One Nice Day

[blogmatix]

man is there a lot of work here! i see a lot of technical practices and thats good but dont forget to apply it either! cool sb!

I remain amazed at just how much work Xeon has done in a relatively short time, and how much progress he made. I think we should now petition him to start a web comic - I can't wait to see the applied results of all the hard work. :-)

[Xeon_OND]

Thanks for the kind comments, folks!

@ BlogMatrix: Web comic? LOL , not now. I've been doing mostly studies so far and haven't drawn any shit from imagination for like......half a year or so. LOL Soon, soon!

-------------------------UPDATE------------------------------

Have just purchased the Aftershock XM17 custom laptop and waiting for it to arrive around next Thursday or so, then I'll be able to connect the Intuous 4 to this heavenly beast and practice painting in my home!
With 24 GB of RAM, it should be enough to handle paintings at A0 size / 300 DPI with 250+ layers in Photoshop turned on, with no lag. :p

I'm planning a short family trip to some nearby country end December. Maybe Malaysia.

I've also started using copic markers to do my head and figure drawings.
Not sure why, but the markers finished up real fast, in 2 weeks. This is my 2nd batch, and if it gets used up so fast, I'm considering watercolor instead. Maybe it's because I'm using thick paper? Not sure.

I do the lay-in using a light copic marker, then draw on it using pen (the marker lay-in helps reduce the pen lines somewhat, since I've a bad habit of over-construction), then I switch to copics again, this time using 2 darker markers for the shadow and core shadow. Used another 2 - 3 grey markers for the hair and a peach color to make the skin look more humane.

Drawings for the past 6 weeks below:




























Will be practicing more on drawing hands and feet. Fucking hard as hell, especially drawing the palm side of the hand and the feet from underneath etc.

I've also started reading Hogarth's book on drapery. I'm not a fan of Hogarth, but his drapery book trounces all others, including Vilppu's! Sad to say, since Vilppu is my god. Well......

The end of the year is coming! End of the world 2012? That's bullshit, because I'll still be drawing all the way into the New Year! Cheers!!!

Next update: 23 December 2012 (approx)

Good day!
Xeon

[p sage]

Hey X....

Good work as usual.

I know you like critiques, so take into consideration what I'm saying at least.

What I'm seeing in many of your head drawings (especially) and it also manifests itself in some hand and figure drawings: there's a loss of "the whole"...

In some ways, "the whole" means symmetry. For instance, if I compare one eye to the other eye, and then both eyes to the face... they very often look crooked.

Example: http://www.oneniceday.com/Artwork/2101.jpg

If you flip the image horizontally, you may see the mistake a bit better. Compare the right eye (our left) to the left jaw (our right). Then compare both eyes to each other. By and large this drawing is an improvement on your past drawings... but it still suffers the "loss of the whole" (it's skewed).

This always comes back to not seeing "the whole", and the cause is "drawing by parts".

Drawing "by parts" means you draw a head shape. Then you draw an eye. Then you draw a nose. Then you draw a mouth. Then you go down and draw an arm. You're focusing on each individual feature by itself. You're trying to get these individual shapes very precise; but what happens when drawing this way is you tend to lose the relationship of these parts to the whole. The pieces never seem to play well together.

Drawing is all about relationships. You have to keep one side of the head in your peripheral vision while drawing the other side. You have to keep the eye you've just drawn in your peripheral vision when drawing the other eye. This is called "relating". If you notice, even Vilppu uses the term "relate". This means that each line, each shape, each feature you draw fits with everything else you've already drawn.

There's really no other way of doing that than keeping what you've already drawn in a sort of "peripheral vision" when you're drawing the next feature.

Anyway... keep up the good work... and consider what I've said at least

[Xeon_OND]

Hey Sage! What you've just said is very enlightening (yes, I love negative feedback)!

This is one big-ass major problem I'm having now. I tried to draw the construction lines as accurately as I can so that the features align, but everytime when I flip them over in Photoshop, everything goes skewed. Maybe it's a cock-eye problem. I'll try your advice, and try to keep the other stuff in my sight when I'm drawing a particular thing. To be honest, I never try this before (I always lay in the construction in one shot, then go in and draw the individual parts etc.)

Thanks!
Xeon

[Xeon_OND]

Yes! 2012 is gone. It's been a crazy year now that I think of it.

The earlier half of 2012 was about rushing school assignments and cramping as much art stuff as I can absorb before school finishes, while the second half the year was being lucky enough to get into a company and doing user interfaces. It's not what I learned in school, but doing something new for a change is not a bad thing as long as it's art-related (actually, it's possible to apply art stuff when designing icons and buttons etc).

The good thing, though, is that every now and then, work is lesser and thus I've the time to practice my painting and drawing.

I'm currently working on my own concept art project and will alternate to-and-fro the usual anatomy / technical studies, because doing the latter alone makes it slower to absorb (because there's no application and you're just doing routine stuff). I'll be posting the artwork and concepts for this project at another site. I've purchased the domain name and will post the link here once the initial sketches and processes are ready.

I've been playing Super Street Fighter 4 : Arcade Edition 2012 at home and fighting with my colleague LOL
My main character is Juri (awesome character design, btw); used to be Ryu but got tired of him.

Below are some digital paintings done during work (not part of the work, but personal practice. SHhhhhhh......:p)

They are referenced from photos; but once the painting starts coming together, I rely less and less on the photo and start painting it the way I see fit.
The more complete environments are done in about 8 hours, some slightly less, some slightly more.
The head paintings are done in about 8 - 12 hours (on and off).

I use the default hard round brush (Shape Dynamics + Transfer [Pen pressure + Flow]) and the default hard round eraser for all paintings. This way, I don't get distracted by fancy custom brushes.

Paintings below are not in any date, but generally speaking, the more completed ones are the latest ones.

Below head is a style study of one of Johannes Helgeson's paintings. His work is at : http://www.helgesonart.blogspot.com
I really love this kind of animation style and plan to learn this sort of style together with anatomy studies.




Learning to paint fire. It seems one can paint decent looking fire by painting a soft glowing orange-red hue, then overlap harsh yellows in the middle, then overlap white on top of the yellows:














This is a painting done last year, in August.





Study of Goro Fujita's painting:


No dates for the next update; most probably sometime in March!

Again, any comments or feedback is highly welcomed and appreciated!

Good day!
Xeon

[Zazerzs]

You have improved so much "never give up never surrender "

[Yinari]

Great studies! You are really making progress. I especially like how you painted the fruit So keep them coming!