some timed studies, sorry again for the long delay between posts. :*

The cool thing about learning the fundamentals, is that you can switch styles.

To warm up, for today's work, I decided to do a digital sketch. Just something to have a little fun with, instead of diving straight into paid work. I took a long stroll yesterday, ended up next to a grave-yard. Probably that is why I way inspired to paint one myself.

Have a great week.

Just some of the studies I did lately.

A digital study of an oil painting by the amazing "Qiang Huang", to help me get a better grasp of the use of brushes.

And from this I managed to create some photoshop-brushes for you to download.

Hey guys,

it has been a longer absence again and I apologize. So hopefully something to make up for it.

I decided to take part in the monthly Character Design Challange (CDC in short) over at Facebook.

The theme this month was: AZTEC WARRIOR. And since I love animals so much, I decided to do a anthropomorphic lizard dude for this.

I followed a very streamlined process this time and waited until the very with painting freely. I think it paid out.

Most importantly thanks to Christian Retzlaff and Jan Drenovec for their feedback.

See the GIF below for the whole process.

Trying to get a better grip on simplification and shapes with this.

So since I am working on a character-illustration, I realized my portrait-skills are lacking in certain areas. So it is back to studying:

After doing the first 2, I decided to change my approach. So instead of copying as close as possible, what the photo has to offer, I settled on 5 colors first. 2 for the shadow-side, 3 for the light-side.

Since I was asked, how I define the colors, here's a little explenation. The darkest color for the light-side is at the same time the most saturated (the midtone), it then gets lighter, more yellow and less saturation towards the highlights and redder/bluer and less saturated towards the darks. So the most saturation occurs in the area, where light and dark meet. This can go meta-physical here, but lets not ... :D

I then mapped out the shapes as close as I could. Especially the shadow-shape is something, that can be treated with a lot of care here. Even done a lot of edge-refinement pays off later.

After the initial lay-in, I continued with overpainting. In this phase I also add dark and light accents here and there. In the end I was surprised how straight-forward and easy this approach is and I am very happy with the result.

I tested this approach on another portrait and recorded the steps (below). Since it produces the same satisfying result, I can safely say, that this process is solid. I love to work like that and for the first time in a long time, studying is fun again.

Hope it helps you to crack colors and gives you some inspiration on how to approach your next project.

Cheers, Flo

Process GIF

So after a lot of noodling and the result, that you can see below, I decided to do some studies.

The first is a portrait - sketch, following Chris Legaspi's youtube video, the second and third are something I haven't tried before. Instead of doing a seperate painting of a photo, I simply enlarged the composition and added elements to fill the empty spaces again. I did it to a level, where I was happy with the result, at the moment. I then used what I learned and applied it back into the painting.

So this is where I am at currently. I will work on it more and do some studies for the clothing and anatomy, that I am not understanding.

My take-away is this: doing themed studies to solve certain problems is way more helpful, than just copying some random image, because there is a schedule suggesting it, or someone else said you should do it.

I hope this helps you to solve your visual problems. :)