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You need to work on your shading and defining light sources. Right now, everything you paint has a bright center with shadows around the edges. You need to consider where the light is coming from and how the shape of the object will make shadows appear.

You should also try using a sharper brush to define textures and shapes and only use such soft brushes for overall shading.

I see your point. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. I will definetly work on that with my next piece. I discovered an incredibly easy and versitile way to blend my colors in painter via tutorial that I am planning on messing around with. I can't believe I didn't think of it on my own. Anyway, I will apply that method of blending with setting my shading and highlighting better. Setting up proper lighting has always been and continues to haunt me with difficulty. I sometimes wonder if it's just not meant to be, but I'm hopeful that it is just a harder thing to learn for any artist and I, like the rest, will fall into my own place. I can't wait to start producing "WOW" paintings. Thank you again!

It helps to visualize how the light would be cast on an object by drawing a kind of wire frame pattern on the object to help you see the shape and orientation in 3D space. For me, a single line along the "center" and around the "middle" of the object is enough.

At 9/22/11 09:47 AM, ADgoat wrote: I'm not exactly proud of this one, and it surely isn't good enough for me to submit, considering it has been finished after I have improved my art and standards of my own work, but wanted to show my progress with painter off. Hopefully this will show a potential with a relationship between Painter and myself.

Welp

I'm not sure what programs you have at your disposal or if you willing to buy more, but I sometimes like to draw the outlines for things in flash, since it has a line smoothing feature, or make really rough outlines in illustrator with the pen tool, use Photoshop to sketch over them with the brush tool, run the sketch through illustrator to get rid of the bumpy lines, add in the initial color. rasterize and then shade it in Photoshop. I think you wanted her to be crossing her left leg over her right, but it's hard to tell form the picture and the only way to recognize that is that you can see the bottom of her foot, maybe use the mixer brush to make a light clothing outline to show where her legs separate.

At 9/26/11 12:15 AM, stretch1one wrote: I'm not sure what programs you have at your disposal or if you willing to buy more, but I sometimes like to draw the outlines for things in flash, since it has a line smoothing feature, or make really rough outlines in illustrator with the pen tool, use Photoshop to sketch over them with the brush tool, run the sketch through illustrator to get rid of the bumpy lines, add in the initial color. rasterize and then shade it in Photoshop. I think you wanted her to be crossing her left leg over her right, but it's hard to tell form the picture and the only way to recognize that is that you can see the bottom of her foot, maybe use the mixer brush to make a light clothing outline to show where her legs separate.

That's a bit of a lengthy process. I usually just do a rough sketch in GIMP and then use a vector or pen tool over it. Then I make a layer under the outlines and one over the lines so I can fill be areas underneath without covering the lines and do small details above without the lines getting in the way. Or I just vector everything in Inkscape.

Grrr! What am I doing wrong here? I tried sooooooo freaking hard to create a realistic human picture. I will explain the method I used to create this. I went back to Photoshop for this one. I used a reference picture of Reese Witherspoon. The reference picture was set to the left and my work canvas was to the right. I set a grid and sketched the outline of the face and hair. I painted the skin all a solid color and then set the shading and highlighting on separate layers on top of it. The eyes were in individual folders. I used a soft brush with flow and opacity set down to about 50% each for the shading and such (with a variety of settings from time to time.) I'm afraid if I go into too much details, I may bore you to death. How can I improve my next picture to get a "wow! I thought that was a photo" look? Just practice, or am I missing a key ingredient for realism?

At 9/27/11 10:53 PM, ADgoat wrote: Grrr! What am I doing wrong here? I tried sooooooo freaking hard to create a realistic human picture. I will explain the method I used to create this. I went back to Photoshop for this one. I used a reference picture of Reese Witherspoon. The reference picture was set to the left and my work canvas was to the right. I set a grid and sketched the outline of the face and hair. I painted the skin all a solid color and then set the shading and highlighting on separate layers on top of it. The eyes were in individual folders. I used a soft brush with flow and opacity set down to about 50% each for the shading and such (with a variety of settings from time to time.) I'm afraid if I go into too much details, I may bore you to death. How can I improve my next picture to get a "wow! I thought that was a photo" look? Just practice, or am I missing a key ingredient for realism?

Honestly, it just takes practice and your off to a good start, just keep trying new things with it(not this piece but a new one) you'll soon figure out something. For me honestly you'd be lucky to even see a realism piece of mine. Drawing it just bores me because its tedious and well "realistic" already dealing with reality so I like to draw from imagination to get away from this godforsakened world. But yeah just keep working and practicing you'll get there as long as you don't give up.

A new portraid. I'm prouder of this one than the other one of Reese Witherspoon. It doesn't look exactly photo realistic, but I wasn't really going for that with this one. I stayed on the cartoon/realism on purpose this time and believe that is the reason it turned out better. Please if you can give me advice on bettering then, as always, I will take it all in and use it for future projects.