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At 4/5/11 03:24 PM, Kumakun4 wrote: Another concept piece for Elysse, a little more time was put into this one.

This is great. It's got the same style as many artists who motivated me to get into CG painting... I find it has a very clean and efficient style, the shading is impeccable within that style and it all makes up for great concept art.

You have great action lines, very dynamic poses, and your sketch pages show that.

Good job :)

I think I can be of some help here...

Photorealistic drawing does not involve a special trick if you want good results. The main idea is to learn to draw different textures (skin, fabric, feathers, hair, wood....) in the most realistic way possible before attempting such a painting.

Here are the main guidelines:
1 - Very fine level of detail: avoid having areas that are very sharp and others that lack resolution.
2 - Appropriate colors and textures: your colors should be based on what you see, not what you think is there. For instance, concrete is not always grey, as it can be yellow, blue, orange, depending on the surrounding light.
3 - Realistic lighting: you cannot paint anything remotely realistic if your light is inconsistant. This is perhaps the part that requires the most practice.
4 - Realistic optics: if your drawing incorporates depth of field, motion blur, lens flare, lighting bloom and other optical effects, you will need to be extra careful if you want it to look real
5 - Adding photo grain: a certain level of "random" in an image, in the form of photographic grain, adds tremendous realism in some situations.
6 - Avoid shortcuts. There are none.

To paint a realistic bird, make sure your doodle is exactly anatomically conform. You cannot cheat anatomy by adding details. Learn to render the look of feathers, think carefully of your lighting, and then practice. It's unlikely it will look good on the first try!

Hope that helps!

Doesn't look very good, and definitely not "Extreme".

The drawings are not up to par with the original animations, the optimization of the available space is terrible. The text does not even qualify as proper English, for instance "Just waked, checking doors", or a "hungry" meter raises my eyebrow.

There is a lot of work to be done for this to be barely acceptable. So here's my request:

Make it worth looking at.

You drew that when you were 4, and that's why it's special.... right?

...right?

I think it's bad.

Some other drawing posted today got frontpaged, which means it's unlikely mine will be (prob. did not get noticed by mods ^^)

Still, I'm happy with the reactions I got! Thanks all :D

At 3/23/11 09:45 PM, Morthagg wrote:

:All hail short-haired beer-drinking lesbian boobies.

Hell yes.

On another note, I was wondering how you manage to draw while in public transit... Do you have
1- Comfortable, smooth rolling busses?
2- Super steady hands, and some "drawing stance" that absorbs vibrations?
3- A super gifted mind that can predict and calculate bumps in the road in advance and adjust in consequence?
4- All of the above?!

I am impressed ^^

She is complete.

It's a total of 110 hours I've spent on this babe, and I'm pretty happy with the results. Please go check her out full-size! I'll leave a sneak-peak here ^^

Hope you like it!

At 3/22/11 10:10 PM, Ne7ers wrote: Intuos 4 every time.

Hell yes. Agreed ^^

Your art is sexcellent. I love seeing your sketches... I want to see more!!

I spy, with my little eyes, a posterize. Try to avoid instant photoshop filters, because they never add quality to an image!

Otherwise, it's a good thing you're looking into anatomy; there is still a long way to go. The general proportions of the character displayed take away a lot of believability (even with the backstory of mutation...).

I think we've covered this one already.

Your artwork is not worth half the praise you already give to it yourself in the description section. While it's not a catastrophe, there is a lot of improvement to be made in the technique, subject, color, everything. I will not go into the detail ofhow you should improve (I've already reviewed one of your drawings), but the idea is that there is much to be done about your drawing and people will contest any of your claims of grandeur.

Your ego is just feeding the trolls that thrive on your agressive answers to sometimes appropriate critiques.

At 3/7/11 05:36 AM, DevourerJay wrote: just a background, and it's perfect! :D

great job!

I'm working on that right now :D Currently the piece should be completely finished before mid april April 14 happens to be exactly the time when I published the Terran Medic a year ago :) I hope it will be a fitting sequel!

I've had a quick glance at what's going on in the comment section of your profile's art section.

I believe that writing "This is a great piece, I think" is somewhat of an invitation for trolls to tell you otherwise.

You may have pride in your work (I definitely do), but pride is unfortunately A-grade troll food.

I won't discuss the geometrical differences between your render and the original picture because I think that's not the point; it's all about your technique!

I think there are several things you could do to increase the realism of all of it. First off, you can further polish the skin by eliminating the colored patches of a single color on the skin around the eye. This means taking a softer brush, reducing the opacity to something like 20%, and smoothing every patch of color until it's all well blended together. You can do it pretty fast too, if you keep a finger on "alt" while using the brush tool. Pressing alt will instantly switch to the eyedrop tool so you can quickly pick a new color to smooth the shading with.

If you polish the colors more, you will get a plastic-ish look to the skin. It'll be nice looking, but not very natural. A quick glance at the photo (or at real skin, for that matter) will show that you need to add some texture to it, or at least some irregularity to gain more realism. There are few shortcuts to this, but painting it by hand is one way, and usually adding a blurred, monochromatic (black and white) gaussian grain as an overlay layer over the skin adds to the realism because it suggests the skin's grit. A trick I like to use as well is creating a custom irregular brush, the kind you could use to paint dirt. A splash of multiple spots is more suited to painting skin than the perfectly round, flat default photoshop brush!

Hope this helps! You are doing great by the way :D

I think I understand your problem. If I got this right, the only reason you need this particular effect to be applied to all layers without rasterizing is because After Effects won't recognize the adjustment layer. Indeed, there is no fast way to automatically flatten these adjustment layers to every layer under it while keeping everything separate. The solution, unfortunately, is to duplicate every adjustment layer a million times and flatten the pair with each layer, which is painstaking and boring.

However, I believe there might be a different solution to your problem. Hue, saturation, brightness and contrast (the adjustments you applied) are very common features in color adjustment and therefore should be featured in After Effects. I am confident you can keep your photoshop layers separate as they are, don't bother with the multiple flattening in photoshop, and instead do your animation (or whatever) using the colors as they are right now, then apply the adjustments on the animated ensemble in After Effects! This should technically produce the same result. In After Effects, you don't need to have perfect colors in advance before starting to animate each part, you can fix that after!

I hope this helps!

Could not resist posting one last update before releasing the final pic. I'm 85 hours into it, adding details and working on the background (not shown here).

Anything missing/looking wrong? I NEED TO KNOW @_@

At 3/3/11 10:42 AM, Razraal wrote: Last day I was on a critical boredom level, so I decided to burn out some time by doing what I didn't do for a long time: drawing stuffz.

I think you forgot to explain at what time the hand actually became famous...

At 3/2/11 09:37 PM, silversunned wrote: I could use a couple of critiques with my works! :D if you don't mind it would very much so be appreciated! :D :D

Here's a piece I've done
tell me what you think?

I like it! You are skilled at rendering lighting and shading on paper, which is a hard thing to do. I'm extremely fond of frontal portraits of women (yikes, my gallery is pretty much only that >_<). If I may, I have a few tips concerning that drawing.

First off, I would like to mention the skull half of your drawing is impeccable. The lighting, cracks and texture perfectly suit the finish of bone and it just spells out your experience at drawing them. Two thumbs way up for that part.

As for the human half, that's where I can direct most of my critique. I will first underline the fact every anatomical feature of the face matches the other half on the bone, which is a good first step. However, although the position is right, you have to watch the size and orientation of the eye. The eyeball's sphere depicted in your drawing pretty much matches the eyeball socket in the skull. In reality, the eyeball is surrounded by muscle and fat, so it's in fact much smaller than the socket of the skull. The eyelids even only show a small portion of that sphere! So yeah, bottomline would be to watch the size of the eyes and turn them less inwards in order to get a more natural result. I understand this is very hard to keep track of when drawing on paper, but you can get around the problem with good preparation before you actually start shading.

Speaking of shading, that's the second thing I wanted towrite about! Overall, as I mentionned earlier, your shading technique is very good and your rendition of bone is miles above average. I think, however, that you can achieve a more natural feeling on skin by decreasing the contrast in the face. For instance, it's rarely advisable to shade the area around the nose that goes follows under the cheeck. This adds a lot to the age of the face, and sometimes it adds too much. The same thing goes for the area between the bottom of the nose and the top of the lips, which rarely requires contrast because that area is often subject to shadow from the nose. I also think some lines are a bit hard on the face and take away from the quasi photorealistic effect achieved on some other parts of the drawing, i.e. the lines around the lips, under the nose and under the chin. Skin is extremely difficult to render realistically and it takes a lot of practice!

Needless to say, I think your work is quite good and I hope you persevere!

(wow I was not expecting to write such a long critique!)

It's really cool to see your progress with time! You are getting very good at rendering shapes and light, but it's time to step up your game when it comes to facial expressions and general facial anatomy. If you want to keep improving at the steady rate you've been going so far, I believe the next step would be to practice rendering faces, eyes, noses, etc. I would love to see that!! :D

At 2/25/11 01:10 AM, Juantopo wrote: THANKS A LOT FOR THE TIP. IM NOOBY, I DIDNT NOTEST, I DID ONE PART OF THE FOREST BRIGHT AND THE OTHER DARK. THE SWORD WORK WAS SHAMELESS, Y USED PEN TO MARK THE SHAPES AND THEN STICK THE REGULAR SHADOWS, THEN COLORS, THEN JUST PUTTING RANDOM SHADOWS. I DID USE FILTERS, MOSTLY FOR THE LACK OF 3D LOOKS. IT WAS TOO CARTOONISH (AS YOU SEE IN PIC ABOVE)

I HATED HOW I LOOKED IN THE PIC, SINCE IM FATTER THAN WHAT I ACTUALLY AM IN REAL LIFE, BUT O WELL. SAD PAINTING. ANY TIPS ON MAKING REAL LOOKING PERSONS?

Yes, we could provide that... once you prove you can actually paint. That means having some drawings to work from.

:At this point, see you in 15 years.

Are you a professional artist yet?!?

Hehehe I'm currently studying in mechanical engineering and I don't plan on starting an artistic career. Most of the stuff I do is fan-art from games or movies, and I'm a really slow painter... I probably wouldnt cut it if I needed to paint as a job!

So, concerning this piece... the resolution is 5656 x 3600 px, it's got over 200 layers already because I'm lousy with minimizing my layer count. When I draw hair, I usually do a couple of strands of hair by hand, then duplicate and warp the layer over and over again until I'm actually manipulating entire clumps of hair on a single layer... then duplicate these clumps over and over again to cover the desired area. So you draw maybe 25 hairs in the whole exercise, and you duplicate them forever :D

I'm glad you all like it so far! I gotta take a break from it now because I've got an exam on wednesday >_< I expect to be done by the end with this painting of the next month, perhaps?

Just an update!

I'm currently adding a lot to the level of detail of the picture, which is my favorite part. I probably have several hours of touch ups to go until I feel ready to start on the background. I've changed my plans as to what it's going to be, but I'll keep that a surprise! It's unlikely I'll update again until the image is complete, but here's some eye candy!

Also, she has a neck now =P

Here's a close up. Most of the leg is not finished, but I wanted to show some details :)

Here's an update!

I am now 50 hours into the drawing and I have several hundred details and corrections left to do on the armor... And a background o_o

Hope you like it!

I find that applying the "minimalism" tag to a digital coloring piece amounts to laziness. There is something about cg that does not fill the right mindset... Having a large area of the canvas being covered with a smooth, uniform color using paintstrokes is an artistic choice; filling the same area with a paint bucket is not.

Have a look at minimalist artists and you will find that it's not synonymous with "simple and bland". I will appreciate something as minimalism when I see art stripped down to its most fundamental approach, and I fail to see your piece as fundamental digital art. I'm sorry, but it does not cut it for me =/

I don't say this a lot, but there's not much to comment on. It does not seem like you spent more than 15 minutes on this image, and even then it lacks clarity.

I'm still planning on implementing a mushroom cloud in the background, although it would look faint and distant, perhaps seen through fog or snow. It has to look far enough as the ghost is not wearing a face mask. I'm glad you like it :)

At 2/10/11 08:42 PM, Kakashi1930 wrote: Also, ignore me if I'm wrong, but the breastplate seems a little bit low...

Thank you very much for the input!! I'm enclined to agree with this one, and I'll probably address the issue before publishing it, probably by moving the breast slightly higher, but not by much... I will also remove/rotate that black line along the "boob armor", which should make it less downwards. I've taken the pose from a picture of some girl lying against a wall, and the proportions should be right otherwise.

Here's a closeup of her face! (armor is not yet finished-too bland) I drew it not long after seeing Tron... I think I'm still secretly in love with Olivia Wilde >_>

I hesitated a lot before posting this, as I would originally have wished to keep it a surprise until the end... But hell, I've been working on this one for a while and I'm kind of excited for feedback already! So... here's an exclusive work in progress on where the "sequel" is going :D

Hope you like it! Any ideas/things missing? Keep in mind it's a WIP and some parts are still very rough (shoulders, armor plates), or unfinished, and I have yet to add hundreds of little details such as scratches and specular lighting spots.