in verve, not so many are visting us, being curious about this absolutely outstanding idea behind this app and the wonderful person, programmer and artist invented it.


I mean, both of them are deserving much more.

[Taron]

Awww, dang, Knacki. I'm still battling some things that won't be overcome until I detach myself from BlitzMax, really. But I'm kind of alone on my quest to transition into C++. There are a few things I don't know, yet, and they scare me. Chief among them are the DLL matters, related to openGL and other runtime libraries. It feels so awkward, since I don't know, if it's normal to having to include them or what I may be doing wrong. Eventually I will figure it out. But until then I shouldn't make another push. The next push must have a commercial companion and then allow people to wanting to support me, you know.
Verve is not orphaned and not sick. It's a little bit dormant, but consider it in a chrysalis!
Thank you so much, though! I do know what you mean.
Also...there are limitations to GL that are currently hard to overcome. I can try to somehow squeeze more and more out of it, but memory is memory and the price for speed.
You all are daring to go to high resolutions, using many layers and all that. In its current state, Verve is a pure exploration, not designed as a high res professional illustrator's tool for final deliveries. But, yeah... it is the goal for it to become strong enough for it, too. I just know that it won't be BlitzMax, which can take us there.

About your beautiful painting: You have a tendency to emphasize the details on the eyes too much along with the contrast. If there was a continuous increase in sharpness and contrast towards the eyes, it wouldn't be all that complicated, but I'd rather integrate the eyes into the majority of the look. The other thing is that your eyelids lack width or thickness. It feels as if you were too worried about them becoming too thick, which is a very common problem. The iris also appear to be a little too large and a little too lit on the inside, making them a bit flat, while they overall look very shiny and pretty. If you were after realism, though, you'd have to become a wee bit more "generous" with yourself, so to say, not having to overwork any one specific area. I do know what it feels like, though.
Anyway, the result overall is still fantastic and does show your great attention to light and form. Portrait by portrait and picture by picture you will gain greater and greater control over volume and level of detail as well as when and where you can allow yourself to let go or whatever it takes to stay consistent or coherent in these matters.

Never mind taron.
Probably it's better that verve grows slowly instead of being pushed unnaturally. Sometimes I just wish you would have some help in this conversion stuff.

Thank you very much for your hints. I'll try that in next one.

We talked about impasto quite often.
I think, I am almost there.
And finally it is brush #2 which still gives the most convincing result. over image brushes by pressure. Together with fluids and not too slow strokes, it ends up in a really good and realistic effects.

Impasto.jpg (233.33 KiB) Viewed 7980 times

Find attached a zip with the project, the image brushes - (not necessary for shown picture) and settings. Play around a bit with diffusion, glossiness etc. and have fun

Plastic verving!

about Verve being not so popular among DA community, imho DA people are too confined to mainstream medias, they are just too practical, they know which programs are the industry standar n they just stick w them, not only in 2d but in 3d as well. History demostrates that big fishes eat little ones, Autodesk did it with Alias Maya n Softimage XSI, ADOBE did it, PIXOLOGIC did it, etc
It's kinda sad to say but imho DA people are just to scared or rushed to pay attention to any alternative programs, it's the mainstream(monopoly) effect I guess.
but there are creative people trying new things despite their limitations, I myself bite my tongue everytime I come to visit this site, urging to verve out new stuffs, however I allways try to give feedback trying colaborate w Taron's marvelous proyect. New tougher GPUs are comming, then canvas resolution won't be a problem anymore, it's just matter of time, it wont be long before Verve gets finally noticed by all.

about you portrait knacki, you have a certain way of depicting eyes Knacki, I believe it is your mark, imho you have to ask yourself if you want it to be so, I can see a portrait with those sort of eyes n I say in my mind "Knacki painted it", is the way you represent the nature, imho is not just only about realism, I would suggest this video, it kinda describe it better than I do, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2Ok0Wx1bCE, btw a technical advice would be to darken a bit the eye in the shadown area, cuz lights in the shadow area can't compete w those in the light area.

about the not so impasto but kinda build up stroke preset you uploaded, if your img has a build up level 10, I have problems doing a build up level 4, because it has some sort of bubbling effect, it can be noticed in your img also, it's in the paths(lines with some depth in z axis) that your stroke made, they are not allways smooth but every certain distance they have n indentation n Oscillate, or Oscillate Caos, I have tried reduce both to 0, but anyway every build up level 4 strokes I has made in verve has this bubbling effect, hope Taron could look at that.

Eduardo, I totally agree in almost anything.

About software. You know, sometimes I wished I would have spent same amount of time in PS than in verve. I would be a PS god now and could amazingly cool things.
But Verve gave me the impulse to start drawing again and due to Verve I learned a lot in PS as well. And one thing is for sure, one could live without Verve ( very badly in my case) but wthout PS or something similiar it's very hard. In any graphic job.
If it's free Gimp or Affinity, something like that really have to belong to your toolset.
But beside this, there are more painting orientated apps than ever on the market.
The tablets do have an amazing impact and bringing much more tools to the international masses than before. Medibang, procreate, infinity painter, art rage, sketchbook and not the big ones win.
Sketchbook failes with shitty rental. Same clipstudio- mangastudio insane rental prices as long as I can get Infinity painter,or procreate for around 10€. Adobe really completly failes and left the market Affinity which is brilliant on IOS.
Don't forget free and lovely Krita which is missing on mobile devices.

So as a conclusion, it is still most clever to learn PS as this thing can do almost anything and you don't need anything else. Impasto is the only thing it can't do, but watercolor etc, there are really good and free tools for doing very convincing stuff.
So I can understand anyone who wants to start in the business, who just focus on PS.

But the masses want to have something light and easy to understand. I like infinity painter a lot. Most be even more impressive on Android. It does anything and very convincing.
Here, I personally see Verve btw. An fascinating, easy to use tool for everyone, which gives a hell of possibilities for professionals. It's this "everyone can be an artist" software.
It's just missing an UI which anyone can understand, presets anyone can use just by one click, some decent lasso select & transformation tools for first concept steps.
Some more common layer blend modes.
Exposure, Hue, saturation as the most used color correction tools ( well by me in PS, almost nothing else, sometimes curves, very rare)
Done


About my eyes. Here you are also right Eduardo.
But it us not easy. Since I was a child, I wanted to make perfect pencil drawings ( well, withou drawing every day for hours) But mother nature didn't gave my these little things to learn it on the fly. Anyway, it's hard to be satisfied, specially knowadays.
It was not too difficult to be one of the best in school, but today one compares with the whole world, which is not satisfying. As a conclusion, I really should take your inspiration and focus on my own style. My own eyes



P.S. I made this impasto preset for you. Try it. Play with build up, fluidity, glossiness, diffusion and layer bump. It's almost there and just waiting for your tweaks. Can't wait to see what you'll do with it.

I totally agree w you Knacki

It's just missing an UI which anyone can understand, presets anyone can use just by one click, some decent lasso select & transformation tools for first concept steps.
Some more common layer blend modes.
Exposure, Hue, saturation as the most used color correction tools ( well by me in PS, almost nothing else, sometimes curves, very rare)

I just would add "universal navigation hotkeys" its also very important, perhaps even more that the GUI.
but I have get costumed to Verve as it is, the only thing that can't be overcomed is the res limit, please Taron, if you could get Verve to work with SLI, we could increase canvas resolution limit by 60%, n since new NVIDIA gamer cards are comming at a expensive but reasonable price, SLI is a real option.

about Infinite painter, I remember it didn't support pressure, has it changed? what about tilt, I remember they use mouse velocity to kinda set that.

Knacki please take a look at the bubbling effect of the impasto preset, I will try to fix it, to make it very smooth, without any kind of oscillation. thx advanced.

Universal navigation hotkeys - Don't know exactly what you mean.
For me as a beginner, a menu is essential.
All this terrible bullshit like File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, Filter, View, Window, help.
There, I want to find any function together with the hotkeys listed.
More, I want a search function which shows me where to find things.
Affinity has one function which opens an overlay which is explaining the interface. Very simple and easy.
https://9to5mac.files.wordpress.com/201 ... &strip=all

This is the most important thing. It is all about the first 15 minutes. "User onboarding" in newspeak.
I believe that you are loosing min. 50% of future customer in this time.
Best combined with some very short and pregnant,only most necessary wording , easy to follow 1-2 minute demo videos and projects reachable via help and search function.
If you don't clearly lead the customer trough your app and let them achieve something somehow nice in a short time, they are gone.
Simple as that.

People have to care about so many bullshit, Internet,facebook, network, mobile contracts - all this terrible things no one before 1980 had to care about and spent this time in simply living a nice life.
This is stolen lifetime and any developer of a decent software have the responsibility to take care about their customer lifetime.
If they do, they will be much more successful. Imho.

Infinite Painter on IOS works perfectly together with Apple Pencil. Tilt, pressure anything. If you tilt the pencil is like tilting a real pencil and you are shading with the "side" of the mine. Same in procreate. Can't say anything about Android.

About my preset.
By only changing fluidity a little bit, you'll achieve a complete different look. Making bristle size smaller etc. etc will have a massive impact of final look. Same do "metallic" or "bump" have. Don't overdo bump, you'll lost glossiness.
Turn down fluidity to your likeness but too low will end in stuttering. Use blendign to achieve a complete different look. Blending is almost impossible to adjust. More like on off appearance when it's about handling bumps.
Turn off build up and use STRG+SHIFT+LMB drag to blend colors without affecting bump structure. Use brush #2 without build up to add color without, or just very little impact to bump.
Go crazy and show your stuff
Please load verve settings as well.
It's not the final solution but on this base you can achieve anything!
Also this:

Wave-web.jpg (245.07 KiB) Viewed 7937 times

This is a 100% crop after blowing it up from 1800px to 4000px with PS amazing upscale 2.0

Wave-web-crop.jpg (235.56 KiB) Viewed 7936 times