Influence Map

Hello once more one and all. I was given an assignment by my new mentor to create an influences map and do some consideration as to why each of the people on the map were there. What it was about these folks that I liked and found interesting. I got excited and finished it rather quickly and I'm happy to share it with you all now. Links to all the artists' work will be provided.

1. Sandara

            Sandara is an artist I primarily know through Deviant art and she was one of the first artists I found when I joined the site almost 3 years ago. Most of my exposure to her has been through her creatures mostly her dragons and the like. She’s got a great sense of the fantastic and creating awe and majesty with her beasts and there’s a level of precision with her craft that I’m kind of in awe of. Her edges are crisp and clear where they need to be and she’s willing to let them haze where it’s less important and that’s a type of control I envy. If I’m 100% honest she’s probably one of the stronger influences right now. Early on I caught myself looking at her work while I painted and trying to figure out how she made what she did and if there were any tricks I could steal. She works primarily digitally.

2. Peter Mohrbacher

            Again we have someone who I consider highly proficient and precise in their painting. His characters also generally have a sense of power and majesty to them and once more the crispness of his work comes through. That said, the thing I enjoy a great deal about him are the colors. He handles his palettes nicely and they’re really a joy to look at pretty much any time. Beyond that I love his Angelarium series where he reinterprets angels into his own strange and unique forms. He works primarily digitally from what I can tell.

3. Dan Dos Santos           

            Find me a fantasy illustrator trying to get into the business right now who ISN’T influenced by Dan Dos Santos. Another one I didn’t realize was an influence until I really sat down and thought about it since my exposure to him has been minimal but I had more from him in my favorites than I thought I would. Like Peter, he’s done work for Magic: The Gathering which is one of my favorite games and a company I’d like to work for one day. I blame my ex girlfriend who was a huge fan for covertly corrupting me ;) There’s a lot to love about Santos. He’s a master with his anatomy and once again, the crisp, precision of a strong draftsman comes through. I love the way he handles his female characters. There’s a definite power emanating from them that I like a lot. I’m also routinely amazed by how saturated his colors are and yet he still manages to make them work so flawlessly. He works in oil but I thought he worked digitally for the longest time his stuff always looked so smooth and that kind of high sheen polish isn’t a look I’m used to seeing from oil.

4. Justin Gerard

            Another guy I like a lot mainly because he’s kind of different. I love the way he draws more than anything and the way he builds up his colors and lighting. He works mainly in watercolor and his control of the medium is amazing to me but then scans it in and uses digital to touch things up. He also handles digital the same way he handles water color: with numerous layers of thin washes to build things up over time. No matter what he gets this great story book look that I think is awesome.

5. Steve Argyle

            Sleek and polished, Steve has some strong compositions and great looking figures. He falls into some traps with his female characters I’m not fond of but his rendering has a really high polish that I like a great deal as well as a great sense of light. His character designs though are detailed and dripping with story tidbits. He works primarily digitally.

6. Jason Chan

            Jason’s another one who I knew but didn’t know I knew. I’d seen his work before in Magic but didn’t know his name. Once more the rendering is definitely on point and I like a number of his compositions. They’re simple but powerful. His color palettes tend to be a bit more controlled than some of the others on here in their level of saturation but only just. He too is mainly a digital artist.

7. Michael C-Hayes

            This guy is the real deal. I’m not as big a fan of his clothing design choices for his women. Sometimes they fit what he’s doing and sometimes it just seems like eye candy for eye candy’s sake (or the request of the client) but on this issue I can say to each their own. His appreciation for the female form is striking and leaps out to hit you in the face. His rendering of the form in general is astounding and there’s so much drama in his characters. Their forms have the finesse of some of the great old masters to me. He works primarily in oil and uses some really detailed pencil drawings before going to that point.

8. Clint Cearley

            Probably the most restrained guy on this list color wise now that I think about it as he tends to lean a bit more to the pastel side of the spectrum with his palettes having a bit more white to them which creates a lighter more airy atmosphere most of the time. He works digitally and does a black and white under painting before moving to color work and I find his methodical process of comforting. His compositions are simple for the most part it seems with an emphasis on the characters.

9. Anna Shoemaker

            Anna’s image has a bit more room allotted to it than might be entirely necessary if one is looking at a size to influence ratio. She’s a purely digital up and comer who’s career is really just getting going but there is a good reason. Anna and I were in school together and she is literally the person who taught me to digitally paint. She couldn’t help but influence me in that regard. I didn’t feel like I could avoid putting her on here since even though my current working method owes more to Clint Cearley, some of what she taught me is always knocking around in my head.

10. Michael Whelan

            This is a guy who’s name I didn’t know for years but he was one of my first examples of fantasy art as a child looking at the Dragonriders of Pern books that belonged to my mother. His dragons were different enough from the ones I was used to seeing that it started making me rethink how one could design creatures. He had some wonderful compositions too that relied on repetition to lead the eye through the piece. He would obviously have worked traditionally either in oil or acrylic.

11. Gustave Dore           

            Now we’re getting into what I call the foundational influences. These are the old dead guys who I studied in school and fell in love with. Dore had some masterful compositions. He was a phenomenal storyteller and could convey a lot with just how he positioned things on the page. His black and white engraving work was always so dramatic and powerful.

12. The Golden Age illustrators

            It’s a bit category but I’m mostly focused on Wyeth and Pyle here. Both men and their contemporaries were great draftsmen AND masters of composition. Their works are just fantastic to look at for interesting camera angles and viewing decisions.

13. The Baroque period artists

            The Renaissance is great and all but if I’m honest with myself the Baroque period paintings probably had a greater influence on the way I think about making pictures. Strong light sources (ones that are much brighter than they actually might be) dramatic shadows and striking compositions all over the place.

Alright time for some observations

-My perfectionism is showing. Strong rendering and precision draftsmanship are big sticking points for me and the art I like.

-Most of these folks are digital painters but use traditional drawing somewhere in their process.

-The colored lighting is great on pretty much everyone here who work sin color and it’s something I really need to make sure I work on.

-There really aren’t any heavy environment painters on this list which is weird because I love environments and think they’re a big part of the story you’re telling. If I were to add a painter that did that it would probably be John Avon.

-My love of Magic is strong.

-Most of these folks are representational artists and often very figurative working in what is commonly dubbed fantastic realism but mostly they’re still unafraid to be paintings. Sometimes digital artists try to render to the point of looking like photographs but these folks don’t for the most part. They’re all proud of the fact their paintings. DDS and Michael C. Hayes come the closest to moving away from that and even they still stay firmly rooted in the highly rendered painting.

-My penchant for colors is REALLY saturated, bright and bold. I’m not sure what that means right now but I do know that’s something I’ll have to think long and hard about since that’s really hard to do well.
-I like drama in my paintings. That's probably the biggest connecting thread in the whole thing. A lot of these influences ended up being a little subconscious but all of them have so much excitement and interest in their story telling even when the image isn't about an action scene or anything. There's a huge amount of drama and scope in the work. 

-Most of the modern influences have interesting ways they depict their women. A couple are known specifically for their female characters. They have a sense of power about them equal to what I’ve seen in most of the males in fantasy art and I think that’s what draws me to them.

“Strong female protagonist” has become a go to term for many things with a female lead in fiction and on some level I think it’s a bit limiting. It’s often well intended I think but too often it’s used as a short hand for a female character who’s just conforming to the male action hero mold rather than being her own thing or the writer forging their own tropes. While this is awesome in a lot of ways, inadvertently or otherwise still makes it seem as if the only way to be strong and have an effect on the world or story is to use a type of strength that is generally coded male. A powerful female lead on the other hand has a slightly different connotation to me at least. It manages to convey more while being much more nebulous and encompasses to me at least, many types of power: from outright force, and mystic might, to deceptions to the use of people’s ingrained ideas against them, to just the power to effect an audience’s mood and emotions within the framework of a story.

Figure studies Ahoy

Lots of figure exercises here folks. Time to get things rolling. There's several weeks of material I'm going to cover in this post and I'm not even uploading all the exercises and practice that I've done so best to get started. 

 

 

First up we have samples of the bean and the robo bean! Exercises from a fellow who goes by the name of Proko on youtube. Check him out, his free videos have been a great help in doing these exercises and improving my understanding of figure drawing. There are a ton of gesture drawings and the like that I do every day but the bean and robo bean help simplify and abstract the figure to help you think about positioning of the body and the extremely basic planar geometry of it all. I use these for warm ups alongside the gesture work and it's been a big help. This is just a small sample.

 

The whole point of the bean and robo-bean exercises is to learn to turn the body into a mannequin type figure for ease of drawing. These are a couple of exercises in that direction. I even did a couple of studies focused on turing the body from different angles. That one was more of a guided exercise. I guess in some ways the top two ones are both more guided. The bottom two pages aren't and out of those, I feel like the woman I have on the bottom right is the most successful. The big problem with that one is that the neck isn't long enough unfortunately.

These studies were longer and more detailed. I went from the mannequin phase to something more detailed. I feel like I'm getting a stronger sense of the musculature involved. The only issue I have with this one is that I don't feel like the width of this model really came through. In the reference he's a MASSIVE man. I feel I may have made him a bit too lean here but it was really easy to see how the musculature all interconnects on this guy. 

To close it out several nose studies. Im continuing working on improving my portraiture and I'm starting by breaking down the face into its features. We'll be moving on to other studies soon but right now eyes, noses and lips are the order of the day and I've been studying several different types of noses. it's such a weird body part. 

Last we have some eye studies. I also did a quick color work up of one just for my own practice on going from black and white to color. I learned a few things I've been doing wrong and have to keep in mind in the future. 

Color studies

Color is a bit of a weakness of mine. It's something that's been criticized about my work before. So as part of the boot camp I'm putting myself through there are a lot of color studies. Originals as always are on the left, my studies are always on the right.

This is the first batch of 3 color studies and there are a decent amount of problems.The edge control is rough here (stuff looks a little fuzzy) and there are issues with the color being just a little off. But, it's early in my color examination and I was already learning a lot from this. 

This was a rough one and a really serious example of how, especially digitally, colors are often not immediately what they look like. I don't color pick when I do these but I try to really examine them and match as best I can. When the study's done, I go back and open up the color picker and check how close I got. A couple of these are really bad. Specifically, cloud in the first study and the grass in the third. The clouds aren't quite orange and saturated enough and in the third, the grass is just too green. It's too saturated and if I were working traditionally, I'd say it was too "out of the tube" green. It wasn't mixed up so to speak. The middle one has plenty of issues also but I actually really like that the color in that one uses not an analogous color scheme like you typically see. Instead, it uses a modified Red/Green color scheme with the reddish/pink being the sky color and those reds are also mixed into the greens there to make interesting and desaturated greens that are really nice and rich. Lots of good lessons in that one. 

The first one in this batch of color studies I probably got the water a little to dark. This one felt really hard to do (and was also a fun experiment in atmospheric perspective because that's another thing I occasionally struggle with). I'm comfortable saying this was an orange and blue color scheme but there were an awful lot of greens in this one as well so the interactions were really cool to see. It's also a good lesson in how, at certain levels and values, oranges turn into browns really fast and dark enough browns are as good as blacks. Again, using straight up black paint isn't a great idea in painting it makes things look flat. Those rich browns, however, don't. 

The other studies are a bit more straightforward but no less interesting. The middle one very obviously an orange based color scheme but I'm not convinced that the blues I put in were actually the way to handle the color choices. I think the things that look like blues may have been oranges that were mixed with a desaturated blue but I think that piece was actually mostly desaturated oranges. I'd actually be willing to bet that if I looked at it again closely, I'd find that what look like blues were really desaturated oranges that would actually just be grays. The third study here is an orange and green color scheme with some cool yellows for emphasis. The fact that this one is so limited in its palette is really kind of cool and a great lesson in how this works. 

Not gonna lie, these were rough. I was getting tired when I did these and my edge control and color matching ability suffered. The first one is a very blue/orange color scheme with a little bit of violet mixed in. The blues are kind of blue/violet in their hue and not super saturated to begin with though this one avoids being a pastel color scheme. The second one is a blue and yellow/orange scheme for the most part and man it's astounding to me how much variance you can have with those colors. The blues were fairly saturated but at different value level in this one with the yellow/orange being less saturated. That's another thing I'm noticing with these. If one color is very strong and bright, often the other will be less so. It's a bit of a push and pull. 

The third study though takes that in a very different direction. This is probably the first of what I'd say is a pretty straight forward pastel color scheme. Those are, at least in my mind, characterized by the colors having lots of white in them and being soft and pale. It creates a soft, quiet mood in the piece and I think that's what's going on here. We're dealing with another blue/orange color scheme with a little bit of pale violet for added effect so we're basically only using 3 main colors with hints of red and red/orange for emphasis and accent and it's really cool to see. All three of these use similar or the same base colors for their palette and go in DRASTICALLY different directions. 

This first one in this batch I was one I got a little two dark I think and used a little too much saturated red. It's one where I'd say this scheme was built on reds, yellows, oranges and browns. This is a major analogous color scheme and it's kind of interesting to me because one could look like a red/green color scheme if you aren't careful (there are yellow greens that could get into the range for that sky) but it's really just desaturated oranges and deep, deep reds. 

The middle study was much easier. Blues, oranges and a hint of blue/violet again. This is probably the most saturated I've seen in a lot of things and it's still gorgeous in the original. I'm glad I picked it to study from. Now here's another great one. Those clouds aren't white! They're very pastel orange. That's a great example of how colors can look different when they're laid next to each other as opposed to on their own. 

The third one was another one that was strange and interesting. It's another red, orange and yellow color scheme that makes the entire piece feel so warm and inviting. It's kind of amazing how you can change the mood so dramatically with the color palette being very similar as the first one had a more sickly appearance. On this one though, one of the areas I failed was that in mine on the right you can see bits of green that weren't necessary. Yeah, the reds are dulled down and desaturated with bits of green but there's some sticking out that's just unnecessary and not blended well. Definitely something to be aware of in the future going forward. 

Only two studies in this batch. One monochromatic one and one that's a little more complex. The monochrome one actually looks monochrome but really isn't. There's blues and violets in that one. Still VERY close to monochrome but it's interesting how the violet shadows lend some depth without breaking the piece's cohesion. The second one felt strange to me as it's mostly browns with hints of red and blue in the sky. The clouds are a kind of pale brownish gray that seems to have been mixed to work specifically with all the brown and probably was. Even the "white" areas are really just pale browns that look white in their relationship to other things. Another great lesson that white and black paint should be used sparingly or not at all. 

Another one with only two and I don't even like LOOKING at the top one. I'm not sure why I even picked that one to do a study of because I don't like anything about it or the study that came from it now. That said, there's actually some cool stuff going on in that when you really break this down, because oranges change color dramatically at darker values, this whole thing is done in various levels of orange but looks like a two color scheme. You can see hints of it on the side of the tractor as well though I missed them at the time. That one's not my best work at all. 

Learned a lot more from the second one though and it's a red/green scheme which are notorious for being hard to do without it seeming like Christmas. Seeing the extreme changes in lighting here was really fascinating and how with the strong green light source, almost none of the red shows through at the highlights. There is kind of a third and fourth color in this one and it's a very dark blue/violet that's mainly used to play up the dark sky element of the piece and it really takes a back seat to the highly saturated red and greens, as well as the red/oranges of the foreground. That's the other thing, this is one of the most saturated pieces I've seen. Most of the colors are very clearly what they are. 

I think we turned a corner here and things were starting to make a bit more sense. The blue and yellow/orange color scheme in the first one at the top was really pretty obvious (side note compositionally the repetition of the pillars is kind of cool here too) and the interplay with the shadows was cool. There's some greenish looking colors here but those aren't actually greens! It's amazing to me actually. Those were just desaturated yellows. And it makes a certain amount of sense actually. Go get some yellow paint some time and mix it with black. Go ahead, I'll wait... done it? Did you see how green that looked? Well you can do the same thing with lots of brown and yellow and it gives you a richer feel. I didn't get a really good match there but the learning experience was awesome. The third one here was a near complimentary color scheme with different variants of orange and violet with the atmospheric perspective favoring more pastel like colors going back. My version is too mushy but the color relationships aren't bad and it was really fun to see how the you could warm up a violet and darken it with oranges to pull it to the foreground. 

The top one here I couldn't resist doing. It's a master study of a guy who if he's dead hasn't been dead long but he's one of my favorite old school fantasy painters: Michael Whelan. He did the dragon riders of perm covers and I absolutely love them. The color decisions here were really sweet. Green and orange is a near complimentary scheme and I learned a lot with this one. I feel I got the mood right even though the shadows are really off in many places and the foreground dragon probably isn't orange enough. There's a hint of a blue green in the upper right corner that I think is a nice color touch to play off of all the greens and yellow/oranges in the rest of the image. It's also great to see atmospheric perspective done with a color other than blue. Here, the greens of the sky come in and objects further in the distance fade to pale dark greens. 

Second one is less different. A near complimentary violet and orange color scheme with the blues making up the sky. A hint of green here and there with the trees being dark and very desaturated. I think I was starting to get a better grasp here but you can still see ALOT of issues with edge control. 

 By this batch the edge control and color matching were both getting much better. I was feeling good about being able to understand not only what colors I was seeing but how to get them. There's some serious issues with the first and second ones but by the third one here not only were the color interactions a bit more complex but I was starting to understand much more intuitively how to mix them digitally. 

At some point I got bored with doing the master copies and decided to take some advice another artist and a video I watched gave me to study by doing film still studies for color learning. Boy howdy was that a good idea. Something I highly recommend and will continue to do in the future. This was the first one I did and it's more than a little off. There's some weird green accents in this one that I'm not sure are actually in the still but with all the red and orange in the original it really makes things pop doesn't it? Mine on the left just looks like someone put a white filter or something over the original and the colors don't stack up perfectly. I'm not bothered by that though because the stuff I learned about how to do orange/red interplays was so fascinating. Also learned lots of cool ways to indicate lighting and the importance of shadows. Mine simply aren't dark enough for one thing and the whole thing manages to look mixed in terms of color but still VERY highly saturated and bright. 

I'm going to tell you something. This is my absolute favorite study of the bunch. Full disclosure I did a quick trace over of this one to make sure I got the proportions and everything laid in right and so I could focus entirely on the painting technique here and really try to learn about the use of color on this one. The reds and greens are both really desaturated here and it makes for a pretty realistic look I think Everything looks a bit washed out and there's a lot of the greens in the reds of the suit being reflected from the sky around it. You can see lot of it on the lower portion of the suit. There are some issues in mine (which is on the bottom with the original on top) like the highlights not peering perhaps as white as they could be (I probably underplayed them, not quite going as white and shiny as I could have) and the reds have pinker highlights in other areas like around the right (our right) shoulder. Overall though I learned a TON from this one especially since I find red/green palettes so hard to do right and I rarely see them done well. 

That's a lot of pictures I know and I'll need to do a write up about all of them in the near future but for now, I'm tired and the important part is done. 

EDIT

WOW that was a lot of writing for the debrief on these. I think that's everything that needed to be said. More stuff coming up in the future. Take care and see you soon. 

More Figure Drawing

I was able to make it out to a scanner and I now have some more figure studies from my week to show you. I'm unsure if I should show some of the other exercises I've done but I'll consider it for the future.

 This first one is just studies from Bridgman's Life Drawing book and some sketching from reference to get things going.

This little batch were all from reference. I've come across some wonderful reference things lately and I've been trying to use them more. Each of these had their good and bad in the practicing and I think I'm improving in the understanding of light and how it works on the body.

















 

I find that I like sketching in erasable colored pencil. It for some reason it helps me get into the zone and work the problem more effectively. I wanted to work on angles and likenesses with the portraits. I think that will be a good and regular use of the day during the week I have allotted to that time.

In the end, these last couple of weeks have been good for helping me establish exactly what I need to do with my practice. the exercise sources I'm using feel good, the practice feels good and the allotted time feels right to keep me learning without burning myself out and I think I can improve this way.

If you're looking at these, please keep checking in and follow along here or on my deviant art or Facebook pages.

Compositional studies 32-50

If you missed the first batch of studies it's Here.

Here's the next batch.

I will do a LONG debriefing on this project once I'm done with the color studies (a project that may take some serious time) but I feel like I've learned a ton just from these composition studies and I'm eager to get to the color. 

Still Life

Well I just realized that I haven't shared one of the few projects I've been able to do with this new self imposed boot camp I'm putting myself through here at leas (I've wanted to do this for a while but I was dealing with a bout of depression and other issues). It's on my Facebook and Deviant art but I'll record it here too. 

The piece has some definite improvements over my usual digital painting and it is true, still life is THE best way to work on technique and painting textures. I should be doing these much more often than I have in the past so I've carved out time to to work on something like this eat least once a week along with my figures and other things. 

And here you can see the steps involved in the creation of the project. 

Compositional studies 1-31

Hey folks. It's been a while hasn't it?

I was working on my own personal work trying to apply what I've learned but I was not growing at quite the speed I desired.

After hitting a solid bit of depression and then having to take a look at what I was doing wrong I decided to give myself a bit of a boot camp over the next several months. I figure, since it's been 3 years since I graduated and my skills are now about where I feel they SHOULD have been sometime around junior year of college (so in essence I'm feeling about 4 years behind where I would like to be but that's being eaten up fast). I'm going back to basics and putting in the serious work necessary to improve to the level I want.

To facilitate that I'm doing a little bit of Noah Bradley's Art camp coupled with my own notes on what I know needs to be done with my training. Lots of tutorials, lots of studying and lots of practice. I have a set schedule for my practicing that's broken up into multiple days and I work on different aspects of things on different days.

Not all of it's figure and while that was the original purpose of this blog, I see it now as more of an online sketchbook. Now some of the things I've done I can't show right now since my scanner is not operational right now. I'll show more digital stuff in interim but that means the posts won't be quite as rapid fire. Wednesday and Thursday though are master studies/fundamentals day and digital painting practice day respectively so today I have 31 of 50 black and white compositional studies to show.

Noah Bradley's art camp apparently has you do about 50 comp studies and 50 color studies in the first week (I'm guessing because I was challenged to do 100 by another artist I know who was doing the full camp.) And let me tell you something. Even though composition is one of my strong suits, I DEFINITELY learned a lot more about it today. I'm going to try to crank out the remaining 19 compositional studies and the 50 color studies tomorrow.

Again, these are master studies of other artists work for the purposes of studying composition. Some are good, some are TERRIBLE. You have been warned. Enjoy.

 

 

 

 

If you're interested in the video that deals with these from Noah's Art camp you can see the link to that video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQfF-P70V2Q

And on top of that, if you want to give it a try yourself, feel free and let me know. I'd like to know I'm not suffering alone.