Natalie - Art School Journey - Art Center / Art School - Forums

Lightning_Flower · Aug '23

I've come far along. I'm now on Week 6 of ART School--although I am going back and practicing a few previous assignments. I have now run into another issue with copying a project from other artists.

I am ready to start the last assignment in this Week, but I'm not sure how to do it...

I first decided to search ArtStation for professional drawings of environments, and I found a pretty one here by Adam Brown. I will add a link to this at the end.
Once I imported the drawing into Photoshop, I immediately didn't know how I was going to copy something of this incredible size.

I first tried plotting some convergence lines and...now I have points where the lines meet in all kinds of places. When I look at this artwork by itself, everything makes sense, and nothing seems to be out of place or drawn incorrectly, but according to the lines that I drew over the artwork, there is no one-point or two-point perspective going on in this.

This is the second time I've been assigned to copy other artists' work and not knowing how to do it. Is there something I'm missing from the video lectures that I am watching?

Artwork by Adam Brown featured here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rAb0ge

mitsuki-youko · Aug '23

imo i'd start with the curvy stuff first. you have a grid there to work off of.

In high school i learned to divide a drawing into many small grids and then try to replicate each grid individually while keeping an eye on the overall shape.

if the grids you have now are too much to tackle try making the grids smaller and working off that

I do see that the hw says lineart only so this technique will make it easier

Something like this - but don't be too focused in on each grid individually - do that at first yes, but once you work on a box, look at the overall image. is there something in box C1 that should have been in box c2? and so on.

hope that helps!

btw click on the pic to zoom in i realized i drew the black line on the wrong layer so its merged with the grid LOL was gonna change it to red but oh well u get the idea i hope

catsforsnacks · Aug '23

No, I don't think you're missing anything. You're actually pointing out flaws that the artist probably had not noticed.
Their perspective is off. If you dissect work from artists of any skill level you will most likely find something that is a little off (except maybe Scott Robertson, I'm convinced he is a robot haha.) As long as things look "good enough" most people wouldn't notice. As you improve and get a better eye, you'll start noticing these flaws in professional's work.

The horizon line here is right along the middle pier, given that we cannot se the top or bottom portion of the planks. As you pointed out, no lines converge on the horizon, and some even seem like they may never converge at all - good eye!

Sometimes when I look at work from amazing artists the idea of getting as good as them can become daunting. If you can find flaws in their work though, it makes them seem more human, and that maybe the task isn't as impossible as the voice in your head is telling you.

I think analyzing before copying is good practice. If you find weird discrepancies like this the forum can always discuss them - critiques are good! I also agree with @mitsuki-youko about the grid method. Just be careful in obsessing over getting it perfect. This assignment is more about trying to understand an artist's decisions rather than creating a photocopy (which I have mistakenly done before.) Another method is to have an invisible copy of the landscape under your drawing and make it visible every now and then to check what needs fixing.

Ok I'm done now - Keep up the good work!

Lightning_Flower · Aug '23

Thank you, @mitsuki-youko and @catsforsnacks for your guidance! I will start practicing and working through this assignment for the next few days! Later I will also complete and post my original drawing of a one-point perspective environment (Perspective 1 Assignment 3)!

Lightning_Flower · Aug '23

My original file containing my first point perspective drawing went missing. Not exactly sure how that happened, but I decided to just move on instead of starting over. Hopefully that won't impact my growing skills...?
I'm now working on an original second point perspective drawing, but I ran into some 3D issues.

To avoid making things appear bigger or closer than they appear, I've pushed my vanishing points outside of my canvas, which I think ended up working. This project is near completion, but I wanted to take a small step further and add some shapes that have extrusion. Instead of having a flat door on my main building, I wanted to extrude part of the wall towards the interior of the building to make a hallway-like entryway. I was also going to add a staircase leading up to the entrance, but after about four or five times attempting to make a staircase, I couldn't figure out how to correctly draw it. In addition, I wanted to add a pedestrian signal on my post (roughly drawn in green), but it looks...wrong.

I fired up Blender and remade one of these problems and tried to see where the edges were going and what the angles were and all that, but it didn't really help, unless I did it wrong in Blender too.

Any solution to this? I appreciate the help.

Lightning_Flower · Aug '23

Making progress!

And here is one of my works for Digital Production Assignment A.

Now I will be working on that box cover assignment!

Lightning_Flower · Sep '23

I am now on Term 2: Week 2 of ART School, and the lessons and exercises are getting more challenging! So far I am doing well with studying the human head, but I am facing some difficulty with the "Photoshop for Digital Production B" assignments.

Blending different colors or blending dark and light tones are not new to me, but in Photoshop, blending does not feel the same.

This above screenshot depicts a blending method that uses Photoshop's Mixer Brush Tool. The results are...sketchy. No pun intended. It did a pretty good job blending the two colors together, but look closely at the results. Where did those sharp, unnatural strokes come from?

Now this is Marc's method featured above using the default Hard Round Pressure Opacity Brush. It works, but it's not smooth. I found this method to be the most difficult. Color picking and brushing and color picking and brushing...it took a long while to get to this result. I can't imaging working on a large scale project and having to blend each section one at a time like this.

Finally, this is the method that uses Marc's Smudge Brush and the Photoshop smudge tool. I liked this method better than the previous methods, but the smudge brush seems to allow me to stretch the colors a small distance. If I try to smudge one color over to the other with a longer distance, it ends up looking scratched on. You can see how tight the blended colors are in the center. I'm not sure how I would achieve blending a color all the way across the subject I'm painting.

I'll keep practicing and working through the assignments as best as I can. Maybe I'll figure all this out along the way, but if anyone has any suggestions or tips I would greatly appreciate it!

cobalt_kat · Sep '23

This is just my two cents, and I could very well be wrong, but the scratchy/sharp stroke effect might have to do with the processing power of your device. When I would run Photoshop on my old laptop, it did every sort of shenanigans since the software simply stretched it too thin. Color banding, brush lag, things like that.

snakker · Sep '23

I feel you, procreate for my money has the best smudging I have ever tried. I think tue trick is to use large to small brushes ehen blending with alt clicking and if using the smudge tool you have to modify - customize the brush a lot to make it work how you want

Lightning_Flower · Sep '23

Ugh! I'm horrified by this! I really did try my best too.

I've been getting busier and busier lately. It's hard to find the time to practice art. I'm on Week 3 of Term 2 right now, but I don't think I'll be able to practice all my current assignments in a mere week. I will need a lot more time to practice drawing the head and all of its different features.

snakker · Sep '23

Keep at it and take your time

Don’t rush

Inkpendude · Sep '23

Yes! I went through that same pain haha, trust me it gets better the more you know and the more you practice and fail. You can actually see a bit of my progress and you can see how ugly some of my heads were. now at least they are decent.

Keep going!

matthewwemes · Sep '23

nothing to be horrified by on this, the proportions and placement of all the features are roughly correct, and that's something lots of people struggle with

I'm pretty sure I have yet to see anyone sticking strictly to the schedule, I see it as more of guidelines to help stay focused and on track.

Inkpendude · Sep '23

Also not everyone can dedicate the same amount of time to this, so in the end is best to make your own Schedule, based on the course or based on your goals and time that you have

Lightning_Flower · Oct '23

Still on Week 3 of Term 2. I've just completed the portrait study assignment. I'm not impressed with my shading, but I hope in time I will get better at this technique. I am aware about the advantages of using "the full range of values," but I didn't implement that in this assignment very well.

But guess what? My proportions seem correct at least! I feel like I'm getting better at this!

Lightning_Flower · Oct '23

The last assignment for Week 3 was to draw 5 character heads from imagination. I was able to finish 4, and I believe I've improved a little! I did realize, by the end of this, I'm going to have to study even more human heads from real photos.

snakker · Oct '23

It's tough, but you're doing an alright job at it. I feel learning the skull and the planes of the head help a ton, getting different viewpoints from various artists also helps to further your understanding of what's important

Proportions look alright overall, where I feel you may be having more difficulty is in the 3D form of the head and its features. When in doubt, try making contour lines either horizontally or vertically. For example, a vertical contour of the midline when you compare to a profile view can help you see if your features are in the right perspective, and horizontal ones help a lot with things like the eyes. It happens all too often, we focus on getting the details well drawn but don't realize that we have two or three perspectives in one portrait

As an example, on the last head, try drawing entirely the ellipse of the brow line through the skull sphere, note the eyes are kind of on a horizontal rather than wrapping around the sphere and placed accordingly, the lids have no thickness/overlap and the nose is facing us while showing a side plane at the same time

There's nothing wrong with re-iterating the same face and angle or erasing/fixing the same one to further enforce what you're learning. I struggled a lot at first and I still feel I need to learn a lot more before my heads are any good from imagination X_X

cheers!