Artist Ambition is a self-moderated joint blog for visual artists to improve their work through specific art exercises. Artists post exercise challenges and share the results. Results will be critiqued upon request of each artist.
So I tried Nicole's Using One Brush exercise and here is the result! The brush was the smeary square 69 brush that comes in the default 'square brushes' set in Photoshop. The result was a surprising amount of texture in the blending that reminds me quite a lot of oil painting!
I'm absolutely loving sketching like this since the texture of the brush does a lot of the work for you and makes the sketch look a little more varied and layered than if I'd used a pencil emulator or hard round. It forces you to be imprecise and to feel out your shapes with the eraser (which I also had set on the smeary square brush), which leaves a 'halo' of texture around your shapes which gives the image a nice subtle variance.
Definitely recommend trying it out for yourself! This is definitely going to be my go-to brush for quick concepting now.
Hey guys! I just finished my first master copy and it was a very enlightening experience! I thought I'd post the exercise here for everyone's benefit.
A master copy is where you replicate a classical painting, thereby reverse engineering the techniques that they used to achieve a successful piece. If you're doing this digitally, like I did, here are a few ground rules.
1. NO tracing!
Hone your artist's eye for proportions by using a grid. Using this method also forces you to pay attention to the volume of objects in the image, rather than simply tracing the lines in a mechanical fashion. One way to do this is to set up a grid using Guides in Photoshop.
2. NO color fills!
Paint in the gradient of the first layer with brush strokes instead. Color fills just make the image look mechanical and plastic if you paint because the gradient is too perfect.
3. NO color picker!
Learn to eyeball color instead of using the color picker to pick them from the original. This is to force you to guess how it was mixed and be mindful of layering, as it's important to digital as well as traditional painting.
Here is my master copy as an example. I've blogged about what I learned here, if you're curious for a more in-depth look.
And a video link, if you can't see that GIF:
Good luck and be sure to share your master copies here with us!
