le-mec's sketchbook - Dec 1. -sketcher

[le-mec]

Okay, first off -- I seem to SUCK at painting clouds. So, for starters, I pulled out my treasured Spirited Away art book and pored over it for a while and tried to grasp how they dealt with clouds. Then I had a bit of a revelation:

One of the things I realized about traditional media that makes it look well, traditional, is that the brushes run out of paint and need "loading" and they pick up other paints underneath and so there's a lot of varying colour. If you're aware of these things, you can use them to your advantage, and achieve a great deal of attractive effects.

The wonderful thing about digital media is that you can just pick a colour and nail it and get consistency -- but sometimes that consistency can make things look flat and otherwise boring! SO....

I have added a "dirty" mode for the PPalette aggressive autosampler. What this does is it picks up colour (just like the pressure-sensitive eyedropper) but in mid-stroke! The harder you press, the faster it picks up the colour. In some ways I feel like my brush really does get soiled somewhat with other paints on the canvas, and I can achieve some really nice colour variations!

Now my only beef with this cloud right now is I can't seem to get under the cloud and really get the sense that it's looming properly over the camera. I have to backpedal a bit later and study what goes on underneath a cloud....

[Idiot Apathy]

Mm mm, yup - that's one of the major disadvantages to digital and something often overlooked and taken for granted - randomness! It's a shame that you have to consciously work at it in digital but oh well, everything has it's trade off. I think you'd be at home with Painter my friend.

Clouds, yeah I seem to always draw them as if they were flat and at the horizon. Try to picture more perspective - a floating box in the sky perhaps and picture that even though they are free flowing they can and will still have bottoms and perspective me thinks. Also, I know it's hard but try to use white only as the brightest bright highlights - not saying they should be too much darker though.

[le-mec]

Hmmm -- Hmmm!!!! I have noticed that when I jump into paints all my perspective training flies out the window and I start madly splatting colour like Jackson Pollock on too much paint thinner. I find myself obssessing too much on this tone and that and not enough on just the perspective and volume of my subject. It's not so much about what tones I'm choosing -- but that I'm not making the effort to picture my 3D subject in my head. So, I think my problem is I'm treating tones and painting much the same way an amateur draughtsman tries to make drawings while obssessing over line quality and technique while totally forgetting about the subject.


I know this much about linework, and I'm willing to bet that this applies to paints as well: F*ck technique and F*ck style. If you pour your effort into visualizing and imagining your subject, then with line art, the proper lines will present themselves to you, and with tonal work, the proper colours and brushstrokes will be instinctive. Only after I have a clear mental image of my subject can I start to worry about what techniques I'm going to use to put it on paper...

[le-mec]

Yes!!! that's it!!!! I can't believe I forgot how it feels just to make something _read_ -- just to have the feeling of depth and perspective...and to imagine and visualize something, no matter how simple -- and then depict it. This is the major drive behind my line work, and I failed to see that in my painting!

Somehow I have to make the skills and ways of thinking carry over... I already surpassed the biggest hurdle of being able to visualize things in my head in line... and now the battle is in being able to light and colour them with my imagination...

Exciting sh*t!


IdiotApathy >> Yeah, I used to use Painter, but I found it got too slow -- and I'm way to lazy to port my palette plug-in over to that program...

[Alday.J]

Salut, Le Mec !
Well, first time I check your SB and I really dig most of your pictures, nice ! The drappery studies are excellent !
À plus, mec !
J.

[nineself]

Hey Le-mec, awesome sketchbook youve got going! I cant believe I didnt find this earlier!
Your linework is really confident and your lifedrawings and gestures just flipped my wig! Post more!

[Tigermilk]

holy crap man, really cool work.
love the life drawings, great lines.
show us some more.
tiger

[le-mec]

Alday J. >> Pardonnez moi, mon français n'est pas le meilleur... mais, j'ai besoin de pratique! Merci Julien! Je suis trés hereux vous trouvez mon cahier de croquis! J'aime regarde vos peintures et je pense que vous avez un grand modèle...

nineself >> I've found a decent comfort zone with people... although now I have so many different frontiers to conquer... Landscape, architecture, animals... and PAINTING!!! Grargh... too bad I'm already out of school and I don't think I can afford to go back but there are so many artists to admire and aspire to emulate!

Tigermilk >> if only my recent life drawings looked good to me after a few days later... I only did them on Thursday and now they look odd to me. I thought I was better than that! I'm like one of those people that look in the mirror and say: "that's not how I look!"

IdiotApathy >> Now I have some painting questions for you!!!!

Most of the people I meet seems to advocate that painting should be fast 'n' loose but one of the things that bugs me the most is that when it comes to drawing hard, angular surfaces, I've got no choice but to shrink the brush down and wheedle away at it -- otherwise the painting winds up being mushy. I hate that mushy look, but there's no way I'll get a painting done in few hours if I'm painting a subject matter that is filled with precise, clean, boundaries and hard edges. What's it gonna take?!

Also, when I have say, a large wall or floor, it takes me a good long time to properly render it so that it doesn't look wobbly or wonky -- again... it's probably not supposed to take me 5 minutes to do a frickin' wall, but it's really draining my stamina painting -- and I know in the back of my head that Ryan Church damn his soul is out there are banging out masterpieces in a couple hours!

[le-mec]

I like drawing caves... why? Because all I have to worry about is specular lighting and I don't get all confused worrying about colour.

[le-mec]

Okay... I managed to solve my problems with hard angular surfaces that take too damn long to work with (or wind up looking muddy at the edges). The biggest problem was that I was using just a circular brush the whole time. The circle brush works great for most surfaces, but once you get into any fine crevices, it starts to be a real pain in the ass.

So, I switched to a line brush which, when rotated properly, allows me to swat loosely over large surfaces while keeping the edges clean. However, this caused another problem to crop up -- while I don't have to worry about sizing my brush down any more to needle into cracks, I still have to rotate it fairly frequently. I didn't like the idea of having to drag a slider back and forth to keep rotating the brush, so I cracked my programming knuckles and added a "smart-rotate" function into my palette plugin.

Basically, it detects any large jumps in cursor position (like when I lift the stylus out of the tablet's magnetic field, move it a short distance, and then hover back into the field) and realigns the brush along that jump. Great! Now I don't have to mash any buttons or drag sliders to intuitively realign the brush, and it doesn't realign itself while I paint (I want it fixed at one angle). So... first thing I did was paint a big frickin' pink cube....

[Erilaz]

LOVE your animations man. Just brilliant. Really clean gorgeous cartoon style.

[le-mec]

Erilaz >> Thanks man! Well, you've already seen this on another forum, but for everyone else, here's an avatar I whipped up to use over there...

[le-mec]

Here's a fun little piece that I spent way too much time on... > 30min.

The goal was composition and story and about making things read with the minimum amount of detail.

[le-mec]

[pushav]

Fantastic work!

[le-mec]

Yay! The first character design for my comic (current title is Inheritors Of The Earth).

Meet Uncle Theo, the diminutive pilot of the Stumble Bee...

[le-mec]

Here are some studies I did over the xmas holidays...

[j a k e]

Hey Mark! Cool lines!

[le-mec]

here's last night's life drawing and some cutesy crap...

[Chuck,mate.]

damn kick ass of a SB, bud.
love your girlies...
keep it up!


P.

[~Faust~]

Woah, very inspirational stuff indeed.

Initially just stoppinf by to thank you for your art-videos. They help me a damn lot and are just what I need right now. Thank you, man.

[Call0ps]

nice sb love your style, and real nice mini-animations. keep up the good job

[FallenLegend]

Good mornin' CA!

My name is Mark Chong, and I'm a former 5-year visual effects TD and 18-year programmer who left the film industry to work as a freelance storyboard artist/conceptual artist for the broadcast industry. It's been a little over a year on my own, and things are slow, and I've been spending a lot of time teaching myself the basic fundamentals. I don't do finished artwork very often, mostly because things die very quickly when I realize I'm missing something very vital.

In any case, I joined CA.org because it seems there are some real pros here who are willing to call a spade a spade and dish out the tough love without being malicious. Feel free to give me your own special warm welcome in the tradition of CA.org, I checked my ego at the door.

These are some of the "finished" yet flawed pieces that I've done in the past. They're somewhat embarrassing to look at, but I'm going to post them so everyone can get a sense of where I'm at, overall.


This one's VERY old. Anatomy problems abound.


This is a very early attempt at painting. It took a whole damn week because all through, I was lousy at planning. Many lessons learned in this one.


This one's fairly recent. It's messy. My brush moves before I can decide where it should go. Still, I like the idea of floating isles with big cannons on them.


This is a study from a photograph that I took. I spent about an hour on this.


This is an OLD thing I did around November for a comic project I gave to myself as an exercise.


This is the first page. There's more on my gallery but I don't want to inundate this with more of the same....

I am proud to say that you are my youtube teacher

[p sage]

Dammit. I thought he'd updated

Yaaay. Mark Chong is here