My 2d art

I am learning both 3d and traditional art right now, which is beyond intimidating!! And I must be out of my mind. Anyway I thought I would post a couple pieces since I noticed this is here.


This is called Cold


Ocean scene from a started tutorial from Evanant. But I didn’t just copy but made it my own. Anyway only got 3 out of 45 minutes in, shame on me.


This is also from a timelapse. I started 30 seconds into a Noah Bradley timelapse called Imposing Castle. I thought stopping here was a really beautiful point. Though I do plan to try to continue. But it is long. So not sure how far I will get.


this also from a tutorial on matte painting. Went right up to the matte painting part. For some reason Matte painting intimidates me.


This is a way older work when I was still barely able to use gimp, but the concept to me is funny. Tree Hand


Ear I did as a sort of practice. But at the time my tablet’s pen sensitivity wasn’t working so I could not make any soft tones. But wanted to make the study anyway. So made the diff colors in diff layers then made a layer from visible and just painted the colors together with the smudge tool.

I am pretty much lately making a 2d painting almost daily so I may just keep them here.

Yup. It is intimidatingly difficult to control the medium, but not that big of a leap from 3D. There is a lot of overlap between 3D, drawing, painting, and photography. In 3D we get the perspective for free, but there is a lot of shared knowledge and terminology: forms, proportions, material properties, light behaviour (direct/reflected light from different surfaces, shadow types), effects like aerial perspective and fresnel, anatomy. Composition rules apply to all of those.

Very challenging, but you’re not crazy :slight_smile: Many say they started with 3D because they can’t draw or paint. But by doing that, actually learn a lot about drawing and painting which doesn’t substitute for practicing it, but still a lot more one might assume. Also teaches that art is surprisingly technical, and that the terminology has more scientific background than what the so called artist pulls out their handbag, even if it’s a guy.

I’m not a big fan of using Gimp for painting. I’ve had my problems with Krita but still prefer that whenever there’s brush work to be done more than image manipulation. Maybe you might want to try it if haven’t already, and good luck, regardless of the tools you use.

yes, okay i keep hearing to try Krita, I will try it. Thanks for the comment. Yes I think doing 3d has helped me with 2d. I especially feel like I get a natural grasp of perspective now without having learned it like others have, okay I am just guessing I have I don’t know. but moving things in 3d you are constantly turning the object/s around and yet the perspective is always right, so I think that doing 3d is probably really useful for perspective. Though it is not as good as active studying. I don’t think anything is. But still getting that experience with it always helps.

also just looking at so much of people’s art everyday, I feel like I am getting a good understanding of how color works. So doing 3d has helped a lot. Yes, I am surprised with how technical art is, it’s all about duplicating the real word. Though often it is also about emphasizing certain aspects for emotional reasons, which isn’t so much technical, but understanding emotions I think. And how to express emotions visually. But yes, i gotta try Krita, i keep hearing Gimp is awkward for painting in, but I haven’t tried Krita yet. And I keep plugging away with Gimp. It is also annoying that sometimes Gimp loses info about pressure sensitivity.
But I do like that I can paint but that I can also use filters and photo manipulations and color grading and all that.

Just was looking at the link you sent, that looks very interesting, thank you for sharing it

Yes, try it. I think you will like it a lot better for painting. And the latest release can do multi layered animation.


Still haven’t gotten Krita but this is my first material study. Had to do 4 versions till I got here. Which is sad cause it’s not great. But I didn’t know what to do with all those crumb details. Finally said forget it and tried to keep it more simple shapes. Which I like the best.



Worms: slimy bodies curling on themselves, covering the surface around them, their slick bodies glowing pink under a lamp post



I was working on this for a project as a tornado when someone reminded me of the fact it looks nothing like a tornado… oh well, I was kind of thinking of the way smokes curls around and well it never became a tornado. So its now a personal project.


a tree i did while procrastinating


An hour and a half study of Hugh Dancy playing as Will Graham

I made this to visualize what I think might help you getting better results. Hopefully you don’t find this too intrusive
http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=120277

Didn’t write or show it but the sketch part can also include composition. Simple drawings/paintings could skip the whole sketching part and start by blocking major forms instead, but composition is easier when the image consists of simple elements.

I used the lasso tool for blocking but could also use a hard brush and eraser to do it. If you refine a sketch to a line art, G’Mic has quite sophisticated tools to get the blocking done quickly from that. That’s included in Gimp and Krita, or could also download the latest version for them.

Once the idea, composition, perspective, and forms are correct, that gives a solid base to refine. Could start adding textures for high frequency details, effects, etc.

I am looking through your picture. Thank you for making it. To be honest it is a little confusing though.
I had never before heard of locking transparency just looked it up and figured out how to do it, that’s a neat trick!
So for locking transparency you used the lasso for a branch then color it in and then locked transparency?

Light direction + intensity + local value = value… uh oh breaking out the math jk. I am intrigued but confused so far.
Ok so “facing the light is lighterr,” oh this is like if you have a log, and you have the light above and behind it is lighter where we are directly facing it and this light curves around to create depth?

I do understand about the concept of hard brushes and soft but sometimes I have trouble with brushes. I have gimp and I noticed in photoshop you can edit a lot of things abotu the brush you seem unable to here.

As for this last picture. I do now just want to say, I have been going through this art book by Betty Edwards about using the right brain to draw, and then 100 pages in realized I needed a charcoal stick and there were none in the stores so i ordered it and it said it would take 5 whole days! Anyways, so yesterday i did an exercise from earlier in the book which is this, where I drew this with the reference upside down. It is supposed to trick the brain to go into the desired right brain mode. And thus you can see what’s there hopefully and not a symbol of it from your own symbol language. It’s great, I have huge hopes that it will help me be a better artist.
But I don’t have a scanner, so egotistically I tried to do this last one digitally instead on paper so I can post it when done. But I found it harder for me to correct mistakes then on paper. Like I know the eyes are not right and there are problems and I did redo them a few times, but not to the point that they were completely better. And I wasn’t really paying attention to brushes. As I was trying to get the proportions. Though after 45 minutes, did spend some time trying to smooth the picture a little.

Anyways, thank you for the help. I appreciate it. I could use all the help I can get. Cause I only have so much time for traditional art studies and the faster something can click with me the better.
I noticed number 1 thing you pointed out was a perspective thing. I am actually trying to find something to teach me better perspective, let me know if you know anything. I will try to follow your direction and make the tree you did following your guide and see if I understand alright. Thank you again for taking the time to help. I am sorry if I am a little slow on the intake at times though, I never took a traditional art class, always wanted to, but they were always full in highschool and college and never wanted to pay for one cause I am a cheap SOB at times and I suffer for it.




Here I am following along, here are the first three.



Hope I did okay. Been thinking about taking ctrl paint tutorials to learn digital painting better.

That is alright. As I mentioned in my previous reply, it is hard, which is why I replied with that kind of pic. There are so many things to consider that it would help to have a process, a workflow, that gets you through all the important steps. Still would need to know to adjust the workflow for whatever you’re doing.

To compare it to modeling in Blender, if you’re an experienced modeler, box modeling is a fast modeling style. But it’s fast because it combines the knowledge of the structure requirements, the tools, breaking down the structure to intermediate steps for the tools, and also forms and proportions, which all get handled in one go. Then there’s the sculpting (forms & proportions) and retopology (structure) workflow which breaks it down to more manageable pieces - still challenging, but also more suitable for very complex models.

I didn’t go to art school either. I had some classes in upper elementary, if that is the right term, 7-9 grade in elementary, age 13-15. But most of these things I’ve picked up while teaching myself 3D.

What I’ve heard, not all art schools are equal even if you had gone to one, or attended classes. Apparently some art students teach these fundamentals to themselves because they don’t teach those in the school, where as other schools spend majority of the time teaching those so the students have the skills to do whatever they want with it.

Yes, I did it like that. I used Gimp for most of it because it had better text editing than in Krita, but quickly went over the last one in Krita because of the brushes. In Gimp, there are different brush presets to get a hard or a soft brush, but handling how the dynamics affect it is less than optimal.

It’s about handling the medium. Each is different, and while digital tools give many benefits, many tools and their options are also a distraction in many ways.

Yes, exactly. A smooth white ball on a table and a lamp above it is a good example. The point at the top is the lightest because it’s closest to the lamp, the surface is perpendicular to the direction of the light. As the surface curves away from the light source, it receives less light up until the point where the surface turns away from it. That’s where it gets a core shadow. As the surface turns towards the table, it receives reflected light (bounced light) and starts to get a bit lighter. The surface starts to become darker again as it turns and meets with the table surface because less bounced light is able to reach it.

It’s a bit different story if the table is dark/black because that reflects less light than a white surface. Same if the ball is black. The values are much darker and the value gradient can be more subtle.

And by value I mean color components in Hue/Saturation/Value (HSV) model. If you set the saturation to 0, literally desaturate, you’re still able to see the forms because the value component is enough to describe form. Local value is the value it would have in an ambient light in the environment it’s in. No direct light, no significant bounced light, and no shadows.

I didn’t mention color, and how light affects it. More light can decrease saturation and change the hue, and less light (shadow) can increase the saturation and also change the hue. It’s about different perceived colors having different values, color temperatures, color wheel, and all that color theory goodness.

But change in value equals form is one of the rare things every medium shares. Be it a pencil, ink, marker, watercolor, oil, digital, 3D, or even sugar, the principle is the same. Each of those can handle the values differently, ink is binary for example (which is where crosshatching comes in), but still the same principle.

I think I know what you’re talking about. It’s about forcing oneself to see relationships between shapes, proportions. The thing I posted is similar, forcing oneself to think in 3 dimensions, instead of drawing symbols in 2D.

Scott Robertson, How To Draw. That’s a very thorough book if you’re looking for one. The guy has taught many famous concept artists in Art Center, who now also teach others. It’s very technical, using linear perspective principles for constructive drawing.

His latest book, How To Render, is a companion piece about all things rendering. In that, he also uses linear perspective to construct reflections, which even the Yoda himself admits is a bit difficult :smiley: He also has an interesting Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrJhSmz4zo9t-Z2GdHECW7A

But even the basics like horizon and knowing what 1/2/3 point perspective means is a lot.

It’s in the right direction, considering that I didn’t attempt masterpieces to illustrate the points and didn’t even annotate them to be followed.

First image shows the up/down relationship. Horizon is in eye level, so if the object or part of the object is above it, you’re looking up, and see the bottom. Similarly you see the top if it’s below the horizon. There’s also light coming from front up.

The second has a lot more going on. I included couple of guide lines instead of whole perspective grid just to approximate general direction and point towards the vanishing points. There were couple of ellipses, circles in perspective, to approximate how far the brances should spread from each other, and drew one out of it. I also did that for the flowers but decided that I’m not painting flowers because those were too small of a detail for such small pic.

Third was blocking the silhouette. I used different values to show they’re kinda separate because they overlap. Can’t see the base of the branches when they start from the other side of another branch, or the form curves away because of the perspective.

Fourth was about blocking different values. Marking where there’s a lighter value and where it’s darker. Ideally one should be able to blend the blocked in values to form the curvature but not in this illustration.

And fifth was the forms with a basic color included. The light direction is from up and a bit behind the tree/branch. The values should be lightest at the top, and lightest visible values should be where the form is below the horizon (because we see the top). There’s also a bit of reflective light coming from underneath, indicating there’s a ground or something there reflecting it.


I haven’t drawn anything since like October. so this was a simple type character.


attempted a coloring… it’s still a WIP. and i am bad at coloring. but i tried to make several layers for different skin shades, but it was more just guessing how that works.



just downloaded krita and am testing it out. was following along with FZD video.

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