Well I got myself an intuos3 and wanted to try it out. Had a day off from my crappy job.
So watching the theory forums in cgtalk, I saw stahlbergs talking about exercises. One was this picture. You had to draw it with your tablet. And the next picture he wanted usto draw was more complex. But the point was just to take one baby step at a time.
Just to feel the shadings and colors. Pretty simple scene. It took me maybe 2.5 hours to do. Mostly tweaking.
The reference.
My Wacom drawing. No copy,paste or clone tool was used.
I would recommend that you that struggle with your wacom that you do such exercises.
I would say you seem to be pretty damn well on par of being a good illustrator! Keep posting your excercises here, I think I’ll try it out myself as well =D
sweetness bigbad thanks for the links, and great work u’ve done there!
the only crits i have r that for the first one urs has more intense lighting (where it hits the ball at upper left, and the high contrast highlights on the scratches), and its not as blue.
as for the eye, i think the highlight is the first noticeable thing that draws attention to the fact that it’s a painting, and then the eyebrow which doesnt show the distinct hairs as well. but i haven’t seen the reference…and ill just give the benefit of the doubt that the model has perfect wrinkle-free eyes.
nice stuff. I should get off my ass and join you. I would use tablet more, but i really hate the things. I’m kinda saving up some cash to get a Cintique… those things look rad.
The first one is friggin nice. The second one does look maybe too smooth. I’ll look around for this paper / article thing that i found about speed painting and how to work a painting up really quickly. I know a lot of pros use similar techniques… i’ll have to find it tomorrow tho, i can’t remember where it’s at offhand and i just reformatted this PC not too long ago so i lost all my bookmarks It’s an interesting read. I think i found it at the Sijun forums a while ago…
I was doing that tutorial when I did that eye. But I keep getting frustrated sometimes when I draw. Then I start all over. I was going to do a whole face but wasn’t happy with it.
The main problem seems to be that you either have too few/ light shadows, or too much spec. If you look at the ref you can see that it has less spec (ie. lower light level), but deeper shadows (more contrast -> stronger light level) than your pic.
Also, spec tends to be flatter in tone and more spread out for large skin areas unless they are sweating.
Your details are really good, but the skin tones aren’t quite right (esp spec).
Skin tone is generally by my reckoning either quite uniform (soft light like in the ref) or high contrast with two distinct regions of tone (shadow and lit). You seem to straddle the middle ground, so I’d lighten the darker areas at the side of the face and bring the colour a bit redder and the luminance a bit closer to the rest of the face.
Or darken the shadows under the brow and nose and create a harsher terminator between the light and dark regions (with some red sub-surface glow at selected spots)
Oh, and break up the outlines of the highlights in the eyes…
Thanks for the crit. Many good points.
But I wouldn’t compare it 100% to the reference. It’s more a direction where I want to go with my painting. The problem was that this picture didn’t have any shadows at all. And it looked somewhat boring. Adding some contrast made it little more watchable.
I was pretty sure it was tom cruise. Try overlaying the two and see if you captured the shape and major feature locations. Anyway I’m looking forward to more of your work. Too few blenderartists are trying to push themselves into doing what they do, but better. I’ll be watching. I checked out your portfolio congrats on getting frontpage on cgtalk thats a tough nut to crack…just wish it was with blender and not maya :).
his eyes look more relaxed in the first one…actually that probably means the second one is more realistic.
great job; yea it’s not perfect but def getting there…good step up from the exercises u were doing.
speaking of which i tried to do some exercises…wow. i need to get working on my painting and wacom skills. im terrible.
and u and jessegp bring up a good point. my aunt always tells me to keep drawing and practicing other art skills, because u use principles from each area in whatever area u’re focusing on.