Xemphait - Art School Journey

Hello hello! I am Corey "Xemphait" Grosz and I am starting this topic to house future postings of my assignments.

Before I get to assignment stuff though I wanted to share artwork I have done to show my starting point. There is a good mix of drawings from reference and drawings from imagination.

This is Em, an original character I use for various tabletop games. She is a huge source of inspiration for me and the primary subject for a lot of my art.

I have spent a lot more time with pencil and paper than digital, and I still gravitate that way due to comfort...

I have done some digital stuff, most of it was done on my phone (Samsung Note series):

Last I wanted to include the best illustration I have done (I can't believe it has already been a year since I painted it )

This last piece took forever... but I think it turned out great compared to all my past works. My goal is to be able to produce more stuff like this (hopefully better!) but be able to do it in less time.

Term 1 - Photoshop For Digital Production 1 - Assignment 1 - Digital Pen Control

I tried this exercise 3 times on my Microsoft Surface with Photoshop using different sensitivity and smoothing settings, once on my Samsung Note 9 with Sketchbook, and once with pencil and paper.

Each of the 3 on the Surface were the worst , what is shown above is the best of the 3 done on the Surface... I had the brush smoothing at 25% (the first test was default at 10% and the second test I did 0% since Marc says we shouldn't use it).

I am pretty disappointed at how jittery the lines are on the Surface. At first I thought maybe it was because of the smooth glass, but the Note 9 is smooth too and I didn't have nearly as jittery lines.

Also, the Note 9 did a much better job knowing when I set the pen on the screen and lifted it off. The Surface had a lot of late-starts and early-stops on the lines, which I CTRL+Z'd and redid each time.

Last, for the circles, on the Surface the start and the end of the circle rarely lined up (probably related to the above).

When starting a new piece I tend to gravitate to pencil/paper first, then my phone, leaving the Surface last. Maybe I already subconsciously figured this all out...

Term 1 - Photoshop For Digital Production - Assignment 2 - Image Adjustments

Overall I think this went well. The last part was rough though.

Fun fact, I have a bit of colorblindness (I already knew this).

Checking the RGB/HSV values for #1 the middle green is pretty far off. I brought it to my wife and she can see the difference between the two, but I can't

I put a little something together to help me understand where I struggle to tell the difference in hue:

I blotted colors 5 degrees in hue difference apart from each other in a long line, and noted where I couldn't tell the different between two blots. Green is really bad for me so I tried escalating the difference in hue to see if I could tell the difference... turns out there is an area that even at 40 degrees apart I can barely tell the difference.

I just try to stay away from colors that are close to green (they are ugly in my eyes anyways )