Finished First Assignment for Schoolism.com Painter 11 class

Well, I have managed to "finish" (whatever that means, working digitally) my first assignment in Painter 11 for Ryan Wood's schoolism.com class. Here it is with two work in progress shots.

Now if only I could figure out how to log in as a student so I can hand it in: deadline today and they have changed their whole site and interface. It is very pretty, but not good if I cannot figure out how to hand in my work for deadline or email questions to the teacher (also needs log-in). eeee!

I'm going to TRY to get to bed before my kiddo gets up today so will upload the continued "work in progress" tomorrow instead.









Oh, Miss E asked about tonal reference: No I don't have exact reference for him wearing the wig, hoodie, dress in this position: I wing it. But I do use a de-saturated set of reference photos for the greytones:

"Real" Schoolism Assignment 1 Work In Progress

Well, I couldn't hand in my Schoolism.com assignment of yesterday, which was pretty much a straightforward copying of a photo taken by someone else, with a hat added. So I had to start over again. Deadline Sunday (it is now Saturday morning! eeee!)

So, I was thinking: I want a head shot. I want textures, so not just hair and skin. I want some fun accessories. And some color since we are going to have to color in this same drawing in assignment three or something.

And we want a fun expression. And it should be something kid-related and all, non? (well, not necessarily, but let's just say for the sake of me being a children's illustrator and all) And I have a crazy insane kiddo.

So. We take this:


And this:




And we take away the colors (desaturate) and then we do a sketch combining my son's current karate expression and attitude, with his halloween costume hair and tiara from October 2009, with his princess dress he got for Christmas Dec 2009 (and wore to a parade last summer) and we get him doing his "Mulan Princess" HEY_YA! bit:



And after a bit of work, and LOTS more to go, of the painterly sort, we get this:



Kind of fun eh! Still really an observation drawing, and not something super creative or off the top of my head. But I think that right now for learning to see and render shadows and tones, this is a good start. Once all that info is entered into my head I can try doing 3D created characters. This is a far cry from my recent "flat line drawings with wash" that I've been working on for clients. Hard to turn them into 3D!!:




More tomorrow, on the Mulan Princess!

Working on first Schoolism Painter Assignment

Well, I got notice tonight that my first Painter Schoolism.com assignment is due on Sunday. EEEK! For some reason I thought we had at least a week, and the class started Feb 28. And one would assume that the work was due a week after one had a chance to watch the tutorial video, which for me was Monday (Feb28) night. Woe be those that didn't have time to watch the class video until Wed or Thurs!

So, at least I had decided I wanted to draw my friend Jacky dressed up as her old drag king performing alter ego Gary. And I used Facebook photos for reference. Yah this is probably illegal or something. Who knows who the photographer was. Beware of Facebook drag and drop, or "download this photo in higher resolution"... ANYONE might be painting YOU right now!!



I did some screen captures as I went along. We were supposed to do a sketch of a person (in the class a head shot with a bit of shoulders), then import that into Painter, and color it in greytones, trying to get a full range from black black to white white. An painting by Ingres is the reference. Love me some Ingres!

I did the sketch in Painter as well. Well, here are the step by step so far. And no I am not done, and yes, I should do a new image for my actual hand-in assignment as I don't think I deviated from the photo enough (I only added a hat... egads a slave to my reference material Am I).



Starting to sketch in Painter using one ref for the face and another for the hat.



Flipping Horizontal to fix errors:




Pretty much finished the sketch. Now adding a gel layer with a grey fill at opacity about 60%.


Starting to use an eraser on the grey layer to block in the highlights.



Another new gel layer that I am using a black airbrush on to block in the darks. Fun to get all this established beforehand. New for me.


Compressed all the layers, now using the teacher, Ryan Wood's custom brushes to paint. The fun thing is that using ALT to get the underlying colors, one doesn't have to chose colors on a palette but rather just pick up the tones already established in the drawing, just turning them into "paint" and brushing them on. Tricky tricky tricky!!!



Established the background a bit more.


Went in with a rough brush to bring some texture into the hair, clothes, facial hair etc. Getting too "soft".


Well, that is where I left off. I have to get to bed... 7am now! eee! Definitely a work in progress. The eyes are too large (I always seem to make faces too squat and eyes too large), the planes on the face aren't well established, esp on the left side. Too little differentiation between the textures of skin, hair, cloth, hat. But hey, not bad for a first trial of this new way of working. Learning a lot about the controls, layers etc. I'll try to finish this up and then get a "from scratch" original character invented and painted to hand in for my actual assignment to be graded. I do hope that Mar 6 means before midnight. Egads. So much for having Sunday night or Monday to work on it! Ooo the excitement of Back To School, with Deadlines. My clients usually just pay me and never give me grades or even any feedback on the final artwork.

Sketch of Kevan as a Kid

More practice on the Cintiq using the Real 2B Pencil brush in Painter. Lots more "flip vertical" "flip horizontal" to try to get proportions and angles right. It's funny how correcting one thing can then make another thing not work anymore.

I really have to work more on controlling the angle of the stylus. All the Real media brushes in Painter 11 are sensitive not only to pressure of your stylus, but also the slant of the stylus ie the angle to the surface of the cintiq. This means you can use a pencil as a point, as a wide block like a big piece of graphite or charcoal held flat to the surface, and anywhere in between.

It is quite a challenge to not angle your "point" when drawing different places on the canvas, and thus getting a wide shaded line where you didn't want it. And also a challenge being consistent with the angle and the pressure of the stylus when putting down value tones that are quite light. I'm not there yet, but that is the point of the practice.

And funny how when I upload it online, I feel it is the chin that is wrong, for the second night in a row.

I really should have been doing this sort of observation practice all the time for the past twenty years. I swear I have hardly ever done it since I left university (June 1985... eee!) Very good for brushing up the eye/mind ability to see, as well as the hand/eye coordination to be able to put down on paper what you see and want to draw.

More to come...

Sketch of Suz

Well, I have decided after looking at "sketches" (ie drawings better than I usually do for "final" work) done by Jason Seiler to "warm up" or "practice", to get back into the habit of practicing myself. Esp useful to get my digital hand into shape on Painter with the Cintiq.

I "stole" a profile picture of my friend Suz (photo credits?) from Facebook, and did this sketch with a Real 2B Pencil brush in Painter tonight. It was fun as it was the first time I have tried flipping both a sketch and the reference photo horizontally to do corrections. It is also one of the first times I have tried selecting and then modifying (moving, scale) elements of my sketch to do corrections. For instance I made one of the eyes smaller and moved it without redrawing, moved her whole face up and over since I had drawn it too long and wide compared to the position of the hat.

It was really fun to see how fast I could eyeball a change by dragging an element to a better spot rather than erasing and redrawing. That is often one thing that hindered me "fixing" errors I could see in a sketch: the prospect of "losing" the work I had already done. Ie if a shape of eye or face silhouette were well-captured by badly placed, I'd avoid erasing and redrawing, and just finish up the sketch knowing that proportions were wrong. Using the lasso select tool and then moving individual parts of the portrait really freed me up to correct errors.

Another thing I need to work on that I have started playing with is the opacity of the brush medium. I was finding the 2B pencil to shade in much too dark with very little pressure when trying to shade Suz's face. I helped that by changing the opacity from 100% to 40% and then finally to 25% and was much happier with my ability to manipulate the digital pencil.

I can see that one thing I should do is save the sketch next to the reference image, and then look in Photoshop Browse at the thumbnails when they are wee and tiny. Amazing how fast one can see incorrect angles or proportions then. Of course I just realized now when I had saved the native Painter .riff file as a .psd file, closed Painter and opened Photoshop to resize the image for uploading to blogs etc. Next time I'll look at them with that sort of distance while sketching.

Well, there you go for tonight. I really should do this very regularly: it is so long since I really draw from reference and get in some practice vs drawing from my imagination, and going direct to work for clients.

Self-portraits and Artistic Self-Improvement

Well, after I did the pencil self-portrait in Painter last night I was both thrilled that I can still sort of draw from life (really, most of my work lately had been less and less realistic, more and more gestural and line-work with wash that has little or no 3D pretensions)... and just stunned yet again by how grade-school my artistic skill actually is. It really is depressing, and I have a hard time just pushing myself to keep working and keep putting myself out there.


Then today, on Jason Seiler's FB page, someone shared this wonderful link to a post by Marc Dalessio about the his self-portraits over the years, his increasing technical skills both in rendering and composition, and his development compared to his self-perceptions.
That's a self-portrait Feb 25, 1984 by myself.

Check it out, it is fascinating, and also there is a great graph at the bottom of the entry, comparing the evolution of his ability to see, his technical skill, and his perception of his technical skill. He really has managed to capture the flux of these elements over the years in a simple line graph.

So, for me, forward and onward. So glad I signed up for the Schoolism.com class, which starts in a short two weeks. I am both excited and daunted. I worry that it will teach me things not applicable to how I currently work (mostly in watercolor with little actual modeling of subjects, whereas the teacher, Ryan Wood, works mostly in an opaquer painterly manner, quite modeled), AND that I have totally insufficient artistic development to get the most out of it. In any manner, I am sure to learn a lot, be pushed (which I really need) and to improve in ways I cannot yet guess.

Self-Portrait in Digital Pencil

Hmmm, I was going to do a quick pencil sketch in Painter 11 to use as a basis to try out some digital watercolor following this online tutorial by Joan A. Hamilton. But I got carried away. Using the Real 2B Pencil brush in Painter is fun, as it is so responsive to tilt and pressure of the stylus... so what started as a bit of indicative shading ended up with me doing a value drawing. I will perhaps turn it into a line-drawing to do a watercolor trial from but perhaps not. I'll hopefully be wearing different clothes tomorrow, with different lighting (it is dark outside now, 5:30 am, and the light is from a desk lamp beside my cintiq).

So, I'll just share this impromptu portrait for now. Totally unplanned