[gloominati]

wheeeeeeew so here we are half a year of the crimson daggers deathlinechallenge officially passed, so I figured it would be appropriate to update this thing.

Actually I spent quite some time thinking aout what to ramble this time but then decided not to, maybe later
So for now here'S a new personal piece I've been working on the last few days. Kinda trying to apply what I got out of that atmospheric perspective stuff, which turns out to be huuuuuuge fun, especially because I see so much more potential to push this. So yea be prepared to see some more big stuff in the distance- things in the near future

Maybe one short thing that kind of really got to me these days. About a week ago I got my first spectrum book ever. I always knew they were out there but I actually never got one myself to look into it. Well that stuff just friggin blew my mind, the amount of awesome work is just crazy.
ONe very specific thing that kinda caught me was that no matter how many awesome artist they are in that book (and there are a shitload of people whose names I already knew) all that stuff is kind of unique and every artist is recognizable as being himself even if the subject matters of the paintings themselves are pretty similar to each other being fantasy work. This kind of got me thinking because it brought up that whole thing of style and about how important it is and how much you should look for it in your own stuff. Now that being said I didn't really figure that out to be honest but one thing I want to do is to actually try and dig even deeper into the stuff I like as far as subject matter is concerned but also as far as to HOW to paint is concerned. I want to try to go more after a process that I really enjoy as opposed to pursue something thats concidered sucessful and good looking.
Looking forward to see where it takes me, one thing is for sure, it's a shitload of fun!

OOOOOOOOH and one important thing for the deathline:
As maybe some of you might remember one of my goals was to save up 7000 bucks in order to be able to fullfill my banks contract which gave me that loan for my one year of artschool. Since I basically flunked out they demanded all the money at once instead of giving me the possibility to pay it off the normal way.
Well it turns out that they seem to have made up their minds and will let me to pay off my credit in rates as "normal", so instead of saving up a shitload of money I am allowd to pay them 150 bucks a month, which really takes of a crazy amount of pressure of my chest and actually allows me to focus on real important things in order to achieve my main goal. So yea wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

Excuse the typos I am tired as fuck

[daniellee]

Hey dude! Your stuff are so cool and unique! Love It!!!!! I was watching your posts way back from the beginning, really inspiring !
And thanks for sharing every single PSD and references, you're such a giver!!!

[richartworks]

cool stuff! Really enjoying your ramblings, especially the one about low contrast value environments = realism (unless it's a sunny day!) This got me thinking about game design, and how current games that try to push realism solve the problem of this low contrast by adding blue glowy lights to the characters, so that they don't get lost in the scene. A cheap, lazy way of making things clear tbh. They should instead focus on the values themselves and perhaps have a shader that keeps the characters readable like in TF2 or Batman Arkham games (where everything is black, Batman is always readable and no glowing lights!) Anyway keep it up!

[gloominati]

Hey guys just quickly jumping in.

Want to know how my last 6 months of the crimson daggers deathlinechallenge went and whats hopefully going to happen next? Check out my blog for the weigh in

http://cgbrush.org

[gloominati]

So here we are again. Normally I wouldn post my whole rant in here and just give you the link to my blog for it. but this topic was kinda important for me right now so I figured I will post it here as well!


Hellouuuu. Another week has passed, time for another update. I actually wanted to post yesterday trying to get into the habit of at least updating every sunday, but I was just waay to friggin tired so I'm doing it now

So first off prepare for another 50 pages of ranting but well, I don't talk to anybody so I gotta get it out here in order to not go insane, besides as I already said a few times I just love ranting just for the sake of getting all the things that are on my mind kind of out there. At the same time I just HATE talking about that stuff (I mean verbally) I hate it when most people do it and I will probably never do it myself, most of all not if nobody actually asked for it. So yea writing it down is the best solution, I can get it out and at the same time you can just skip that shit and look at the pictures

The last few weeks I have noticed quite a change in the way my stuff looks, especially after I did those landscape studies and paintings from imagination. One thing that has always kind of thrown me off and which I couldn't figure out why is the fact that my studies, no matter if from life or from photos, and my masterstudies as well(although that might kinda fall out of that becaus emasterstudies by default are supposed by the original look of the painting) have a wildy different look to them than the stuff I would concider a personal Piece or Illustration. Not only did the studies themselves look kind of different but also the studies I would paint afterwards completely from imagination. AND not only would they look diffrent but I would also paint them differently completely.
The thing that was bothering me with that is that I actually like teh way my studies look MUCH more than my finished work, after I did them but I would completely ignore that insight when painting personal stuff, which now as I look back to it is really weird to me. Now when I look at the Oilpaintings I used to do a while back I notice that they have the same look to them like my digital studies and have NOTHING to do with what I would make a finished Illustration look like, and it's teh same there, I kind of like those paintings better than my finished portfoliostuff.
Now for the last few months I have been getting more and more sucked into a specific process of working when it comes to my Illustrations, which to summarize is basically to push it into the best Result I possibly could, rendering the shit out of it, which for sure is not a bad thing at all, BUT:
The more I did this the more I noticed that this way of working completely eliminates the process itself, and with it itsomehow even eliminates big parts of the skill you need to have to be concidered a good painter (now I mean what I would concider a great painter). What I mean by that eventually the risk you run into is that the process isnt a gradual built up until the finished result but more a constant tweaking, transforming, and basically licking that thing until it somehow looks finished with the right amount of rendering put on top.
I know that a lot of artist work that way but what I want to say here is that this is not what I actually think of being great paintings, sure it's tempting to work that way just because you eliminate failure almost completely just by making "pulling and pushing until it looks finally right" a part of the process. For me, however great painting is something else. For me part of great painting is being able to just nail stuff right away, having the ability to smack down a single almost messy looking brushstroke but being able to make it look right just the way it is and bein able to let it sit where it is in the finished painting. For me great painting was always kind of like boom,boom,boom done!! I have always admired Artist who could do that and I mean look at the old Masters, they worked that way, every stroke of applied paint just right the way it was, constantly building up the whoie thing conciously bein aware of every brushstroke making it intentionally and LEAVING it there. Like its simple: what is the point of a brushstroke when it's not correct, when you're gonna smudge the shit out of it?

Now to get back to my stuff, as I said with the studies I feel that practically all of them even the finished ones kind of have that feeling to them. I don't say that they are awesome or anything, no not at all but I do say that they show a way of me thinking while painting them that actually just HINTS at what I would concider "this is the right way to do it in order to achieve being a good painter someday in my life". For some reason I think it is actually fear + unconciously trying to do what is seen as popular these days I blended out that aspect completely when I was painting personal pieces, completely loosing the aesthetics that I normally would like about a painting.
So this kind of leans towards what I have been talking about in my last post when I talked about wanting to get something more "personal" stylewise and people would come to me and say I shouldn't worry this would come to me on it's own. But this is really not what I meant when I said that, sure I know that everybody kind of has his or her own style by default, it can't be avoided, what I was talking about was that something about the way I was painting just didn't feel right from the very foundation. Sure my stuff got better and more and more polished but at the same time it kind of got away from what I really think is cool and looks great.

So what I want to do now is to completely break out of it, and this piece is the first attempt in doing it, just totally doing what I like and how I think I can create a broader base to improve from, because another thing that kiiind of bothered me with the "licking stuff until it looks right"-technique is that study seems to become redundant in some way simply because it doesn't matter that much anymore. If something looks wrong just fondle with it until it somehow finally without really knowing why looks right and on you go. If a value looks wrong, lighten/darken it gradually until it fits in the picture, if a leg is too short select it and make it bigger, puzzle your piece together and render the shit out of it, BAM professional Now this might sound harsh or dickish but I don't mean to be that or to offend anybody. All it comes down to is that this is a persdonal opinion about what I think about my work so far and where I want it to go in the future and I think the change is going to be quite significant.
The last thing ( I think) is the consequence of the last thing I mentioned: NOW studying makes sense to me again, lifepainting shouldn't be supposed to teach you how to redo the effect of light on an object by accident but it should teach you how to BAM just being able to nail it and eventually enabling you how to smack in an accureate shadowshape with one single stroke which is just correct and will stay there visible in the final painting. Thats where I want to go, and I am not saying that my stuff is there at all, or that my stuff is good (actually I hate it more than ever these days). And I think that this painting here is a good step in the right direction, and I see so much stuff that sucks but the great thing is now, that I know what to do and where I want to go I can put my finger on it and say "yea THIS sucks, I am gonna study this and conciously push it in the next one".

As I said a long rant, and I think it's awesome if you read so far, and if you have thoughts on that feel free to drop your comment, as much as I hate hear people taling about that stuff I love reading it when people write about it

Oh and : Maybe I stress this too much but this is important to me: This is in NO way meant to be educational in any way. This is simply what I going on in my mind and conclusions which I make for myself. Most likely that stuff has noting to do with you as far as you learningexperiences in becoming an artist are concerned at all. So it's cool if you like what I write here and it'S even cooler if you can get something out of it, just know that there's no intention of educating people in here (somebody said on my last blogpost "nice lecture", that really freaked me out )

cheers and see you next time

[gloominati]

Nothing fancy this time, just a few small skull studies. Basically trying out different stuff on each of those. teh first two are pretty quick, around 30mins-1hr maybe, the last one around 2 hours.


So yea not doing much more than experimenting right now. Its funny how it always gets back to basick sucking each time when you try a new approach. Like I painted that skull in the past a few times and they were all actually better than that last one for example, it's weird. It's kind of like the test if you're willing pushing through shitty times in order to achieve improvement, pretty cool!

I also uploaded the PSD for the last one, check it out if you like, its on my blog: http://cgbrush.org ! I kept all the layers for the different steps, also this one is pretty big but I never see the point downloading lowres PSD files from other artists just to check out how they arrange the layers, I'm always interested in seeing how stuff is actually painted and that only works with the fullres thing

[gloominati]

Hey Guys,

just throwing in todays morning-skullstudy. Things are getting better and I am starting to feel really confortable and more important really excited with that "new" way of painting.

Later today I will update the Download section of my site with a big highres Photoset of that Skull I'm having here, one in daylight and one (or more) with artificial light, so stay tuned and add me on facebook or twitter to get the updates:

https://twitter.com/#!/gloominati
https://www.facebook.com/christof.grobelski

So here we go, fullres PSD file with layers as always on my blog: http://cgbrush.org

[gloominati]

artsymptom: thanks

heyhouu,


heyhouu,

some more skulls for you, one from imagination, the other one from life.

Its kinda strange painting those in that dim daylight conditions. They have that yellowish chalky color and the walls in my room have pretty much the same color, so when that cold windowlight hits the skull and the room all the shadows tend to get that weird muddy greenish color and only in the areas where there is a lot of subsurfacescattering going on you get that warm yellowish glow. It looks really strange and is quite a challenge to get right in a painting, but funfunfun, prepare for more!!As always the PSDs are online for you to look into on my blog: http://cgbrush.org .
One thing I have also been kinda experimenting with is this trying to find out how dark stuff needs to be painted in order to make the light read correctly. haha wow that sounds weird especially if you don't know what I am talking about The thing is that in paintings, the lightest it gets is white, but in reality light is muuuch more intense, so in order to make bright highlights read like bright light in a painting, everything that surrounds it must be dimmed to get that effect. Really really challenging to get that right and I definitely still haven't got it, so be prepared for moooore skulls

This one is from life, around 1,5 hours


And thats a quickie from imagination, around 45 minutes:

[gloominati]

oh and btw guys I upoloaded the skull photoset on my blog as well. 100 photo skullarchive. check it out!

[gloominati]

Hey everyone.
yea it's been a while since the last post. The reasons for that being that I am pretty busy with freelance right now which is pretty cool, since slowly but surely my jobs are getting better and I am actually starting to work for companies nowand hope that I can keep working for them getting steady work. The second reason is that I also took it a bit more easy and actually tried to "live a live" for the last two weeks instead of just working. Weeeeeeeeell turns out that this probably wasn't the best idea (to keep it short) so now I'm back to just work again I guess.
So without further blabla, here is a quick terrible sad man from imagination and a painting that I started but which will never be finished unfortunately :/
See you next time!

[gloominati]

Hey guys!
here's todays piece. I wanted to paint something like that for a long time now and since I had some time to spare between client responses I figured I should just do it.
Now because artists tend to get a lot of shit these days I am gonna mention that I referenced a black/white piece for the structure of the hair, so that if some of you guys finds my ref on google I am preventing the shitstorm

So Photoshop around 3hours

[gloominati]

Hey guys,

I just was too lazy to upload the PSD of my last piece yesterday buuuuuuut today I'm not, so here you go. If you want to know how I painted the girl with the nice hairstyle, download the PSD with a ridiculous amount of layers

http://www.mediafire.com/i/?vm5uxr3g0or5ehy

[Stuart-Gant]

Awesome stuff man, i love reading your thoughts as well, keep doing what your doing.

[gloominati]

Finally some personal stuuuuffs, this time a little bit of conceptwork. Also I might be able to show some of my freelancestuff I've been doing lately and of which I think is actually worth showing
Other than that I have been taking freelance a little bit easier the last weeks and focused mroe on personal stuff, especially sketching with reaaaaaal pens again. To be honest right now this is the thing that's most fun to me
So for now here's a persian influenced orcdude !!

See you soooooooooon!

[JoseVega]

nice man!!!
yah i actually started about 2 weeks ago sketching with just pen and its so much fun....
great stuff!