andrew ken ~ slow hand

[Cojac]

I like your last painting, the still life, I just think that you should lighten the cast shadow a little.

[aks9]

lionheartG thanks, i can't stand to look at the sea-space picture anymore, i've improved it quite a lot and will post that up here soon. thanks for the comments thanks for stopping by ~

Cojac hey, the cast shadow was actually quite dark at the time i painted it, as were the form shadows quite harsh too. i adjusted the light setup today a little and the result happens to be a softer cast shadow. also realised that my monitor setting was at too low a brightness setting and i couldn't hit the oranges properly. got all that fixed up. thanks for the comment



worked on it a few more hours, leafs are mostly done, now its mostly texture and highlights on the skin, which will be an interesting challenge.
this is from life, the leafs wrinkled and dried a bit over night, the lighting has changed a little bit on the skin but i like it better this way anyhow.

[aks9]

~ 2013 ~

Yet another year has come to pass. I joined conceptart.org in the summer of 2010, so six months from now I will have been on this ride for 3 years.


Last year, I said:

my artistic resolution for 2012 is to learn digital painting, and to concentrate my energies on learning the visual art foundations.

I made good progress in that direction. I feel much stronger in areas I was completely hopeless at.





I got paid for my first art-related jobs this year too, as well as selling my first ever prints (I sold two prints at a fair where I snuck in with a friend and we stealthily layed our stuff out on the grass. But that counts )

But this could be so much more. Got a long way to go.

My artistic resolution for 2013 is to focus on those areas which I have been neglecting and bringing them up to par so that all the parts can integrate well; and to earn more money doing freelance work

[aks9]

this is as far as i took the orange. peel needs more work especially

[twelvex]

all your stuff is so nice - and I would already have stopped on working on the orange because It looks already finished to me

[DvrJeroen]

That last orange study is insane man!
nicely rendered...Very nice :p

[kasblue]

oh God! the textures the whole feel and colors! magic! very nice!

[aks9]

Thanks for your comments guys



I posted this in the CC section ( link ), but I'll post it here too


---

I'm posting up an ink drawing I've been working my ass off for yonkeys, on and off for months.
I'm going to finish it within the next two days, and I realised I'd really benefit from any feedback and constructive crits people on here might have.
The medium is a 0.05mm micron ink pen, on a small 14x10cm paper surface. It's all done with stipling, and I don't want to use anything other than dots, no lines or masses.

Its almost finished, so I don't have much room for changes - but you never know what helpful suggestions might pop up.

I'm particularly concerned about the white areas of the galaxy, I want it all to be bright and make use of patches of bare white, particularly around the center of the galaxy. I envision the rings getting darker as they go out, with the ones close to the centre really brimming with light, though I'm not quite sure thats working right now. I think I shouldn't have added so much texture to the front ring, closest to the viewer, and so things are a bit out of balance now, and I'm contemplating if/how to darken out the rest to compensate.


Thanks a lot for your suggestions

[aks9]

these sketches aren't so good but i want to update regularly with whatever it is I actually have, so here they are.





















and some wip on a pencil sketch ive been doing for a while




check out this awesome music. 40 minute track:

Sullen Tone

[aks9]

.

[aks9]

little sunday

[AronDraws]

I really like your weapon designs! They're intricate yet look like they would have some serious heft to them.

[aks9]

thanks arondraws! very nice sketches on your website, you gonna start a CA sketchbook?

[aks9]

two more from last night

[aks9]

ellipses hard

[Lucarky]

Working hard I see! You're studies' good like always. And the Chaos Sky on post #309 is incredible!

[aks9]

thanks lucarky, your comment made my morning always striving for distant carrots can make me forget to enjoy and feel proud of the things i've already done so far.

---


practicing figure using straight lines in gesture drawings has been helping immensely. Rengin gave me this advice back in May 2012. shameful that I didn't take it up seriously until now, but I think I'm finally starting to understand it.

i'm starting to feel like i can visualise the parts of the body in my head in 3d and how they interconnect, all this time my frustration with the figure was that i was never getting really clear on the shapes and their relations. looking forward to more practice. went a bit overboard with the ridiculous muscle-ish stuff. not quite sure which back muscles are the ones that define the form

[aks9]

birthday present for my stepfather, copied from a photo

[aks9]

so much more to learn..............................




yesterday







today




























from ref (yes the ref had such saturated colours)


from imagination based on previous ref colour palette


memory from tonights sunset


from ref

[eclip-se]

Omg ^^ again incredible pieces.. you'r machina too

[llex_paul]

wow, you have a ton of studies and postures! i liked a lot the orange study

[aks9]

thanks guys


blooororrghhhhh

dear life please someone i need crits

[lionheartGFX]

holy crap so much stuuuuuuuff! i love iit, one little crit tho i think you should study or re study the pelvis area and more specially how it connects with the legs, some of your figure stuff its looking a bit disconnected, and you should also do a few figures when you work on Body balance and weight distribution it feels like a few are quite floaty too, but i will give you MAD kudos for usin so few and confident lines Awesome job, i cant tell you anything about color since i dont know about it but i love your color pieces but the composition feels a bit cluttered at times and not as balanced it seems you go for the details and dont analyze how the tension in the piece is being handled, its a matter of reading a but more on composition and do more thumbnails before settling for a compo work hard dude!

[llex_paul]

and even more stuff, its great to see how many works you can produce, i wold advise you to try aim for a better precision of lines instead of numbers. Hope it helps

[aks9]

lionheartGFX: thanks for the advice on the pelis and legs, i agree with you. I haven't done any weight/balance studies so I'll try those too. the figures with few lines came about by doing 30second gestures and deciding to only use straight lines for it, no squiggles. that way, i'm forced to be clear about what each line means. i tried doing some 10s gestures too, extremely hard, there is barely enough time to put down even 10 single lines. how would a figure look with just 10 lines? good practice
the enviro comps do need work. im not sure if its because of balance or tension tbh, when shrunk down and looked at as small thumbnails they look quite accurate, to me at least. in the ones i posted, the main fault that I see is that too many of the edges are soft, and forms undefined, too much overlaying opacity brushes. i definitely need way more comp practice though

llex_paul: i agree precision is certainly more important than just mass producing. though in my defense, there is just a high number of sketches in the last post because you end up with high numbers of figures if the poses are 30s. im certainly going to be doing more precise and longer duration figure studies though, i definitely need those. figure figure figure. thanks for the comment!

thanks for the feedback both of you!




reworked this

[llex_paul]

About detailing you can do it, i know it, you have some wonderful studies with a few pages so im pretty sure you are capable.
This one looks very vivid, looks good, try to make roads/rivers not straight when is possible. It adds a lot to the dynamism.

[eclip-se]

About the thing you sad, when i always finish something from observation, mostly skull & basic geometry shapes :p next thing after what i do, is i'll check the drawing on the mirror and somehow i see additional +50% more errors and it looks terrible ~.~ but im glad for that, errors = progression.. My question is about the line, my extern teacher (not anymore) that didn't teached me much.. always told me that i should't care about tone&shading&rendering, but mastering the line and measuring, accuracy.. If i master the line and fast accurately measuring, mastering the tone will be no problem in short amout of time, i hope that's what you also trying to tell me and lead me that way + if i force myself to do draw continuously one thing and try to be more accuracy, brain starts used to feel more comfortable and vuala, we have only accurately drawings. The only problem is to force myself and dont fail from poisoned feel of doing something over and over again. Btw you'r on TAD? nice update

[aks9]

eclip-se, that's kinda what i'm saying, but also not. here are my two cents, im no teacher and have much, much to learn, but perhaps my thoughts can be helpful.

i wouldn't go so far to say "master" your line. at this stage isn't not about line, doing line drawings isn't about making the line good, its about observing form and proportions accurately. but i do think its true that once you spend a good amount of time focused on learning and seeing and drawing proportions well, yeah your brain will assimilate that and be able to do so with less effort. i don't know if it will ever get completely effortless or automatic, i assume (and what i've experienced so far) is that it will instead make it easier for you to get into concentrated and focused states of mind, and to be in those states for longer periods with less resistance or difficulty. its in those states that you learn the most, that you see clearest and that you push your frontier. rather than expect your current level to become automatic or effortless, the way I see it is to instead get used to spending more and more time focused and concentrated, in focused mind-states where you're really putting everything into it, and in doing so repeatedly, to be able to get into those states easier.

thats what its like to me. while painting the chess-set or the nude woman, part of what enabled me to do that wasn't so much an increase in knowledge of how to do those things after having practiced it a lot (because I hadn't practiced still life very much and as might be obvious from my sketchbook, those pictures were a big leap upward), instead, it was resolving to spend increasing amounts of time at my highest possible concentration and focus, and calmly observing exactly what i was seeing and translating that into my picture.

so, when doing exercises such as these, especially when trying to get specific basic attainments, to decide upon just one thing as the focus of the exercise: such as capturing the proportions and form accurately in line. to be able to focus all your attention on that, instead of scattering it among tone/value and other things. if you never solely focus on just X, you might never get really good at doing X, because you only have a limited amount of attention, and it'll be spread among all the different things you're doing. so i do think that while trying to learn specific things, to focus on doing just those things, for the duration of the specific exercises. this can also help clarify what exactly it is you are trying to do in that exercise, and to think clearly about how to do it. i'm far from being great at any of these things, but this approach has been really helpful for me.

I distinctly remember leveling-up during the Light and Form class that I took at TAD (more on that later). Our teacher Dorian Iten made us do a master copy, and we spent weeks and weeks on it. The point was to push our observational and rendering abilities as far as they could go, by refining and improving one single image until it was as close to an ideal as we could take it. In spending so much time and attention focused in observing one single thing, it literally stretched my capacity to observe, it showed me "how far i can actually go, if needed", and it pushed the ceiling up on what my observation-level was. so its in that spirit that i'm talking about approaching these exercises.

more than anything, concentrated focus, a specific goal and strong intentions can take a student a long way


really do your best to not have a poisoned attitude! do it with an attitude inspired at the idea of seeing progress IN THAT VERY DRAWING SESSION, of making the very drawing you are working on count. no pumping out mechanically, no doing things by rote, frustrated drawing knowing that your heart isnt in it, "hoping" to improve. observe with all your capacity. i draw the object once, notice what is wrong, and then re-draw it, paying special attention to fix those mistakes, so the new one ends up undoubtedly better than the last one, or at the very least, I'll be seeing the object more accurately than before. check the errors again, and within a few versions you should get noticeably closer and see the results.

doing things over and over with a poisoned attitude isn't helpful - i did that with lots of the figures in the first few pages of my sketchbook and i didn't improve much. its not so much just doing stuff lots - i think learning (in part) happens consciously, you have to take control of it. just remember that our psyches are rebellious - if part of you is trying to force you to work by punishing itself, another part of you will surely try to rebel against that, and this inner conflict takes energy away, it doesn't add anything.


as for TAD, i took 3 classes part-time during 2012. Fundamentals of Light and Form, Composition & Colour, and Painting Fundamentals. All three classes were excellent, and I especially recommend the Light and Form class. I learned so much in that class; that class gave me a solid foundation in understanding how to observe, and in understanding the theory of how light and value work. I know what rimlights, ambient lights, specular reflections, occlusion shadows, cast shadows, form shadows, diffusion/reflection/refraction all are now, woo! I made all the still-lifes, the chess-set and the photo-study of the nude figure, during the following summer and autumn after that class ended. I highly recommend it to anyone, and the teacher Dorian Iten is really good at explaining things clearly and meticulously.


bwararhghzars. i hope all of that is clear and there isn't too much that any super duper artists will disagree with.





aand ive got to finish a commission and havn't had much time for practice.

drew my neighbour from life. must we're going to make this a regular thing. ill have something worth looking at of her soon!




and a couple of days ago i finished this picture (micron ink pen):

[aks9]

been doing some drawing of figures walking around the supermarket. is hard! my first attempts were even terribler.
with these ones, i spent a few seconds to capture the gist/gesture of a movement/pose in my mind and then i tried translating that from memory to paper, and this seems to be a good way to go about it



squiggly lines from holding a little soft-cover sketchbook in my hand

[aks9]

sugar, terrible

i am having a small exhibition at a local cafe, went to hang up my stuff there today. met a nice artist lady, we might be painting together in her atelier.


simple gestures
while watching Chinese film: Hero
such a beautiful film, i'll watch it again