Art Exercise - Master Copy

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!

Complementary palette

Complementaries here being oranges and blues. For this project I wanted the eyes to pop a lot, so I used not only the complementary blue to all that orange in the skin and hair, but I also played with the lightness and saturation to make the eyes the focal point. One more thing I tried to play with in this image was to use a more textured skin, I’ve been trying to improve my skin tones, which I think I am doing (though there is a long way to go still!) but so fat I’ve never really been happy with the textures of my skin. This time it looks a little better. I think there is a lot to improve and I hope to some day find the delicate balance between subtlety and texture. As my first try with this technique, I guess I’ll have to settle in order not to neglect my other projects. I might actually revisit the complementary colors topic. I actually envisioned something more eye catching. I can't stand the anatomy of the nose, that got messed up as I was painting it. I will need to do some nose studies, methinks.

C&C are welcome!

Digital painting - using one brush

I have yet to watch the video (Enliighten blog by Daarken), but I saw the basic premise of doing a digital painting with only one brush and knew I had to try it. The idea is to use a brush that you wouldn't necessarily gravitate to (i.e. not a round or chalk brush). I chose a 'cross' brush, shown in red next to the painting, next time I'll try something a bit more out there :). This was a speed paint, so only about 20 mins in Photoshop CS5. Also to note, I used the same brush setting for my eraser... actually I just changed the colour to white to remove parts that didn't work.

Art Exercise - drawing with white media

Ok, so this was not on my list of things to try, but it's an exercise I haven't done since art college days. It's not hugely exciting, or all that revolutionary, but it's dipping my toes back into the traditional media.Normally when I do pencil sketches I draw on white paper, yet when I work digitally I generally start with a grey or midtone background. Even then, I tend to start with a dark 'brush' and add highlights at the end.

So the goal of the exercise was to use white media exclusively on a dark surface. Lines weren't important, nor was shading, the idea was to just break out of the habit of going directly to a dark drawing medium. This was my end result (I wanted to use pen.... but it decided to dry up about 5 lines in *sigh* ... next time!)

Coty: Palette: Secondary Triad. Crits welcome.

I have had in mind for a while this image and I decided to work with a secondary palette: Green, violet and orange. It really proved to be harder than what I originally thought, and I don’t know how well I did honor the secondary theme, but the final image has the energy I was looking for.
Comments and critiques, always welcome!



That puts my list down by two themes! Yay!

Palettes:
Monochrome
Limited (Circe)
Complementary
Primary
Secondary (Enchanted Visions)
Tertiary
Split complementary
Analogous
Multicolor
Warm
Cold

Composition:
Pyramidal
Spiral
Big group of people
Architecture
one point perspective
two points perspective

ART EXERCISE: Body Language

Snagged this meme from Sam, who snagged it from DeviantART!  The 25 Facial Expressions meme is a pretty common one, but what we tend to forget is that the face is not the total of a character's expression.  Expression comes from the hands, the posture, the movement, and a character's presence. It is the sum of its parts and can make or break a character's impression on the viewer.  The challenge of this exercise is to take a character and to define the various expressions in a way unique to those characters.

Don't have a character to try it out on?  You can try using a generic figure instead and just practicing body language in general.

NOTE: If you try this exercise, be sure to tag it as 'Body Language' in your results post, so we can keep up with who has tried this one out.

The meme:

By ReincarnatedParano on DeviantART.   

ART EXERCISE: Draw 100 Hands and Feet

We all know them and loathe them - the dreaded hands & feet of the human figure.  These elements seem to be bugaboos on everyone's list of challenging anatomy so let's take them head-on, so to speak!  The challenge of this exercise is to draw 100 hands and feet.  You can either draw 50 of each, or 100 of each, if you're feeling brave!

The lesson here is that pure repetition can teach us not to fear difficult anatomy, as well as commit more of the subtleties of hands and feet to memory.  There is a saying that you must draw something 10,000 times to know it by memory.  Drawing 100 should get us at least partway there!

You can try drawing your own hands, the hands of friends and family, the hands of random strangers, or even use models.  Here are some resources for expressive models who might have interesting hands to draw:

-- Pixelovely Life Drawing Tool
-- characterdesigns.com

(Feel free to suggest more hand model sources in comments!)

Time Limit: n/a (Try to shoot for 2 weeks, for those who need a deadline)

* If you do this exercise, add the tag 'Draw 100 Hands and Feet' to your post.  If you desire critique, add "CRIT PLZ" to your post's title when you post the blog post for your results.  Good luck!

ART EXERCISE: Surrounded by Design

The first exercise I'm challenging myself to do is one suggested by the FZDschool of design.  The challenge is to take a shape from a random photo of an everyday object or scene and turn it into a design, either a character or a setting.

This exercise challenges your design sense to see if you can be a creative problem solver in making a design from a completely random shape.  There is inspiration all around us and we need to be able to identify it to be successful creative thinkers.

FZD posted a video example of taking a random photo and creating something cool out of it:



Time Limit: n/a

* If you do this exercise, add the tag 'Surrounded by Design' to your post.  If you desire critique, add "CRIT PLZ" to your post's title.  Good luck!