Curse

kais · Mar 23, 2006, 12:46 PM // 12:46

Hello.
So, here s a painting I ve been messing around. It s a warrior in knights armor.
I wanted some critism about what I ve done so far, if things looked alright.
I would also like to have some advice about making the background (snowy mountains), because what I tried to make was too blurry or too neat.
btw the outlines are from a scanned drawing.

Poison Ivy · Mar 23, 2006, 12:50 PM // 12:50

Needs to me more detailed. Imagine a source of light, and add some shadows, usually that can really make it look like snow.

kais · Mar 23, 2006, 02:01 PM // 14:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by Poison Ivy

Needs to me more detailed. Imagine a source of light, and add some shadows, usually that can really make it look like snow.

ah yes, thank you for your contribution, I ll try that as everything else I ve tried was so horrible I had to delete it -_-

Jenosavel · Mar 23, 2006, 03:18 PM // 15:18

He seems a little flat. You've got shading where the pieces of armor over lap, and where the arms overlap the body, but that's it. You don't have any shading to indicate the 3d form of his body. Try adding some faint shadows at the under edges of his limbs and sides to try and push them back in space and give him some shape. The trick with that is to never put the shadows at the very edge, because the very edge will catch some reflected light.

Here's a good example of what I mean. I know an egg isn't the same shape as a person, but the same method applies to shadowing almost anything. It just takes some minor tweaks.

Also, the armor should be shiny. Once you figure out where your light source is coming from, and some tiny but very bright highlight spots.

actionjack · Mar 23, 2006, 06:20 PM // 18:20

The face is often the part that people draw their eyes on first. Maybe give him more detail in the face (especially the eyes) to make him more life like.

Sidra · Mar 24, 2006, 12:24 AM // 00:24

the face makes him look like a blind old man wearing a nuns hood. who is bald. >.< the forehead is a bit too... high. I like the warrior though. Light shading looks appropriate for that drawing, as do light blues for darker areas of the snow and just plain white for the rest, if you do some black outlining to show the hills and whatnot.

PieXags · Mar 24, 2006, 12:51 AM // 00:51

(I'm going to assume you're serious about wanting to improve as a whole, that you will be pursuing art with some sort of motivation. If not, there's no sense in reading further.)

As stated by Jeno, very 2D. Before moving onto painting with any sort of realism, I'd first work on your line work. The armor's decent enough, but still very 2D, just from a straight-on perspective, no curves or 3D sort of look to the armor or entire body for that matter. With proper shading, this could be fixed, but not to a point that's going to make it look real. I'd pick up an anatomy book and study it, study it like crazy doing pages of sketches if possible. In fact I'd start out with bare-skin and skeleton sketches before adding armor and the like, because doing so just seems like a cover up of for not drawing a proper hand and such. The net's full of tutorials that should help you get started. (By the way, what program are you using to paint this in? Photoshop?)

The most obvious thing that screams at me is his face, very straight, very flat, not realistic in proportion as a whole. His eyes are HUGE, he almost looks like a dragonball z sort of character. His nose is very long (not large, just unrealistically long) and too close to his mouth. Try working on faces, lots of faces. Practice is really the only way to improve, but once you pull off something better you should be able to replicate it with relative ease.

When it comes to painting, here's what I'd suggest. Normally you'll hear "pick a light source", but what we must understand is that life never has just one light source. Sure you've got your primary light source, the sun typically, but you've also got color and reflective light coming from everything the sun's light touches, which will add color and shadow as well as highlights and reflections to the armor. However...this is very very very complicated and we can't possibly hope to be able to perfectly depict exactly how light would reflect off armor, or an entire scene of any sort for that matter, because life's just too complicated in how it does this. The point with 2D art isn't so much to be dead-on accurate (though we try as hard as we can), but to make it LOOK like it works. A simple way to go about this is simply elevated parts should be highlighted (lighter color) and wrinkles, creases, parts farther back should be shaded dark, then using something like your smudge tool if you're using photoshop, to make the colors blend into one another. Right now your painting has two basic shades, shadow and not shadow, you leave out reflections, highlights, different shades and hue's, etc.

Start more basic, I'd suggest something like an egg (as Jeno suggested) or the more common apple. Here's a very good thread over at conceptart.org with lots of examples from people learning to paint, it helps a lot to look over. Link

thor hammerbane · Mar 24, 2006, 02:36 AM // 02:36

Might not be the greatest, but better than what i can do. It's a nice picture, needs some more details as stated, but i like the detail on the armor.

kais · Mar 25, 2006, 03:47 PM // 15:47

thank you all for your comments, i appreciate it very much.

Jenosavel: thanks for the critsim, thats a very nice egg

Its true I may not have worked enough on inanimate objets or anatomy...
I though my anatomy was good enough...

Piexags: thank you for the critism.
i did read your post since i wish to do something in my life with my drawing

I guess i will have to work a lot more on anatomy.
just to say: i made the full body naked before putting the armor on so it would look better and more proportional. I agree i havent worked on the hands at all because it bored me... It takes me way too much time to draw a hand well

now that you say it, his head does look a bit wrong. the nose is too long and the eyes are too big... *sigh*

yes i did use photoshop to paint the warrior. I got it because I didnt really like to paint even though i liked the effect. so i got photoshop (very cheap in china -_-) and a digital tablet because drawing with a mouse was just.... horrible.
Now, I ask myself if that was a good thing to do since it seems i cant draw well by definition...
Anyway, I will check out the links (Jenosavel s and yours) and try to improve.

Again, thank you all for the comments.

Sidra · Mar 25, 2006, 04:54 PM // 16:54

I'm horrible at anatomy. And if y ou aren't willing to practice, than just give up kais. Hands are probably some of the hardest things to draw. Keep trying till you get them.

kais · Mar 26, 2006, 08:12 AM // 08:12

I looked at the links you gave me and chose to make an apple( yes, you heard me right), to see what I could come up with. I did this in roughtly 1 hour and im not even finished yet -_- . i find that long but i did try to make it as realistic as possible.
here it is:

Jenosavel · Mar 26, 2006, 01:57 PM // 13:57

I think you've got 110% improvement over your first painting attempt, which is great. One thing about the apple that I would suggest is to try blending together the colors more. Not so much blurring the edge between the two, but rather, instead of having the red area a solid red, try to figure out what other faint hints of color are in there and add in those traces. Painting isn't only about mastering how white light falls on a colored object, but also about mastering the interplay of many different colored lights around us (reflected light will be the colors of whatever it's reflecting from) and the variation of color within the object itself as well.

kais · Mar 26, 2006, 03:01 PM // 15:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jenosavel

I think you've got 110% improvement over your first painting attempt, which is great. One thing about the apple that I would suggest is to try blending together the colors more. Not so much blurring the edge between the two, but rather, instead of having the red area a solid red, try to figure out what other faint hints of color are in there and add in those traces. Painting isn't only about mastering how white light falls on a colored object, but also about mastering the interplay of many different colored lights around us (reflected light will be the colors of whatever it's reflecting from) and the variation of color within the object itself as well.

thanks for the comment.

as its not finished, I ll surely work on it more to have
more color variations on the big chunks of color.

PieXags · Mar 26, 2006, 07:06 PM // 19:06

As Jeno said, wonderful improvement over the first, quite a lot better. I'd definately go with Jeno's advice, it needs more color variation for sure. Take your pen (you do have opacity set to pen pressure right?) and make lots of light curved strokes with some yellow or brown over some more of the apple to give it more variety, also I see the shadow's brown, is it on a brown table? If so, maybe some sort of brown highlights throughout as well.

As a whole, keep practicing, you'll improve startlingly fast.

kais · Mar 27, 2006, 07:39 AM // 07:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by PieXags

As Jeno said, wonderful improvement over the first, quite a lot better. I'd definately go with Jeno's advice, it needs more color variation for sure. Take your pen (you do have opacity set to pen pressure right?) and make lots of light curved strokes with some yellow or brown over some more of the apple to give it more variety, also I see the shadow's brown, is it on a brown table? If so, maybe some sort of brown highlights throughout as well.

As a whole, keep practicing, you'll improve startlingly fast.

thanks for the advice, I actually have my pen pressure set on brush size (the more pressure I make the bigger the brush). I actually didnt know I could set opacity to pen pressure, as the brush size thing was the default.
I ll go change that right away

ok, I ve tried doing another apple, this one was done in 45 min, and I still doubt its finished yet.

ok, now I think I ll work on my anatomy a bit, I ve already started by drawing my hand in class

btw: What are hard brushes? Ive heard about them but since the brushes in photoshop dont have names or any description, I couldnt figure out which ones they were.