first painting

[sasco]

Hi,

Just recently bought a wacom intuos3 tablet and have been playing around with it. Haven't really drawn anything for a long time so I tried my hand at some digital painting.

This is the initial sketch I did in PS


This is where I've come up to so far in terms of painting it


I seem to have totally messed up the proportions in the process of painting it but then again this is the first time I've actually painted anything digital or otherwise. The way I've been doing this is to block out basic values and then slowly work them over using the smudge tool. Although I feel this isn't the correct way to work as it's quite laborious smudging everything to a smooth finish.

This is how I originally started off blocking things in


I'd appreciate any crits or pointers

Cheers
-Matt

*EDIT* - typo

[sasco]

Haven't had much time to work on this but there were some things that were annoying me too much to leave alone. Aligned the lips a little better with the nose, and made them a little bigger/fuller. Eyes were too high up on the head I felt and the nose was way too long so i moved the eyes and bridge down a bit.
The eyes also looked a little too small for my liking so I enlarged them. Overall I felt the head was too elongated and thin so I removed some the shading and shortened her head a tad. Im trying to soften up the shadows a lot as she seems to look too chiseled for my taste. I'll also have to fix the neck cuz it's starting to look as if she has an adam's apple.
There is still something about her eyes that is annoying me but I can't put my finger on it, something to do with the alignment of them isn't sitting so well with me at the moment.

Anyways here it is so far:


Critiques, opinions, suggestions or just general pointers in the right direction would all be greatly appreciated.

Cheers
-Matt

[JERI]

A problem I see is that the nose is at a different angle from the face. The left side of her nose appear to be drooping compared to the right side. It stands out.

Other than that, everything else seems fine to me.

[sasco]

yep, I see what you mean, thanks for pointing that out, I missed it completely

[dogfood]

You're going to the small brushes too soon. Use much larger brushes to define the big forms and introduce the underpainting. It's also a good time to add the blues, reds, greens, and yellows which will give more life to the skin (right now, it's just too monochrome). Only after exhausting what you can do with a very large brush should you go to a slightly smaller one. It's also tougher to integrate the eyes into the face when you paint them like you're doing. It often leads to the whites being far too bright.

While I like what's going on in general, the eyes and mouth in the painting are much smaller than in the drawing (giving it a completely different feel) and those are some club ears (did she wrestle a lot?).

[sasco]

hahahaha, naw I just haven't gotten around to painting the ears properly yet since I kept being distracted by the wonky proportions. You're right about the differences between the drawing and the sketch, although Im starting to like the lips and eyes in the painting more as they feels more feminine to me than the ones in the sketch.

As an aside, my computer just crashed without me saving the psd file, so I'm gonna have to work from the jpeg I saved which is a little annoying

Cheers
-Matt

PS. Thanks for the brush tip, I'm still trying to get to grips with the whole digital painting thing so I'm probably doing a million things wrong

[madster]

You can set a preference for auto saving of your updated psd files, which at least minimizes some losses. It's saved my butt a couple of times...

Learning to hit Ctrl+'S' every time you change colors or tools is a good habit to learn, also...

~M

[sasco]

Ok, now my complete lack of technical skill is starting to show, I'm looking at this thing I feel like I'm going backwards, the more I work on it the less life like it starts to look. I'm really starting to struggle with colour and value, I'm just not able to get this thing to look like anything but a mannequin

I'm still working on the eyes and I still havent gotten around to working on that ridiculous "wrestler" ear. If anyone can offer any suggestions or tutes I could look at that would be fantastic.

Here's where it's at:


Cheers
-Matt

[INFERNOmunky]

do you have a reference you can post......because in most non klingon people ive come across in my travels dont have brow like that on her left eye..........
...and her jawline seems to be a bit uneven.........
....getting much better
....json

[sasco]

I know the painting looks absolutely nothing like this ref but yeah, here it is: