Nose Tutorial

Here is the result from the furiae nose tutorial. Now that I have followed all of her advice it is time to try putting it in practice on a complete face.

Lip Tutorial

Continuing with my attempts to learn how to shade different parts of the face I decided to work on lips for the past three painting sessions. They turned out to be a lot harder than I was expecting.

I have to admit that I am not happy with the results, but after an hour of unsuccessful attempts to get the highlights correct I figured it was time to move on. I will revisit lips again once I am done working on a nose.

Hair Tutorial

I spent a few hours this week working on a hair tutorial. The advice in this tutorial was incredibly helpful, especially after struggling with hair in a photo reference painting for a few days.

http://www.furiae.com/index.php?view=gallery

To follow the tutorial I decided to start with her base image but attempt a slightly different style. I think it worked out well, and I learned a lot.

Her is a quick before and after to show the base image that I took from furiae vs the final image:

Eye Tutorial

This is an image I have been working on for a while trying to improve my rendering of eyes. I'm not entirely happy with the result, but it is a start at least. I will write more about how this was created later

Figure Drawing

This is a 25 min digital sketch from my figure drawing class last week. After reading the blogger terms of service regarding nudity I think it is one of the few sketches from the Jam Factory classes that I will be able to post here. I am using Painter X for this sketch, which I was considering abandoning up until a few weeks ago. The natural media concept used in most of the brushes really doesn't help for realistic digital painting, but with a few minor tweaks you can start to create nice images. My first discovery was Rob's Brushes

http://www.ethereality.info/ethereality_website/goodies/goodies.htm

The basic brush and blending tools are much more useful than anything shipped in painter by default. The second discovery was a simple piece of advice - avoid using the colour wheel! Just use a few swatches for your midtones, highlights, and shadows. If your stuck finding good colours a great starting point is the Flesh Tones.colors colour set shipped with painter (Color Sets->Open)

Morning Sketch (10 min)

I have been trying hard to get faster with my tablet PC over the past year, and I was fairly pleased with this 10 minute attempt. Trying to paint in coffee shops teaches you a lot more than working from static references or long figure drawing poses because it forces you to remember the important aspects of the pose. I still have a lot of trouble with skin tones here, but I'm pleased about getting the overall form done in time.

Photo Reference Sketch

I sketched this by hand from a photo reference I found in the independent one day during my morning coffee shop sketching session. The thing that struck me about the photo was the way the layers of transparency in the photo posed an interesting challenge. A few unsuccessful sketches in pencil made me fairly determined to get it right digitally. I might post the steps later if anyone is interested, but the basic idea was to get everything roughly correct in B&W before moving to colour. I started with a very rough sketch at low res (400x800) before upscaling to work in detail. I'm not really happy with skin tones in this one, but it was a great learning exercise.