Being Selective

Lately I've found that I'm learning rapidly to a point that keeps me from working on a single piece to get the majority of learning experience. Due to my time and limit of knowledge, I've had to be a bit selective with what to work on, as well as when to call anything finished.

This axe is slighty unfinished, made by following a tutorial by Cabrera on digital painting. Here is the near finished version. I learned a lot from this piece, including that I need to stay at a low resolution in order to get a better picture. The higher the resolution, the more artifacts can be created with your brush, and things can look way too muddy. Keeping a low resolution keeps the colors crisp, and the lines solid. This was also a great exercise in drawing in photoshop and bringing that drawing to a finish.

I worked on this for about 4-5 hours yesterday from a reference picture. I'm very pleased with how well this came out in such a short time, and it's all thanks to the previous work and practice that I've done in the past few weeks. I kept the resolution down and carefuly included the skintones. Fabric is getting easier for me, as I start to feel what brushes to use for different situations. I'm going to continue doing short paintings of refference pictures and hopefuly learn to control my pace to get something like this done in around 2 - 3 hours.

I called it quits with this image when Andy told me I needed to move on. I agreed, there were way too many design flaws that I didn't work out earlier because I didn't think about them. The lighting is confusing and wrong, the mummy's face is crooked and the anatomoy of the girl is a little off. These things should have been fixed during the sketching process, but because I used a push and pull method to paint it out, it was harder to adjust it. I've learned that sketches (line work) is the best way for me to see and make corrections before going on to further stages.

Keep checking in to see new studies and what I've been able to do with that knowledge.