[bonapartebr]

Hi everyone, first time I'm posting here. I follow the website it's been a while now, but I was ashamed to post something of mine. But I need some advises from you guys who are awesome at arts!

Here is a drawing that I did, but now I wanted to paint it, but I can't make it look good, can you guys tell me what I should do? Please, feel free to critique the drawing too, I'm very bad at drawings, but I wont give up of it! hahahaha...

[Astaldo]

Hey man! Don't ever be ashamed to post art, kudos to you for putting your stuff out here. My input about what you have painted so far:

1. Your values seem a little off. Unless you're trying to mimic flash photography or do some other hard lighting effect, most skin tones will stay quite grey. Example: http://flic.kr/p/apCt6p Notice that in this picture even the full light is quite grey and you only get the almost white on a few small highlights. Obviously this isn't a hard rule as it get's broken all the time and looks fine, but you may benefit from "sneaking up" on the whites a little more.

2. It doesn't look like you have a clear conception of the light hitting his face. I would decide on where the light is coming from if you haven't already, then take some photos/find some photos with similar lighting schemes. (or get a lamp and mirror and study your own face) I've realized more and more that you have to know what you want to paint to paint it, haha! I know that sounds obvious but unless you have a clear idea of "this plane of his cheek is facing the light more than this one" it's very hard to get your painting looking good. At least intentionally with repeatable results.

Overall, what I would suggest is to apply your local values and then decide where the light is coming from and start to layer in your lights. I did a quick paintover to kinda show you what I mean about the local values and a little bit of the values of the face. It also helps if you start getting rid of the hard black lines as early as possible (unless the hard black lines are part of the look, but in this case I think it's just flattening the image out)

Anyways, hopefully something I've said was helpful! Keep practicing and posting stuff and you'll definitely get better.

[bonapartebr]

Wow! Thank you very much Astaldo! I was hoping that someone could answer me. You were of great help and I'm really happy! hahaha...
I loved the way you mixed the grays at the face, I always mess up at this point of mixing, I guess I put on much more values than it's necessary.
How do you make the mixing look so good? Its seems like a gradient! I only decrease the flow of the brush and pick some midtones between two grays for example and try to blend it between the two, but it looks strange when I do it.
Oh, thank you so much, really!! hahahah... =D

[nylelevi]

bonaparte - If you're finding it hard to blend, try decreasing your opacity a a bit too.

There isn't really much more I can add to the good advice Astaldo's already given you lol.

[bonapartebr]

Hey, look what I did! I wont lie, I'm pretty happy about it... what do you guys think? Did it get any better?

[Astaldo]

A step up for sure, bonapartebr! I think before you go much further you should lay in the local values for the rest of the painting. Right now you've got some values floating in empty space without anything solid to judge them against. I find it generally helpful to get all the main value masses on the canvas early so you can start to balance everything as a whole.

It takes a while to figure out blending. Just keep doing it. For that paintover I used a hard round brush with opacity and flow to 100%, airbrush and smoothing on. Then opacity and flow set to pen pressure. To be honest it doesn't matter too much what brush you use, there are a ton of different ways you can do your settings. If you want practice try painting a few different gradients as smoothly as you can. For each different one try different settings/techniques on your brush. If I can get to it tomorrow I'll do a few process pics of how I blend, but it's not too different from what you describe. Haha, not very helpful I know, but there wasn't a time that I was like, "ah ha! So that's how you blend well." It's a bunch of little things that you pick up and I don't feel I'm done improving yet either.

[bonapartebr]

hAHahhaa... thank you so much! You are very kind to help me out.
I made another drawing today and I made some shadows and used a little of color balance too, I liked the result. I think I blended much better at this one.
I left the lines because I wanted to, I wanted only to do some shading at the drawing to practice some more.



What do you think?

[bonapartebr]

I did this one too, at morning. What do you think?
His lips are wrong, but I couldn't make it right and seems like he is using black lipstick! Ahahahhhaha....

[Astaldo]

Dude, nice! It looks like you're already getting the hang of blending! No need for me to help you out there. If you want a smoother look at this point, I would say use your brush with the hardness turned down and go over everything again. But there's definitely nothing wrong with a painting where you can see the brush strokes. Do be aware that the direction of the brush stroke does matter when you leave them visible! Just pay attention to it when you're painting and you'll see what I mean, experiment!

For the lips: Now's the perfect time to break out a mirror and a lamp and use yourself as reference! You could lighten the lips a little, but I think the big thing is that they look kinda flat. Like pasted on. That's where the reference is gonna help. You'll be able to study the form of lips and how the light bounces around.

One more thing, I personally think the face is washed out on the bright side. Something to think about: what's the brightest source of light in the real world? What's the brightest thing your monitor can put out? You gotta realize that we're painting with a really small range of values compared to what you get in nature. So we've gotta be really smart about tricking our eyes and brains into seeing the effect we want them to. We do this by using relative relationships of values. If you've ever put a grey square on a black background, it looks very light, if you put it on a white background it looks dark. So when you're breaking out some of your most powerful lights it's either going to look like a light source itself, or like someone is shining a super powerful spotlight on him. (That's what's happening in this case, but it's only on the left side of his face) Now, that's not to say you can't break out those powerful whites at times, but it's gotta be tied together pretty well. (And I suck at it ) Anyways, I think the important thing is you start paying attention to the relative nature of values and how we use them to trick ourselves into seeing certain things. I suggest you study other people's art, see how they handle values. You'll notice that there aren't any hard and fast rules about these things, but some things in general get used more/are easier to use.

Anyways, keep rockin' and keep posting!

[bonapartebr]

Thank you so much Astaldo!
I realized this super glowing white are on his face, but I couldn't get it right after I've finished, I forgot to save some steps earlier. hahahaha
I'll soon post another one I'm doing, but it's a harder one and a bigger one, so I'm not sure when I'm going to finish, but I'll keep you posted. hahaha
Thank you so, so much again.

[bonapartebr]

Hey, here is another one I did, this morning. The lips are wrong again and it's pissing me off! I tried a looooot to do it right, but... I couldn't get it the way I wanted.
Are the light effects good at all ?
The face ?
The general proportion ?

[bonapartebr]

I did another one yesterday at night. I'm really proud of it, but I know that there are a lot of things to fix, so could you help me once more please? hahaha...

[Zentrope]

Amazing improvement
Impressed and would recommend you to start this as your sketchbook!
You will get more feedback regarding your work!
Just shift this to the Sketchbook section and of-course change your SB's name!
Keep it up

[bonapartebr]

Thank you very much Zentrope! I'm working really hard to get better and I'm really glad you think I got it at least a little bit.
How do I shift this to the sketchbook section? Do I have to create a new thread there? Thank you for the tip ! =D