Ville's lair of mentoring

**Ville_S** · September 20th, 2012, 03:52 PM

Hey there.

This is a tutoring thread where I I, Ville, try to do my best to tutor VincentV in the ways of artsy things. I have never tutored anyone in arts before, so this should be very interesting learning experience.

If you see this and wish to follow along and do the assignments your free to do so.

ok first assignment:

select 3 of your best works and post them here. if you used reference images link to them or post them with your artwork.

This is just so I can get the feeling where your at in artistic development.

Also let me know if theres some specific problem you want to work on or some specific thing you want to learn about.

**VincentV** · September 20th, 2012, 04:53 PM

Well, first of all, thank you very very much. I really look forward to your assignments and I hope my work will be satisfactory.

As for the first assignment. Here are three of my works that I consider to be better than (my) others.

Picture 1 - Bee

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Picture 2 - Sherlock

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Picture 3 - Lovecraft

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As for specific things I want to learn, I don't really have any specific ones. I'm willing to learn whatever you think would help me improve. Be that painting, anatomy, composition or anything else. I don't really know where to begin.

**Hiddles** · September 23rd, 2012, 07:22 AM

I'd like to join please! Thanks for the opportunity!

Picture 1

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Picture 2

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Picture 3

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Quite difficult to choose as they are all bad >//< These are my most resent and I only really have tests and sketches.

I'm starting at the beginning, I want to become more comfortable with my art and by learning gain more confidence. Anatomy, colour, lighting, digital, etc.

thanks again

**Ville_S** · September 23rd, 2012, 12:15 PM

VincentV: Nice works. I see that plenty of good things are happening there.

The bee is very impressive. The values look good and you got the specular highlights in eye and the legs very nicely.
Aditionally you seem to wrap your strokes over the form, further enchancing the feeling of 3d object. very very good.

One thing that you should keep your eye on is to draw what you see not what you think you see.
For example in the bee you have drawn lots and lots of individual hairs, but if you look closely at the photo you can actually see that there isn't actually all that many individual hairs you can trace through all of their length.
You can see the tips of hair on the rim but then they often disapear into this soft clump where it's very difficult to differentiate seperate hairs.

I know it can be hard, but don't think of what you draw or paint as objects like "nose" or "chair". Think of them just blotches of colors and shapes.
It's hard becuase your brain tells you to do the exact opposite, but you just have to teach yourselves to override that instinct.

Hiddles: Welcome!

*Quite difficult to choose as they are all bad >//< These are my most resent and I only really have tests and sketches.

Oh I know that feeling. I bet every artist do. But trust me, these skills are learned, and you can learn them and be good at this stuff....but only if you practice...hard.
no wishi washy "oh I draw when I feel like it", no. Just draw/paint. Thats the only sure way to get better at it.

I see that you do anatomy studies. That's very very good. You also label the anatomical parts which is very good, as that will help you to remember the anatomy.

Ok, I think we should start with structure and perspective. Mainly because it's really important to get that stuff right and secondly because I really need to work on that stuff myself.

I assume you have atleats some basic knowledge on how perspective works, so were not going to start drawing boxes. If you feel like you need to remind yourself about the basics please do so. There's no shame in that and I very much recomend it.
No matter how advanced you are you should remind yourself at times about the basics.

So what I want you to do in the following week is to pick 5 pictures of objects of your choosing (can be anything really, but insects and vehicles are recomended) and do structural analysis of each of them.
atleast 5...but more is always better.

If your not familiar what it is to do structural analysis, check these videos by Matt Kohr.

http://www.ctrlpaint.com/simplifying-form/
http://www.ctrlpaint.com/constructive-form-pt-1-5/
http://www.ctrlpaint.com/constructive-form-pt-2/

If you wan't further examples, do a google image search for "dynamic sketching".

Also try and plot the horizon/eye level line in your drawing.

ps. This is not assignment, just a general advice. What you both need at this point is milage. so draw/paint something every day. Try to get that routine going.
Even if your tired and don't feel like drawing...do it. Don't always need to be anything fancy. Just do it. Quantity over quality. The quality WILL eventually catch up.

That should keep us occupied.

Good luck!

**Rindoukan** · September 24th, 2012, 07:27 AM

First off I just want to say I appreciate the fact that you go out of your way to give some sort of guidence to other artists.Im very interested to see if this will help me improve.That aside..

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Something specific...Technique is the thing Im concerned most.Rendering, facial features,lines... pretty much everything.

**Ville_S** · September 28th, 2012, 12:57 PM

Ridoukan:

Oh NP. I'm glad to help if I can.

You certainly have eye for drama. Loving the assasins painting. Lovely sense of motion and impact.
I see few general problems in regards to lighting, values and colors.

For example in the evangelion and in the car it seems like you have painted the shiny reflections with white.
There's simple pointer to this. The shinier the surface the more mirror-like they act. Hence shinier the surface the more they simply reflect colors from the surranding environment.
So instead of white you should use the sky color on the surfaces that are directed upwards and ground color in the surfaces that are directed downwards.
Ofcourse you get the bright almost white spot in cases where the surface reflects the light source (Sun, bright lamp etc.) but that's really only the half of the story.

So how are we doing?
Looking forward seeing what you have come up during the week.

Was the assignment ok? 5 is a bit small number so if you feel like ramping up the number of assignments let me know.

**Rindoukan** · September 28th, 2012, 01:12 PM

not to sound ungrateful but,is that all ? Is it because I've shown only paintings and not technical stuff ? If so I can apply some sketches and stuff.

**TNiznet** · September 28th, 2012, 01:44 PM

Rindoukan

Are you serious? -_-, unfruitful lad.

You are too kind Ville for doing this. I don't specifically know what area I want to improve on but rather learn off what ever you feel is important and the assignments that you present. With that said, um these, I think are my best works.

**Ville_S** · September 28th, 2012, 01:57 PM

Ridoukan: Well, honestly I wasn't planning on making any sort of in depth analysis with the works you posted. I just wanted to see where your at and what seems to be general problems so I could decide what sort of assignments I should set up. I did check your sketchbook and the same issues that can be seen in your three best ones are repeated in your technical studies.
I can certainly make a paintover/dissection of one of your paintings if you want.

**Rindoukan** · September 28th, 2012, 02:02 PM

My apologies.It's just that you gave stuff to do to the other people,I was wondering why it wasn't that the case with me.

**Ville_S** · September 28th, 2012, 02:28 PM

The assignment I gave in the post #4 was for everyone who wanted to participate including you. Did you do them?

**VincentV** · September 29th, 2012, 06:18 PM

Hey Ville

I haven't had a chance to scan all of the sketches yet. So here are the ones I've scanned so far. Will make sure to upload the others asap.

Cool asignment. It's tricky to tranform and split complex shapes into simpler ones. Especially with insects. And again: thx a lot for your help

**Ville_S** · October 1st, 2012, 01:52 PM

VincentV: These look really nice! Nice simplified planes, eye level plotted. My only comments would be to really keep eye on those parallel lines.
All parallel lines, when continued to the horizon, run into same vanishing point. In your drawings some lines don't quite do that, causing subtle but noticeable distortions.

TNiznet: nice! Those b&W thumbnails look good. Nice spectrum of values with single focal point with hightest contrast. Good good good.

The problem I'm seeing that your using bunch of small low opacity/flow strokes in your paintings. This leads into somewhat messy look. It looks like your hesitating, scrubbing that color in untill your satisfied. The problem is that when you some green in low opacity/flow over the blue of the sky your essentially mixing colors and the result might not be what you would realistically see in that environment/lighting.
I had this exact problem myself, and you can see it in my sketchbook thread. the way I fixed this problem myself was by setting the the stylus tip feel (from tablet properties) and by doing lots and lots of studies.

So here's the assignment for this week. By now you should have whole bunch of structural sketches. Let's dissect them.
Identify parallel lines, and by using a ruler extend them to the horizon line. do they run into the same vanishing point? if something looks off, really think about what went wrong.
It might even be a good idea to write that stuff down. These sort of self analyses, I feel, are absolutely essential for learning. Mistakes are only bad if you don't learn anything from them.

I could do this for you...but, as the saying goes: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

please try to post your stuff saturday at the latest so that I have time to look at them and comment on them.

Next week I think we will be delving into values.

**Ville_S** · October 2nd, 2012, 04:11 AM

Sorry, forgot to ad this. Once your done analyzing and figuring out what went wrong draw the sketch again with fixes you identified.

**Rindoukan** · October 2nd, 2012, 09:03 PM

not sure if I quite understood the assignment but here this goes.

**VincentV** · October 7th, 2012, 06:10 PM

Sorry for not posting, but I've been rather ill these last few days. I'll make sure to post the sketches asap. Sorry for the late notice.

**Erebus74** · November 6th, 2012, 07:05 AM

Hello Vincent, can I ask if I can join in this "class".
I'm late, but anyway here are my 3 introductory paintings. They are not maybe "my best", since I think I do better on the actual work I do for illustrating boardgames, but I'm interested in getting better at human figure drawing/rendering and enviroenmental/ambient painting. I had not an academic training, I'm a self-taught artist, so any help in improving is wellcome.

Here I go:
1- this is a finished piece. Some problems surely with the arm in the left. But I don't tell anything, just let me know your toughts.
http://erebus74.deviantart.com/art/K...F16488964&qo=1

2 - Another finished piece. Got mixed critics on this one.
http://erebus74.deviantart.com/art/R...F16488964&qo=2

3 - This one is a bit unfinished, because it was born as a sketch for an editor. But I was told the shield in front is deformed, there are anatomy problems and perspective problems, and so the sketch was not accepted and didn't go further in developing it. I leaved it visibile on DA because I was searching for constructive critique, but got none

http://erebus74.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d5g80am

Thanks in advance.

Giorgio

P.s.: sorry if I use the links, but I find uploading to "stash" on DA via ftp much more faster than uploading here ^_^