Thanks for the feedback, Sapo. “Picnic Tree” looks so much better in person–the green just doesn’t translate to a computer screen correctly, or at least mine. I love the idea about the small beach painting, I’ll definitely try that. As for selling, I wouldn’t call myself successful enough at this point to advise anyone on that subject. The market is pretty limited where I am (Okinawa) and I’m mostly focusing on my writing these days. I hope to do more when I get back to the states.
Malthus, those are fantastic. The mirror and the forest god on bark are especially impressive.
I also love your work, Acid Lamp.
Argent Towers, I think it would help you a lot to try to loosen up (in your drawings, I mean.) I realize your style is very tight and detail oriented, but it would help the realism of you work to get some paper and do a whole bunch of very fast sketches. I’d get one of these manikins and a hand manikin from that site and do some ten second sketches. You get ten seconds to complete the thing, then move on to another pose. Do a few hundred of these, then start giving yourself more time.
I think where your art tends to resemble the “primitive” paintings is in how static it is. Forcing yourself to draw quickly and get more of a feel for the figures can help you put them more “in” the drawings instead of on them. As they are now, they don’t feel much like a part of the scene, they don’t feel very three-dimensional. I think you have potential, but if you want to develop it you’ll have to try something different to break out of your current patterns. Good luck!
In your third and more recent drawing (state), you say you are going for realism. It doesn’t work. It might be because the figures are not realistic shapes. The brain sees impossible shapes and then gives up on any attempt at making the textures wrap around them. The radio and the cigarette pack, to mention your two examples of small objects just cannot be the way they are. They could be cardboard cutouts slipped in the clothing, but not 3D solids. There is no magical texture that can overcome that mental hurdle.
Also, your stile is very bold and high contrast, which I think is their best quality but is also contrary to a realistic rendering. Things are not normally so black and white.
Your second drawing (construction), on the other hand, by not trying to be realistic is a lot more credible and easy on the eye. Clean backgrounds, textures only where needed. Sharp lines evenly weighed and spaced. It looks a bit like a wood carving. The stiff poses and exaggerated expressions do seem like primitive art and you can take that as an asset.
If you are really going for realistic, you have a long way to go. As others have said, life drawing is what you need. You have serious issues with perspective and proportion, both of which improve a ton with life drawing.
MY advice, though, is forget about realism. You are already up to something if you choose to develop it. You could go for that mid-century caricature style with lots of black area shading. The fact that you rate “State” over “Construction” tells me that you might not be too open to this advice, but that’s my two cents.
We don’t get to choose our voice as artists, we have to discover it and embrace it, whatever it is.
I’d like to thank the dozens and dozens of posters who visited my site (I haven’t had so many hits in the last few months as I’ve had in the past week), and thought I’d add this other one:
It’s not as much art as it is journalism, since I was only starting out as a photographer then, though I’ve printed a number of those pictures over the years.
I haven’t updated it in a while, either, but it’s basically a blog of photographs of NYC street scenes from the mid to late 1980’s with current views (2007-08) of the same scene from as close to the same angle and cropping as the original, with the originals in black and white, and the current ones in color. Plus a little history of the particular neighborhood as well. (I’m a photographer with a writing problem.)
This is all excellent feedback, Argent. Further, I feel like you have a limited idea of what good art is; you need to study some more. Spend an hour in front of one single painting in an art museum. Copy its lines in a drawing pad. Take an art history course. Unless you want to reinvent the wheel without any context, which is also a way to go; create your own style. You’ll know it when you’ve found it, and you won’t have to convince anyone to like your paintings.
As of now, your drawings show enthusiasm and patience, two essentials that many would-be artists lack. The rest you can develop, as you learn how to observe, not only what you’re looking at, but at how it’s going down on the paper.
Since the detail seems to interest you, do a couple of exercises: draw a patch of gravel, or the surface of the ocean, or a rough-hewn board. Obsess on the texture; forget the perspective and composition for now. You may find something. Even if not, you’ll learn something on the way.
I’m not gonna confess to being a great artist, but I’ll give you one example in your realistic drawing that I noticed, Argent.
You say that you worked very hard on the details and included “clothing wrinkles”. However, the only wrinkles I see are on the folded up shirt cuffs and the outlines of the clothing. Within the shirts and pants themselves, there is no texture. You don’t have the “whisker wrinkles” that can form near the crotch of jeans, the folds of a shirt near the armpits or gentle folds along the torso or thighs if the fabric skims along a figure that isn’t standing perfectly ramrod straight. I see a few attempts to do a bit of this with slight shading (in the gun-holding arm of bearded man), which is better but still not quite right.
I only mention this because you said you were going for realistic in this drawing. The textures are all very flat and lifeless. I agree with Opal that it appears that you are drawing the outer shape first and then filling the inside in.
I think it’s one hurting the other (your technique is undermining your statement). (Looking at State of the Union) You’re focusing too much on detail, like wood grain, and cloth folds, yet, it looks flat and not well observed. Stuff like your faces, hands and the veins in the arms look very amateurish to me. You’ve got the classic “L” for a nose going on, and your body proportions are all over the place. I think you need to use the pencil with a little more finesse, too. As far as style goes, well, you just haven’t developed any yet, I don’t think.
Look, there are a few schools of thought here, and this all comes down to my opinion, but here goes anyway.
There’s technique, like rendering (shading, light and shadow, capturing likeness); mastering of your medium of choice (working fluently and with suburb control in such things as charcoal, pencil, watercolor, oils, digital, magnadoodle, etc.); perspective and foreshortening; composition; anatomy (important to you, because most of your subject material include humans); and so on. These are just the basics. Stuff that can be learned very early on.
Then there’s style. Anything from comics and cartoons, to impressionism, post modernism, and even the ‘primitive’ art lissener points to. I think mastering, or at least developing a good grasp on technique has to come first, before you even try to pin down a style, or label you work as such. Master things like vanishing points, still life, depth, shadow, color, anatomy. Worry less about just adding in detail, for detail’s sake. Detail doesn’t necessarily make a piece of art better, or more skilled. Use broad strokes and flourishes to affect. There are ways of actually using less detail to make a stronger and more impressive image, but to accomplish it well, you need to filter that style through your practiced technique and learned eye. Learning what simplifications work, and how to edit. Only then does it become stylized. And of course, you can add details that aren’t even there in real life. But, now you’re getting in impressionism, abstract and surrealism, and you don’t seem interested in it.
At the base level, I’ve always felt that some people can draw, and some just can’t. Or at least can’t get past a certain level. I’m talking about raw, innate talent. It’s the same with music. I can probably pick up a guitar, and work really hard at getting all the technique right, and make sure I’m working in all the details, and even ape certain styles, but I’ll never be a Hendrix. He was born with an ability to talk through it, not just master it as a technical device, but to literally emote with, fluently, making the complexity seem effortless. As if the guitar we’re being manipulated by his very emotions, as if his body and the instrument were one. (I know, it sounds corny)
But still, even if you have the raw talent, it needs to be refined. If you suck at drawing hands, practice. And practice only hands. Study them, they’re real physical things with their own set of rules and topography. Glossing over certain aspects in your art, because you don’t know how to render it, is one of the easiest ways to sabotage your work, and your integrity as an artist. Also, If you don’t understand perspective and vanishing points, learn what it’s about and how to use it in your art. You keep saying how hard you worked at adding all that detail, but it doesn’t show, simply because it seems you haven’t mastered the basics. So, when I look at heavily stylized art, even in such pieces like the ‘naive’ examples, I can see it was filtered through someone with a grasp of the basics. There’s a balance there. And to you it may appear to have been drawn by a child, I can tell it is a sincere piece, with a lot of thought behind it. And look at the lack of detail! If you’re going for realism, I think you have a very long way to go. If you’re going for heavy style, I’d say you’re not ready yet, simply because you haven’t gone from A to Z by getting through the rest of the alphabet.
For constructive criticism, learn how to draw simple objects. Still life. Render them well. Stop trying to jump into these complex compositions, with difficult subjects, drawn on loose-leaf, without first even mastering foreshortening (amongst other things).
Can you render a rifle, with the barrel coming out toward the viewer? Can you give it realistic light and shadow, highlights, secondary lighting (bounce lighting from surrounding brighter objects), and even reflections? What medium will you use? Do you know it’s limitations? Do you like to crosshatch, shade & smear, or what? Don’t draw from other people’s work, draw from life itself. Use actual objects or photos. Reference. Inspiration. Shoot, I’d almost be very interested to see you try your hand at something as simple as that. If not a rifle, choose an object of your choice.* You obviously love to draw, and have points of view. Make them stronger and say them louder by strengthening your aptitude.
*In fact, that might be a new thread. Still life, themed illustrations. Anyone for it?
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Argent, to reiterate, in the face of all your asked-for criticism, you exhibit enthusiasm and patience: you can’t learn these. You’re a born artist, IMO. But you need to pay more attention; not take so much for granted. People won’t see what you see until you really, *really *know how to see. You have some bad habits, some short cuts, where you don’t *think *about what you’re drawing. *Think *about every stroke. *You *know that noses don’t really look like that, nor do hands, nor heads. Pay attention.
If not, then REALLY invent new things: if you’re not interested in really observing, then REALLY create. You’re in an uncanny valley right now, which I honestly think you have the enthusiasm and patience to work your way out of.
One of my best instructors once told me, “for every good drawing that you do, you’ll have done 100 bad drawings.” It’s true, not only because constant practice will increase your skills, but as you advance you will consider your earlier drawings to be “bad” no matter how much you like them now. IMO, the mark of a true artist and also a true professional is a drive to continually improve; if you get to the point where you think “I’ve arrived!” and stop learning and growing, you’ll become stagnant. Compare this image (http://dinosauria.com/gallery/chris/trex1.jpg), that was done nearly a decade ago, with this one, which I updated about 5 years ago (http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL176/1171787/2428238/56256196.jpg) , with this one (http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL176/1171787/2428238/55590863.jpg), which is very recent. I can see noticeable improvement each time, either in regards to rendering technique or attention to detail or anatomical accuracy, and even now looking at the latest works, I’m looking for ways to improve what I’ve done. If, 5 years from now I can’t do something that is noticeably better than the one I did recently, then I’ve become too complacent.
Thanks! I usually do several pencil studies, then a clean line drawing, scan it and render the piece using Painter. Then I’ll use Photoshop for some texture application and some color adjustment. For the recent T.rex I brought in the fully colored image to Photoshop, made a new layer, with a bevel/emboss effect applied, and used the clone stamp brush on the new layer (with “sample all layers” selected) to bring in some more dimensional-looking scales. I actually use Illustrator for the teeth of predators; I’ll export the vector shapes to Photoshop, place them in the right spot, then flatten the image and finish the rendering in Painter. It helps keep the curves clean on the outer edges of the shapes.
Ahh. very nice. I tried my hand with Painter way back in the day when it was owned by Fractal Design. I used it with mixed result (probably because I was so used to the way PhotoShop worked), but you certainly make it sing. Or roar. (sorry).
I used Maya loooong ago (and Lightwave too), so I probably wouldn’t even recognize it anymore, now I use Cinema 4D by Maxon, pretty hard core. I used to be a graphic designer and photo retoucher who dabbled in 3D, now it’s pretty much all I do.
Funny you should say. I used the demo for about a day, just to get an idea. And it’s been coming to a boil in the back of my mind since. I think I’m about ready to plunk down the change for it. I’ve been doing a lot of organic modeling and have been stunned by the detail that zbrush can achieve with an almost intuitive sense of painting and sculpting. With yourself being a digital painter, I think it’ll come very natural to you, and really up your level of photorealism, speaking of growing over time! (if not a challenge)
