Ryo - Art School Journey

[Lockenheim]

Nice work with this, shading the head is an entirely different beast for sure. One thing I would recommend is to really study the planes of the head using an asaro head model if you want to get into more detailed head structure. I think it may help clear up some of the questions you may have as working on the head. Let me know if that doesn't make sense. Nice progress!

[ryooh]

@patrycja.lerch yeah I see what you mean. I think the eyes are uneven, I think I placed it the left eye little too high. And thanks for pointing out the eyebrows on the one from memory. They definitely look a bit artificial, if that makes sense. And I think the curve that I missed would be why. And as for head size I had a feeling it was too big but wasn’t sure how much bigger so I only shaved off a bit from the top of the head and not the back of the skull. Thanks a lot for point those out it it helps a bunch.

@Lockenheim yeah that makes perfect sense. I’m fortunate enough to have had @patrycja.lerch send me a link to a Asaro model that’s good imo. But yeah honestly I kinda avoided shading for a long time to focus more on structure since I was struggling a lot with the nose and such. And for the memory head I wanted to do my best to not reference anything. However i am going to integrate your recommendation into practices since my structure has improved a little bit. Thank you for the advice, I know the models will help with my heads, whether stylized or not so much stylized.

As a side note for the head from memory I think I could have more tilt on the nose. It kinda curves back in so if I fixed that it also would have shifted the mouth and chin in a more appropriate spot. But Thank you both a lot for the responses. I hope your weeks are fulfilling.

[ryooh]

Hello all, been really busy lately since I’m moving houses. And I haven’t had much time or energy to practice lately especially with all the heavy lifting and back n forth. But I got some practice in a bit before we started and I watched the 3 point perspective lesson. At first it was awkward to replicate the perspective but I think I got it & now with this assignment piece I’ve tried to play around with the environment more although I started moving the day after I started this assignment. So I slowed down a lot. Did a little speed head practice since as well.
But as for the 3 point I’m curious if I have the perspective correct here. I don’t wanna get too far and it be wrong and I was blind to it. But any comments or advice for what I have so far for the environment is welcome as well. The giant stag is giving me a bit trouble but I’m going to keep looking at references to help me get the hang of it.

That’ll be all this week. I’m going to try to get back on my routine and start up consistent practice some more since I’m about done moving. Hope you all have a good week.

[ryooh]

How here’s a checkpoint on the 3 point. I’ve been way busier than I thought I was going to be and I’ve gotten a little distracted with the mind numbing things when the day would calm down. but I’ve still fit in some practice. Not as much as I’d like though. As for the 3 point though I don’t really know what to think, it’s my first time coloring something like this and right now I have the colors in the right place but I want to make the piece whole. I’ve done some shading on characters that came out nice but using varying colors feels vastly different. Everything looks smooth and not like how they would feel or look/not how I imagine the scene to look. ( roots looking like wood, grass like grass and the stag like it has fur and plant growth coming out of it. Etc. ) I don’t want to have a hyper realism style here but I don’t want it to look too smooth/putty like. I’m going to watch some YouTube videos on coloring and play around to see what I like ( think I might make it darker for starters ). Idk when I’ll post again, hoping to have some progress and hit a major checkpoint (maybe finish) within reasonable time. As Always thanks to everyone who stops by. All criticism and advice is welcome. Hope everyone has a great week.

[Gordon003]

Ayo, first of all, good job with 3D perspective.

Colouring wise, have you watch Brunet T2 video on perspective where he said that the further the object is from the camera/viewer, the more bluer and darker it becomes? (correct me if I'm wrong lol) Reason saying that is because the same colour you gave for all trees doesn't give me an illusion of depth. Same applies for the building as the colour just made it look flat.

Have you decided on where's the light source is (e.g. the sun)? That may be a good question to start placing shadow on your background work. But for your first colouring work, it looks great; especially that animal inside. Keep it up!

[ryooh]

@Gordon003 I don’t think I remember hearing that from the t2 video but, I didn’t watch all of it just the 3 point so I may have heard it but forgot about it. But since you told me that, now I won’t forget about it. As for the light source I think I’m want it coming from the upper left, so yeah you’re right I need to start placing shadows. I’ll play around with lighting and see what I like best.

So I’ll start with shadows then move to the depth and work my up from there. Thanks a lot you gave me some direction here which is invaluable to me. I appreciate it. I hope your weekend is great

[Norma]

I like the picture. The idea appeals to me. And for the smoothness: Maybe try some ground shading. Shade the areas that are farther away darker, such as the outside of the tree trunks.

[ryooh]

Hello all it’s been a while, so I decided to just restart my 3 point lol. I wasnt satisfied at all with my first attempt which led to me just deciding I wanted to start from scratch. I don’t know if I’d call this finished…but in my opinion I think it’s better than the initial. For now I think this is as good as I can get with my skills and knowledge. Is it the scene I had in my head? Not exactly lol but if I could get what I pictured in my head exactly already, I don’t think id need to be taking classes at all. There’s obviously a lot to be learned from this experience and to say I’ll catch all my mistakes and, maybe even most of them, would be wrong. So if anyone has any tips or things that stick out that I could have done better or improve on for the next time please let me know. I have my own critiques but I’ll keep them to myself to see what others think.

I’m going to continue the lesson video this weekend sometime but for now I’ll continue my regular studies & maybe some character stuff. This assignment took me more time than I initially thought it would. (partially because I did have a lot going on and then did get distracted a lot. ) but like I said earlier I think this is the extent of my abilities at the moment (big thing being coloring/shading and stuff but I think that lesson with eventually come and help alot )

I hope you all have been good and I hope everyone’s week is great.

[Araita]

It does look better! I like perspective work on both of those. On this one - as you have coloured over lineart and approached shading a bit differently - everything just works better. Also, the deer as it is the only one with lineart so it stands out a bit more, and it is now positioned in a more eye-catching spot on the canvas. As the last thing I don't know if that was intended but dimming c the olour palette a bit gave it a "darker" feel to the piece - I quite like it
Good job!

[ryooh]

@Araita Thanks a lot, the compliments mean a lot and affirm that restarting & making different choices was the right decision. The darkening of the whole thing was indeed on purpose, I'm not for sure if how I did it was proper since I just took one of the darker tones I used for the night sky and just went over the whole thing with it. But I felt that trying to get it right and doing it wrong would be better than not trying at all and then having the buildings look like they are in day time while there is a night sky. Regardless I'm happy that you like it :))). Thank you very much once again I appreciate the time you gave for feedback, and I hope you have a great week.

[ryooh]

Hello all, hope all is well. Post 3 point has mostly been gesture and head practices plus some 4 point exercises and a little bit of proportion practice. My proportions were a bit rusty I feel and I’ll start doing some more order to make sure it’s better engrained in my muscle memory. Seeing what the 4 point assignment was I figured it was a good warmup since it’s the same thing just in 4 point now. But it proved to be a bit difficult for me. I don’t think where I chose to stop on each was bad but I think each show a different struggle. I think in my first it seems a bit flat. The perspective isn’t quite there imo. On the second I think I did better on the perspective for the lower half of the body but from the torso up I think in my attempt to get the perspective down I distorted the body in the wrong way maybe? It seems longer than it should and maybe a bit too wide. I decided to stop since it’s late and i want to see if I could get some outside insight. And I’ll try some more tomorrow with what new knowledge I have.

Also I was wondering if this excessive can help slot with foreshortening since they’re both types of perspective that distort our view on the body or certain parts within it. Mostly asking because I like when characters are in really dynamic poses like action sequences or say a pose, and I want to get really good at stuff like that. I’ll have some images down below of what I mean specifically.

Hope everyone has a good week and I hope everyone’s has breakthroughs in their studies and success in their art pieces.

The images i mentioned before, poses like this are so sick. Red arrows on the second one point out the ones I mean specifically

[ryooh]

Long time no talk, hope everyone has been making progress with studies and their art journey. I didn’t post for about a month because I was doing more head and gesture/pose studies before moving on to the next term and didn’t feel it was necessary to post them. But now I’m here and here is the first attempt at clothing folds. Used the example from the video as the reference. It was a bit more difficult than I expected but I don’t think I did all that bad. I don’t really know which direction to move towards in terms of improvements that need to be made. So I do need some help with that for sure. So on course if anyone has anything to critique or point out about this pls do so, I’ll appreciate it a lot. I hope everyone’s week was good and I hope your following week is good as well.

[ryooh]

Hello all, so I wasn’t able to get as much in this week as I woulda liked but what I did get in I was really trying to make notes of what I could be doing better. I’ll post 3 below, 1 being one I think I did the best on this week and another 2 that I think came out the worst. Both having their own reasons in my opinion. I still have an issue of messiness, and I think that creates a problem, especially with folds. So I’m going to put that at the front of my focus since I think it is a major issue.

This is the one I think came out best, lines aren’t super messy it’s clear where folds are. On the pants at least. The jacket was fur and I already dont paint often so a whole nother material like fur is kinda difficult for me to get to look right. Let alone show folds well but I did try haha. If there are any critiques or advice it’d be much appreciated.

This next one I think is one of the worse ones this week primarily because of messiness, and it just looks kind of boring. There is a lot going on. Of course any critiques are welcome here.

For the last one I think the culprit is the messiness. It’s a big mess and the whole thing look bad in my opinion. I was pretty tired this week from work and I don’t remember which day I worked on this exactly so maybe I got tired and decided to call it before fixing it but it just looks really low effort. I do see the bright side of this though in that it did point out to me just how much me not having clear lines can impact the look.

But these are just the things that I noticed. If anyone else notices anything else, or even some of the same please feel free to point them out. For now I’ll use what I gathered myself to try to do better. Thanks to everyone who takes the time to peak in here, I hope everyone has a good week.

P.S. not going to lie I haven’t been committing as much time as I could have this week ( or maybe the last couple…) to drawing because I got FOMO. And I’ve been consuming a ridiculous amount of One Piece in order to catch up for the gear 5 episode lol. But I’ll be caught up soon and all will be right in the world. ( I have my priorities a little mixed up I know )

[daceronine]

Hey! It seems we're at the same term 3 phase!
Clothes were really a challenge. It's like all lessons come together plus more.
I found that at first I tended to also do "hairy" lineart, which results in unclear folds. I found that working at the side on my lineart clarity in consequence helped me put more attention at how folds shoudl behave over the volume.

Marc actually has a good video about it, I recommend checking it out and doing a pause to practice it:

I personally end up doing one draft, then a sketch over the draft, and finally the actual ink over the sketch. Helps define lineart a lot. Oh, and flipping to quickly notice where proportions are going off.

Keep at it man! Just doing 30 mins a day (or one hour if you can) consistently helps immensely.

In order to help give feedback, it also helps to post the photo reference, or the body model under the clothes, to help identify the anchor points and how they should affect the clothes in question.

Bests of luck!

[ryooh]

I’ll definitely watch that video, and yeah I put some focus on my line work for the folds this past week that I’ll show in the post here after this. And the thought crossed my mind to post the reference but I don’t know why I decided not to lol. I’ll be sure to include it in the progress post for the past week. I’ll also try to remember to flip it, I’ve only remembered to do that I think one time ever on a personal drawing of a character. Thank you very much for the response & pointing me back to that video.

[ryooh]

So this week was a little lackluster in terms of the practices again, I again had a couple days where I pretty much was out as soon as I got home from work. But the days I did practice I did put some more focus on my messy/hairy lines for folds. After the first practice took a good chunk of time I decided to do what I guess could be considered “easier” clothes because I wanted to see what I could do in under an hour. Just as a challenge. I had something else I wanted to bring up but I honestly forgot what it was so, I won’t say too much for this weeks post and I’ll let whatever problems there are show for themselves. Also I did include the references used as @daceronine suggested. So if there are any critiques of the practices below please feel free to bring ‘‘em forward. I appreciate all the time anyone takes to come in here and read and/or give their thoughts. Hope everyone has a successful week.

[daceronine]

Hey! There's already some good improvement there! These last few ones seem more simple, yet cleaner and better at taking the bases of the reference.

When working from a reference (which we do a lot), I found it helpful to taka a piece of the original as a "ruler" to measure if my proportions and scale is right. Even if we stylize or modify the reference, it helps to keep proportions in relation to the same person.

For example, taking the head as a rule of measure:

Once you lay it lay it out like this, it's easy to see where the differences are and where some adjustments might be needed. My lines here are not all that straight, but you get the idea.
You can easily notice the top part is very accurate, and it starts to deviate more from the waist down. (granted those pants look difficult)

On folds, also when working from reference, it helps to identify those tension points and some basic lines between then, then copy them over to your piece to identify where some of your own tension points might need adjustments:

Most of the shadows perfectly match the refrence, with some small deviations here and there.

There are many advantages when using digitial tools, and when learning, using them to verify our work helps a lot.

Just some tips though, you can apply them when you feel you want to verify something. It's easier as an observer to point stuff, but truth be told, I break some of these tips myself all the time, I also deviate a lot from the reference myself and end up trying to "naturally find the folds" on my own once the base is done (which is also a good obervation exercice).

All in all, the important thing here is the end piece is already looking so much better.

[ryooh]

Thanks a lot for the feedback this is really helpful:). Yeah I definitely don’t measure like I should. Don’t know why though. But you’re right, it would help when getting to the shadows and folds placed accurately so I’ll be sure to try to proportion correctly. I remember that I was a bit confused on why my some folds weren’t lining up right, like them being a bit further from each other then they were in the reference, leaving more open space then there would be naturally.

Also yeah I don’t know why for these in particular I didn’t get those tension points first, I got them for some previous practices but I guess I forgot lol. I’m about to start studies right now so I’ll be sure to note what I was lacking here and make sure I don’t forget them. Thanks again for the advice, I’ll be sure to apply it

[ryooh]

Here’s some of the practices from the part week. The hoodie on the top most practice gave me some trouble because of the folds on that arm but I’m picking more references like that to try and get a better feel for clothes being scrunched up like that. Also I see that I made the sleeve that’s more straight a bit narrow for some reason. I guess I wasn’t paying amount attention to that side haha.

For the dress 1 ,I think I had more success on, her legs didn’t apply much tension on the dress so the creases weren’t difficult. I got side tracked and started doing some skin, but remembered that’s not what I’m studying so I stopped lol. The man in pants went well also I think. I think I did a bit better on the pants here than the shirt but still not bad.

For the last one I don’t think I did bad. But I could obviously do better. Line work still meh (goes for all ), I use a lot of movement on wrist which I think is a root of the issue. As I’ve heard multiple times, mostly from Marc’s videos, makes it more difficult to make clean lines. Although using more arm feels SOOO weird to me for some reason. Regardless it’s something I can’t ignore any longer and something I’m going to start forcing myself to do regardless of how weird it looks.

I’ll keep practicing and try to remember I do have to practice more than just clothing, even if clothing is the lesson I’m on it doesn’t mean I should stop practicing heads,shading,gestures & perspective. This is a habit I have of completely devoting all study time only to the lesson I’m on and not really any on past lessons. I’ll probably try more ways to demonstrate folds other the the way I have been so far, maybe some hatching or how mark does sometimes just doing the actual line for the fold with no shading. I do think the blending from the dark of gold to the fabric in lighter forms is a weak point and I gotta figure out how to make that easier in myself as well. So I lol be watching some videos on that. Anyways that’s it for week, if anyone sees some standout issues or just have something they wanna add please lmk. I appreciate everyone’s time and I hope you have a good week:).

Side question. I notice Marc zooms in and his work doesn’t lose quality. I doubt myself but I think this is because of his canvas size right? If so does anyone know what size he’s on? Or if not recommend a canvas size? I can’t zoom in much before my quality drops like it fell down a cliff. I do use procreate just in case that matters since I know he’s on photoshop and i also feel like it could just be sn aspect of photo shop never dropping quality when you zoom. (idk lol I’ve never used it)

[daceronine]

All these are looking much better! Shadows, proportions, linear, it's all looking much better!

If there is any feedback I can share, is to look into folds a bit more into detail, to try to imagine them as a mesh affected by the body volume gravity and tension and not just shadows on fabric.

As usual, I have a hard explaining with words, so let me use a small example here, with one of the sleeves:

If you can visualize the cloth like a "3d Mesh" over the body, and try to see how it's being deformed by the tension points and volumes (the black line), the blue lines represent the body underneath, and the red line the tension strenght. It'll be easier to see where the shadows go (the green lines), since you can then just place shadows following the 3D mesh object.

Hope that makes sense. I think Marc once explained "shadows are there just to give a hint of volume to the objects", so it's all about the shadows properly following the 3D volume and light source.

For me at least this was the most challenging part, getting the volumes and the mesh to look right, since it's imaginary 3D space. That's also why the 3D figrues exercices are so important. If you get those right, the shadows just follow the object.

Take a quick look at this video, I think Marc explains it better here:

However I would advice to take a peek at your first piece and compare it with these last ones, there's HUGE improvement already!

On regards to the zoom in question, I'm also learning myself, but I can share what I've learned so far:

• Try to use 300 dpi, that gives you a reasonable pixel quality.

• For resolution size, it depends on where you intend to publish it (print, instagram, etc), but for most of us, a resolution of A6 is fine for exercices, A5 for something with a bit more quality, and A4 if you REALLY want to make a high quality, high resolution piece. I forgot the width/height those represent, but most softwares have these by default. Basically, A4, A5, A6, the higer the number, the lower the resolution.

• Something I learned recently which I still have to try, is to start with a low resolution, say, A6. Do your drawing without much detail, just the outline, basic colors and so on. When you want to "zoom in" to add more detail, change the canvas resolution to a higher one, this allows you to "zoom in" more and pack in more detail that would normally wouldn't be possible due to the fixed resolution. Resolution is not a "one time" set and that's it. You can keep increasing as needed, so start at A6, then increase it to A5 if you need to add more detail, and so on.

• I noticed the brush you use has a lot to do with the detail you can pack in. Download and try Marc's "legendary" sketch brush (not sure if it can be imported into procreate... I asume you can). It's basically a sketch-like brush, good to do basic drawings, usually zooms in pretty well since it has low opacity.

Still, your lineart also shows improvement, so the effort is paying off.