Joe's SketchyBook

[FlyingFins]

Hello, this is my first sketchbook here,

My name is Joseph Goss
Now I have been able to find some free time for making art I thought I'll use this excellent community to get advice and help.

I really want to become better with digital painting, so this will be what I am going to focus on, later on I might add actual drawings and other stuff as well.

Any help anyone can give will be great.

If anyone knows of any tips, techniques or tutorials that they might think would help me will be greatly appreciated.

Also, if you spot any mistakes like perspective and colour mess ups please let me know. :-)

thank you!

[FlyingFins]

I am practising this sort of battle scene, at the moment there are no spaceships or anything,
I'm hoping its ok to post WIP on sketchbooks, i can't imagine why not

any advise on this image would be great!

thankyou

(they are meant to buildings on a mountain area btw)

[Nathan House]

Hey Joseph,

Looks like theirs some good experimentation and ideas going on here. I particularly like final image in your first post. Seems like a wacky treehouse for heads : ) You also have a nice texture going on with the trunk of the tree.

I think it may help if you were able to give a little more structure to the images. I know for myself sometimes it helps to do a quick rough underdrawing of the basic forms which will be at play in the image.

Keep it up!

[Camara]

It´s ok,but try to define more the shapes,not just brush strokes here and there.Maybe you have a naive style,which is good,but it´s hard to see what you want to show for example in the first pic.
Keep drawing,man!

[FlyingFins]

@Nathan House: Thanks for the advise, i tried using lines to define some of the buildings a bit more, darn it is difficult though, here's an update.

@Camara: I like the idea there, make shapes and not just brush strokes, which i must admit are a bit random, thanks for pointing that out! sometimes, like the first pic, i'll have some sort of idea about what the spaceship should look like, but can't actually get that across whilst painting it.

[FlyingFins]

Here's another update, i'm getting kinda stuck now, i want to put aircraft in there and make it more colourful, energetic and detailed, but i don't know how to do it, kinda scary at this point

[RokasButkys]

Getting better and better with that enivro. Dont be scared,youre going to ruine more pictures if you want to become an artist ( thats what my art teacher said ones) make a new layer and paint, if your not happy, delete it. Yeah, i like that treehouse too x)

[FlyingFins]

I have no idea how to paint buildings in photoshop,
I want to be able to paint them by free hand, but they look so non building like
anyone know of any good tutorials on painting buildings? please.

In the update, I used a hard round brush with the use of the shift key to produce straight edges

I feel so lost doing this though. hmmm

[Stoat]

Hey, Joe, I think you have some real potential. You aren't making the usual newbie mistakes. You have nice, bold, clean colors and big, solid, foursquare shapes. Your overall composition and perspective looks pretty good.

Now what you have to do is start filling in detail without losing the freshness of your initial sketches. Instead of trying to do that overall, maybe just pick the area you think is more important, zoom in on it and try to flesh it out.

Just a suggestion.

[FlyingFins]

I tried to add detail, but i never got very far, i wanted to make my buildings more expressive.

the first image is the one where i tried to detail the buildings, the last image is the one where i used a few abstract brushes and kinda repainted the buildings with them, i think that if i clean it up, somehow, it'll not be too bad, but its all guess work really. i wanted to keep an expressive feeling to the structures, but when i cleaned them up before it kinda took the life out of them. when i started detailing i got so lost, had no idea where to go, it was not looking good so thats why i repainted them. i'll work on this more tomorrow.

[FlyingFins]

Just a small update, i refined the buildings a bit more, and now the plan is to clean them up whilst detailing them, i will work on that later.

any suggestions at this point?

Thanks

[FlyingFins]

I got bored with this city image, thought it was time to move on, this is as far as i got.

Thank you everyone for helping so far, its been quite encouraging :-)

[FlyingFins]

This is another city image i tired, i gave up though, :-(

[FlyingFins]

This is the one I am working on at the moment, its a little more clear then the others, i think the colours are crap though :-(

[dtr.aty]

looks nice)

[Darktwin]

good start to your sketchbook, I would maybe suggest you use reference or do environment studies from photos to get a more clear understanding of what equates to a background. Think foreground, middle ground and background. I would definitely use reference to strengthen my knowledge. Keep working hard!

[Xaya]

hey flyingfins!

Great start, keep attention to edges, they are far more important as they seem to be. Especially painting/drawing architecture.
For example, take a cubus. If you paint the cube in the same way you do it is hard to read as a cube. Edges let us know if a form is edgy or round.
Do some paintings with reference and you will see what i mean.

Keep going!

Xaya

[Auhsan]

Hey it's nice to see a sketchbook about environments... let's see how those progress

[FlyingFins]

I have added an update, but I think the image and my painting is not going anywhere because i seem to get into details to soon and my forms and shapes are not ready for that.

@dtr.aty,
Thanks

@Darktwin
I have been trying to use more reference, I am also trying to do more drawing from life as well, I know I need to do a lot more though.
One thing i would love to do is take my laptop outside and paint from life using it, but I don't think that is such a good idea; its large and fragile. :-(
I might however, do more drawing and marker sketches from life with a focus on architecture. I hope that this will improve my digital painting skills.
:-)

@Xaya,
Ah, those pesky edges!!
I might start doing smaller studies using photoshop where I might work on rendering cubes and other shapes in perspective. I get the feeling I am jumping in the deep end here, going straight into painting cities and stuff.
I am also going to start doing a little bit of painting traditionally soon, I hope that will improve my ability to paint digitally

[FlyingFins]

Hello.

I'm working on this image at the moment, its taking a while, mainly because i am gradually changing my technique whilst painting this one.

The major difference between this one and the others I have posted so far, apart from the fact I have spent much longer on it, is that I started with a A3 drawing to paint over instead of it all being digital.

[FlyingFins]

Just a small update, i tried painting over my drawing again, i can't seem to paint very well though. everything always seems so messy.