Brad B - Art School Journey!

[brad100]

Hey everyone! My names Brad! I'm 19 and am a newer artist, from Ontario, Canada.

Due to Covid and having all this extra time, I figured I'd try and do something productive. I'm currently not able to go to a Art College, so wanted to try the next best thing and sign up to a online art course.

I started drawing when I was about 12 and then moved to digital roughly 4 years ago. I've always wanted to be like these amazing artists you see creating beautiful illustrations, but I never had the skill, nor drive. It's always taken me a while to finish an art piece and I have been pretty inconsistent when it comes to staying on a schedule. I'm always getting discouraged because I don't have a "style" and I'm not producing nearly enough art like these other artists.

That's why I joined Art School! I'm hoping that the structured lessons and assignments are gonna help push me to stay consistent and help me improve way faster than if I were to do this alone. I'm super excited to get this started and can't wait to meet you guys! I'm going to be posting updates when I finish stuff so feel free to comment and critique!

Here's the first few lessons I completed

Had a hard time with the very last one. Could never get the shadows to match and somehow I killed a lot of the shine, especially on her ice thing to the left.

[hyoi]

Hey Brad, welcome to the club! I decided to pick up art school for similar reasons, hope it works out for you.

I've noticed that for the last image if you apply brightness/contrast/curves adjustments first then it tends to sort of dull the image which might be why you are losing some of that shine.

these two images have the exact same adjustments but the second one has the curves applied before the colour balance and hue adjustments and you can see how much it muddies the image. This may or may not be what happened with your image but it's something I noticed while spending hours on this assignment myself so I figured I'd share it.

[brad100]

Thanks for the reply @hyoi! I think that was my problem, no matter what I did, it always seemed to turn really muddy. Makes sense now since I did use the brightness/contrast/curves adjustments at the start. I'll definitely keep this in mind for future projects, thanks!

Also thought I'd share my next assignment! I had a lot of fun with this one. Never really done photo manipulation before, so was interesting to see what I could achieve. Didn't realize how powerful some of the healing brushes were. Literally took out an entire boat and added new waves, crazy! One thing I'd change next time is the perspective I think. I feel like I struggled a bit with it and the dock maybe doesn't fit correctly? Spent a lot of time on this one, but I'm pretty happy overall with how it came out.
(PS: This isn't my ideal home, just wanted to go for more of a old/rundown aesthetic lol)

Edit: I forgot to add the castle ruins to my reference list x.x

[brad100]

Haven't been super active the last lil bit, been real busy around here haha. Just been doing anatomy studies and gesture stuff. I always have a super hard time with anatomy so just been taking my time I guess. Here's a couple little recent studies I've done. After Christmas I'm going to be really getting back into the course, just right now there's not a ton of time. I'm having a harder time with the cylinders, but I'm hoping that they turned out okay. if you see anything incorrect or off, critiques are always welcome!

(Covered anything explicit, so hope this is okay to share as it's part of the course)