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

Maria's Surrounded By Design results

I tried the Surrounded by Design challenge, and this is what I got:

From a wee bit of this dress:

I got this winter scene:

And from part of this theater curtain:

I made this mossy cave:

They're really more thumbnails than finished pieces, but I just wanted to experiment with texture and color for the moment. My backgrounds are pretty abysmal, and I think either of these would be an improvement over what I've done in the past. So, success! I may have to do more of these in the future, and keep them around for environment ideas.

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.   

Design is everywhere - Sam's post

When Ang did her set of design is everywhere photo paintings, I was doing them at the same time. Here are my results. Most of these were done in less than an hour. Photos were rotated and cropped in pretty much every case!

Original Photo: Withered Shade by nexion

Original photo: Bird by Yowlot

Original photo: Cranes by SuzyTheButcher

Another introduction - Sam Hogg

Hi there, my name is Sam Hogg. I'm currently a professional concept artist, working for Jagex on the Transformers IP, though my first love is fantasy art. I work in pretty much any medium going aside from pastels and markers, and enjoy a healthy balance between traditional and digital. My job means I draw for pretty much at least 8 hours a day during the week, and I'm always looking to do more in my spare time. Having burnt myself out doing 2 high profile concept jobs a couple of years ago though, I also appreciate the time to be able to relax and enjoy things like movies and games.

My main reasons for wanting to improve are the constant pressure I feel being in an industry where the young and talented are always on the rise, and seem to be even more multi-talented than ever. So while I think my technical level is now pretty high, I also want to be sure I'm producing the best work I can, and not just getting lazy with what I'm comfortable with.

So, here's my overview of things I'd like to get better at. Currently I'm not sure exactly how I'll be improving these, so I'll probably go back and amend as I go.

ANATOMY:
The problem:  The everlasting study. Can never know enough and work currently isn't working that part of my knowledge hard enough.
   · Do more copies from Michael Hampton's brilliant anatomy book. Try to learn the names of key muscles properly so it sticks in my head better

POSES:
The problem: Default to standing or calm poses. Always from straight on, and never suggest movement.
   · Gestures  -  do a good number of sheets of simple gestures. Work on different types of gesture. Standing, calm, more action based, more with pushed proportions.

EXPRESSIONS:
The problem: Tendancy to always default to a calm or sad expression.
   · Do sheets of both gesture and more in depth expressions
   · Study muscles of the face and how they affect expression.

COMPOSITION:
The problem: Tendancy to think of everything as a flat 2d surface. Over complicate things. Don't use visual rythym enough.
· Work on simple thumbnail sketches - gestures for composition essentially. DO some with line and some with just flat colours
· Break down my existing artworks into simple shapes and values.Try to figure out what the key things that work and don't work are.
· Simplify -  I'm already aware that I have a tendency to over complicate things thinking more = better.
· Camera angles. Look at films, try things other than head on viewpoints.

COLOUR & VALUE:
The problem: A natural inclination towards over saturated colours and not working with enough hue shifts.
· Figure out colour by doing more photo and life studies. Work out how much light affects colour's saturation, hue and value.
· Work with more desaturated palettes.
· Work with limited palettes. Learn the terms for various colour combos.
· Practice using more subtle turns of hue and saturation
· Study master paintings. Artists like Bougereau, Leyendecker and Sargeant.
· Do some concept art studies - looking at how other artists in my field control their colors and value.

LIGHT:
The problem: Not enough knowledge of how more dramatic light works. Defaulting to a more matted light set up with rim lights.
· practice small compositions with more dramatic lighting
· Do photo studies for cast shadows.
· Do a few pages of simple 3d shapes lit in different ways.

Erin's introduction: trying to get back in the game

Hello!

I'm Erin.  I'm struggling to write an introduction, because I am quite unfocused as an artist (and definitely less accomplished than all of you).  I used to do a lot of fantasy art, mainly digital paintings.  Then came a six-year foray into a stressful career path completely unrelated to art… and the artistic side of me shriveled up and died.  My husband's job recently took us across the country to San Francisco, and I am finding myself without a license in my field, plenty of free time, and a desperate desire to make art an important part of my life again. 

I am fascinated by religion and spirituality of all sorts, and will be turning to religious stories and mythologies when trying to figure out what to paint.  One of my goals is to paint the angelic hierarchy, which is how I found Angela's blog.  

My plan for improvement is to have two tracks: one is lots of drawing and painting from life and from photographs to boost my technical ability.  The other is creative pieces where I don't stress out so much about technique but work on letting creativity flow and on actually finishing paintings (I have a problem with that).  

Technical:

- Make better use of marks in shading (directional crosshatching rather than smudging, etc.)

- Finally learn proper perspective, so buildings are not intimidating  

- Continue to study color theory and never be haphazard about color. 

- Work on drawing from life to improve proportions and flow of drawing

Creative:

- Use more detail!

- Stop having areas obfuscated or covered in darkness or texture (I use it as a crutch)

- Do more illustration - have each drawing tell a story, with dynamic figures and expressions

The first thing I'm planning to tackle is perspective, so I checked out a couple library books and will I'll be posting some challenges about that.

I look forward to working with all of you!

Nicole Cadet's foray into art improvements

Hi, I'm Nicole Cadet (sometimes known as nixjim13) and I'm a part-time fantasy artist (the rest of the time I'm a computer programmer). I mostly work in the private commissions arena, doing RPG character portraits, and the occasional book cover, but I love painting fantasy, goddesses, fairies, mermaids, sci-fi, myths and legends, and elves (I got hooked on painting more 'manly' elves, if that is possible, a few years ago as a laugh :) )

Anyway, I'd like to push my skills towards more RPG game card art and cover art, but also take a step back and pull out my watercolours and acrylic paints (as I've mostly been doing digital paintings for the last few years)

My goals are relatively fluid at the moment

• improving narratives/ storytelling through character and composition
• improving my composition skills (in general, might look at Loomis as a starting point)
• trying to get more dynamics into my paintings (dynamic poses, interesting POV)
• improving my values (so they aren't so flat, stuff like chiaroscuro and the likes)
• simplify my colour palettes

Exercises (this is going to sound like a menagerie as I want to push my subject matters)

• participate in sketchfest regularly (to keep the traditional drawing skills fresh & try new things)
• learn to draw horses (so I can go to unicorns and pegasus)
• gryphons
• dragons ... of all kinds, and more than just a head!
• paint a cartoon character in the style of a realistic painter (like the Disney princesses exercises that happened a few years ago)
• sci-fi ships/ concept art / character concepts - like you see in game art concept books
• more character concepts - different types of ethnicities, races, roles etc

Likely I'll be inspired by other people's posts ... I like joining in on the fun :) But Sketchfest tomorrow!