andrew ken ~ slow hand

[Sushy]

great still life studies. Maybe you could add some background to them too.

[aks9]

Sushy thanks, and good idea

So, here is a bunch of stuff from the past few weeks. I've been away traveling and have some catching up to do.













pencil sketch, i don't do characters often and this was a start.


water-colours, unfinished



and the still-life i am most proudestest of!



a wooden chess-set of mine which i love. done over the course of two weeks. learnt a lot doing it. took a lot of adjustments and measuring with lines to get the perspective of the box right, and i learnt a lot about colour, warmth, value, edges and of course texture. phew.
my "quality" standard for getting the lines and perspective to be right kept getting higher and higher until i just wanted it to look perfect and im sure that's the whole point of doing these studies.

[aks9]

...

[aks9]

alchemy










sketch + finished the watercolour

[kasblue]

i absolutely love that chess box. awesome! it even looks pretty damn hard to paint. the variations in color and perspective is just near perfection. way to go!

[WRappiii]

I had to look at that chess still life for a few minutes. It's hard to find anything to critique!

Like kasblue said, nice job!

[kevin_]

nice studies in here! really like your pencil stuff and your lines! keep it up!

[aks9]

kasblue thanks! yeah it was super hard to paint, but I'm so glad I went through, i learnt loads. thanks!
WRappiii yeah! thanks just gets me thinking that if i keep on doing studies like this, hopefully i should improve? makes sense. theres just so much to study and i panic when i think about how to integrate it all
kevin_ thanks buddy i haven't done any pencil stuff in a while i need to get back to it


so heres just a little photo-figure study from yesterday since i haven't ever really tried painting any figures yet. not finished yet:




busy gotta fit in mooorrrrrr


if anybody has some good input or resources on how to organize study practice to make it more effective i would greatly appreciate it, its something i am thinking about a lot these days.

[PointyEars]

Really nice work, especially the chess game, that´s awesome! I also like those abstract images in your second last post

[zou]

hi dude

the imagination is strong in you young padawan ! XD

i don't know if i understood your question about orgnization but here what i'm doing:
-a good organization is absolutely the way to show how professional you are and will help you progress

organizing resources

i have one big folder for photos one for artworks
i mostly use the same categories as photos websites (human - nature - object - animals ...) i use many keywords to name the same folder ( i use the everything software to instantly access my file by keywords)
to create a new category, i think of how i will think if i need that resources some day (use the most spantaneous keyword)


the same thing applies to artworks (other people works, master works ...)



organizing learning path

the most difficult thing since it's an unknown area:
i do same exercices as others people in CA
i look for the program of some known schools
i always looks for tutorials (even it's too much, later i will choose wich one to do)
i focus on one thing at a time, example this week or month i focus on: character design , environments design , figure drawing , animal drawing , anatomy ....


organizing files
-name correctly everything
-use many keywords
-for my sketchbook - i create a new folder for each day


hope it helps

[Patonki]

Wonderful still lives! The chess piece is breathtakingly well done! How long did you spend on it?
For you I'd suggest more imagination paintings, the stuff you can produce from your head seems quite a bit behind your technical skill with studies. But definitely keep those still lives coming as well!

[kasblue]

aw.. nice... this is really nice quick study...

[aks9]

PointyEars thanks! im super happy you like the abstract stuff, its always my favourite stuff to do. all this still-life study stuff is just a stepping-stone for me so i can do some badass psychedelic insaney things better in the future

zou ! thanks for taking the time to write down all that organisation info. the question is specifically about organising the actual learning process - i am drawn by the idea of "perfect practice makes perfect", but what is perfect practice?

organising resources: this is something i need to do, my resources are all scattered. building up an image library is something i just don't think about for some reason. i have an "artist" folder with lots of subfolders full of works by artists who inspire me, thats about it.
as for my own works, they are all hyper-organised by software, type of art, etc

organising learning path: this is the interesting part to me, trying to figure out what to focus on in each area and how to connect it all... cant even begin to sort out my thoughts on this right now. but when i do, ill likely understand the whole situation better. so i think ill do that soon.

ill think about what you said! interesting way of organising stuff, all tagged in one folder.
thanks for the input!

Patonki: thanks! took me 23hours, spread out over two weeks. i got totally computer-burned from doing it, well worth it though. imagination: hell yeah.... i can clearly see that in my life i tend to have this cycle, or a sine-wave of sorts, of focusing mostly on imagination with a half-hearted studies, or focusing mostly on studies with some half-hearted imagination stuff. i am most certainly in study-mode right now. integrating the two would surely be a good thing. gonna think about this!

kasblue thanks! took two hours, about 30-45 for a line-drawing of the figure and the rest painting.



sooo i worked on it a bit more for just over 2 hours. was hard at first, and then i got into it. in that time i managed to do the shoulder, arm and hand. man that chess study helped a lot, i wouldn't have been able to paint this before. hand still needs a lil work:



this is all i did today, man i feel lazy

[erdbeerfeldheld]

That chess board study is effing amazing. You should be proud! Your linework could use some work though. It looks a little stiff. Experiment with line weight and try to be more loose.

[kasblue]

going good... picking up colors really well. nice works on details. that hand doesnt look easy.

[aks9]

erdbeerfeldheld thanks! linework is sometimes stiff, sometimes i put no effort into it and i get comments everynow and then saying i should work on it. so i will

kasblue cheers, actually the hands feel easier to do than the solid plains (like back, arms, etc), im not very good at blending colours yet.


so, did another 3h today, the back, arm, hand,

[kasblue]

well, as far as i can see you're blending colors really well! good luck.

[aks9]

gestures and figure stuff
















worked more on the figure. blending the skin tones is hard on the bigger surfaces, her back, buttocks, arms...
pleased with the hair though
hands and feet aren't finished either.
didn't think i would be capable of this, last month. any advice on how to get more out of this figure and improve the skin is much appreciated.

[kevin_]

you got some real solid studies in here and i really like your pencils and lines! keep it up!

[ohomoho]

Man the wooden box and the girl are insane. You should chill the fuck out dude I wouldnt do that to myself in million years. It doesnt look like alot of fun tho.
It is indeed impressive.
I bet i could learn tons of stuff if i do one of those.

[iven]

Amazing work here, I really like your chessboard too, its impressing me how
you can draw something like that with so much patcience.
The last post was a question. I am on the road just sketching and sleeping on
diffenrent couches. Did you hear about the new Cintique alternative ?!

I am asking 4 advice in my sketchbook about PC tablets, maybe you can help?

[aks9]

_kevin haha thanks, and idk if you noticed but you posted almost the exact same reply a few days ago

ohomoho thanks . i highly recommend it and it can be a lot of fun once you get into it. its not the same fun as creative-imaginative stuff, but its rewarding in a different way; once things start to fall together and make sense and i feel that i am learning it becomes really satisfying in a way the purely inventive stuff isn't

iven cintique alternatives, ive only heard of http://www.rossmorr.com, one person in TAD mentioned having one and sayingit was good.


been busy with work here is all i have to post



the rage to improve my pencils. sketch wip









trying out some comp studies using only custom brushes. i suck at comps and enviros and need to do lots. making brushes is lots of fun



a little more work on this



and some blah

[WRappiii]

WOW. That figure is beautifully rendered! How long would you say that has taken you? Because it's photo real

This one is very nicely textured; I like it a lot.

[CountBlackula]

That nude study you did was gorgeous. Do you have any tips on blending?

[BHCS]

The girl study and box still life are superb. Be proud, you are obviously building a good critical eye, just try to apply it to your works form imagination more! Spend as much time as possible on them, you need to balance those two skills out

[kasblue]

wow~! just ... wwow!! that is huge improvement! that figure! it looks almost real! your digital work is just going leaps and bounds! your custom brush practice looks so much fun! i wana try that too man! i just gotta! can you give me some guidance where to start?

[aks9]

WRappi thanks! at the time of posting it, I had been doing that study for about 17hours. i am really slow. i worked on it for 3 hours yesterday and not a lot to show, but trial and error is part of the process
CountBlackula thanks I guess all I can offer is the way that I blend:

I use a default soft round brush, with flow set to 100% (I never alter the flow on the default brushes), size set to pen-pressure. I always have one hand on the number keys, to quickly shift the opacity precisely whenever I want to. When blending two blocks of colour, at first I start with 40/50%, mixing the two to get a half-way inbetween (alt-key eyedropper technique), then mixing the half-way with each of the ones on its side, and so on, as many times as necessary depending on how large the area is. For fine blending I have the opacity at 10. I think the important part is to just take a good look at the subject and try to see the "transition", or the "gradient" or the soft blend progression in the subject, clearly, where it starts and where it ends, in order to try and replicate it with any kind of accuracy. And also, even if painting a large area of skin (like the back or an arm) it seems that often I have to pay as much attention to the individual details as if it were something like a hand. Going over with a big brush hoping for it to work doesn't seem to work (for me, yet, anyway).
i hope that was helpful




BHCS haha thanks yes my imagination work is lagging behind, I simply haven't been putting my attention there for a while, wanting to focus on the technique stuff more because i am so crap at it. definitely looking forward to mixing those two things together. thanks for your comment


kasblue thanks man! yeah the custom brush stuff is super fun. ill try and explain how i go about it:

i start opening up a blank canvas and using a tool im comfortable with (for example small hard brush) i draw some interesting shapes. not too complex. do you know how to make custom brushes? the brush-shape has to be black, the background white, and any gray areas will show up as varying degrees of transparent. you just box-select an area around the brush, then in the edit menu choose "define brush preset". give it a name and it will appear at the very bottom of the brush palette.

now from the brush panel (F5) just play around with the settings, one by one. get a feel for what each thing does. i think the most important ones to experiment with at first are

- brush tip shape
- shape dynamics
- transfer

and the two most important pen settings seem to be "pen-pressure" and "direction". so for example, setting the size to pen-pressure and the angle-rotation to direction.

the goal is to get something that you can make a single stroke with that looks interesting. so that you can drop a few strokes and have it not be ugly.

once you have a nice brush, you have to make sure to save both the brush settings, and the brush set, if you forget either one of those you'll lose the brush forever. save the brush settings by going to the brush-presets panel (the one where you can choose all the brushes) and clicking on the little "paper" icon, the same one that is used for "new layer". it will ask you to just save the brush again. every time you make a change to a brush, it won't be saved, so you have to do this again.

and then, if you want to keep this brush and be able to load it in the future, you have to save a "set". you can find that in the panel-options for brush-preset, "save brushes..." which saves a file on your computer you can use again whenever. the last brushes you used should stay loaded in photoshop across launches, but if you load a new set of brushes you won't be able to load your custom ones back unless you have saved them to a file. and you can save as many brushes as you like into a single file by shift-selecting them. hope that helps!

and then for the enviros, what i did was decide to make something only using the custom brushes, nothing else. i chose two for each enviro, and tried to have a contrast (one soft edged and one hard, etc)



phew!

so i worked on the study for ages yesterday (i not telling how long :C), mostly arm and back, not much to show but there are definitely subtle improvements to areas that looked weird:



next up, finishing buttocks and refining hands/feet. yargh



and i had a ton of fun workin this out. this came easily and would have been a loads of work before the summer still WIP obviously.
the studies have helped with imagination stuff, i can feel it very tangibly. so i highly recommended them to everyone ~~––~–~–~–~–

[kasblue]

wow man... that was so important for me. you have no idea. thankyou! thankyou so much!
your studies are coming along so wonderfully. loving the pencils. u tha boss!

[Valyavande]

It's great to see how your studies turn out if you take the time to refine them. the chess set is absolutly amazing. Love it! I like the pencil character in that post a lot too.
I would never have the patience to work on studies that long! But I hope, you can learn a lot from it. It's nice to see how you concentrate on the different parts.

The pencil figure drawings are nice too. Good balance of practicing painting and drawing. I don't think there's any advice that I can give now - you are on the right track!

[aks9]

kasblue so glad it was helpful! your comment made my day. lookin forward to what you come up with, with the custom brushes

Valyavande thanks a lot! yes, its such a time investment that i often have the fear that it won't be a good use of the time. but so far it has helped me loads thanks for the comments on the figures, i always feel they're crap so if someone likes them then balance is restored in andrewland


i worked all day on this self-portrait for self portrait day 2012