Ville's Sketchbook: C&C greatly apreciated

[Ville_S]

Izzual: Hey thanks man! Krogan is coming...I swears, it will. don't shoot me!


Nickybeats: Thanks! I shall!

Jakubvavrik: Thanks.
I think most important thing is to get good mental library of things so you imagination have something to pull from. Read, play games and study stuff.


Kingkostas: Very interesting. Thanks for sharing your views on shapes and silhouettes. Hmm....must study more.


Study times:

Will be streaming about in half an hour or so. Let's say 18:45 pm of Helsinki time. I shall paint....a krogan. dun dun dunhhh!!!

http://www.livestream.com/DerivedApe

[Jordan_]

These studies are looking great Ville, especially the environments on the previous page. Looking forward to the stream

[Ville_S]

Teh krogan + photo study

[kingkostas]

Great mate!!!! And the enviro looks awesome, really enjoying the interplay of edges. Btw on the krogan, i would add a little more detail in the face. Not actuall things like texture and stuff but the blacks that appear as outlines could be worked some more.

[TearUp]

Awesome sketchbook, looking forward to more posts.

[Izzual]

You did it ! The krogan is really looking cool (King is right, maybe some details on the face would give him an even more badass look ) !
I love you environment too, you can feel the atmospere in it

[PlugTurtle]

poor old john snow !

[PlugTurtle]

hey im a begginer myself and i was wondering where you get your reference for drawing this stuff? whenever i sit down and have a blank page, my mind is almost blank of what to put down

[Ville_S]

Kingkostas: cheers man! yeah, got a little lazy on the krogan.:/

TearUp: Thanks! Glad to hear it.

Izzu: Thanks dude. And yeah King is right.

Plugturtle: Well I often go trough various sources that serve as inspiration. Fellow artist sketchbooks here in CA, Awesome artists at Cghub. Photography serves also a real inspiration for me. National Geographic photography being one of the biggest.


Startwars screenshot study and some mountains from photoref.

[Mr.Pryminista]

Some excellent work here! Subscribed.

[noodldoodl]

Hi Ville, I joined this forum specifically to say how amazed I am at your work; it's truly magnificent - you're very talented.

Please can you tell me if you have done a tutorial on any of the landscape pieces that you've done, as I enjoy them the most. I am struggling at the moment creating my own landscapes with Procreate on the iPad and would love to know how you get those amazing tones and values. I appreciate that you've done some demos on Livestream, but I can't find any landscapey stuff and would love to know, step by step, how you put your nature studies together. Hope you can help, sir.

Keep the work flowing, it's very inspirational.

[Ville_S]

Mr.Pryminista: cool man, thanks!

noodldoodle: Wow, that's a quite the compliment. thankyou.

No, unfortunately I haven't done any landscape tutorial, and now that you mention it I haven't done any of that stuff in my livestreaming sessions either. Tell you what, Next time I stream (probably tommorrow) I'll do a landscape study.
hopefully you'll find that useful, and if you make it there when I'm live I'm more than happy to answer questions if you have some.

Thanks again!

Band of brothers screenshot study.

[noodldoodl]

Thanks Ville, what time will you be going live, as I'm working until 8pm UK time? Appreciate your willingness to help

noodldoodl

[kingkostas]

Great mate, things are becoming more and more great!!! Lovely strokes and man i cant get enough of these enviros, lovely mood.
Lets keep up

[JakeB]

Really nice sketches man. Nice and loose, but they look great.

[Ville_S]

Kingkostas: thanks. will try. Though right now I feel like the dude in the band of brothers screenshot study I posted yesterday.
Just gotta keep pushing.

Jake: thanks man!

Noodldoodl: I see your online. are you off from work? 8 pm uk would be about 10 pm here, so that would be pretty late. especially since I need to wake up early and head up for the campus tommorrow. :/




Sketch.

[DANKA]

Really good sketchbook! Nice studies!

[Ville_S]

I'm going go live now. Sorry Noodldoodl. :/
I'll paint a landscape study and save the vid on my livestream channel. If you get any questions drop me a line.

http://www.livestream.com/DerivedApe

[Ville_S]

photo ref study I just livestreamed:

[noodldoodl]

Hi Ville...just checking out the recorded environment study now. (Was late in from work and had left my PC on, which is why you thought I was online ;o)

Overall this is a fantastic insight into how you work and I'll definitely keep referring to it and see where I can adapt my workflow accordingly.

It's tricky to understand some of your stages, as there's no audio commentary. However, this is not a criticism as I'm very grateful you've taken the time and trouble to put this together for everyone.

I'm going to take another look right now and might come back to you with a few specific questions over the next day or so, when I can get a few hours to myself. (Hope you don't mind?)

Thanks once again, Ville...

noodldoodl

[Renart]

Wow! Really great sketchbook! I love it! It's really interesting to see your work!

[Ville_S]

noodldoodle: cool. Glad you found it useful. And no I don't mind questions at all. bring it on.

Renart: Thankees!



Daily study timey.

"There sits the only king I mean to bend my knee to, m'lords..."

[noodldoodl]

Hi Ville, here's some questions, as promised ...

First question might sound a bit dumb to some, but I think it's important (for me) to ask, which is how do you decide on the colour palette for a particular piece? I've noticed a bit of colour-matching going on in the Livestreams, ie you gauge from the source image the approximate colour to lay down initially, then you test it to see if this works for you, which you might change a few times. There seems to be quite a lot of tweaking, in fact, with the hue, saturation and brightness sliders, so is this just a matter of practise, as I find this very difficult and frustrating to get right? It's the most fundamental aspect of painting, as getting this stage wrong can lead to frustration and ruin When I sit down to (attempt to) paint, I see too many colours in the original image to be able to pick one to set the tone for the piece, whereas you seem to effortlessly lay in colour and match the source very closely, before continuing on to the detailing stage. Is there a best way to approach this?

I don't think I see you use the eyedropper tool on the source image. Whilst I appreciate the grain of the source image renders this task a bit tricky to start with, is this actually because you consider it to be 'cheating', ie you'll never learn to colour-match if you don't do it the proper way?

How important is the underpainting stage in setting the tone for the piece, specifically the environmental studies?

You make very clever use of the selection/mask tool in the latest environment demo, picking out abstract shapes in the distance near the horizon, for example. Is this something you do often, rather than zoom in and paint directly/freehand? (Could be a good idea for a future tutorial?? )

My last question, you'll be happy to read, Ville, is do you have a select number of brushes you limit yourself to when painting digitally? And do you make your own custom brushes or have you settled on, say, half a dozen which you feel won't change for the forseeable future?

Thanks Ville, sorry for all of the questions, but I hope the answers might help a few people who follow your frankly excellent progress.

Regards,
noodldoodl

[noodldoodl]

Oops...double-post, my bad

[Ville_S]

Noodldoodl:

Q #1 : Color matching can be tricky thing, but you get better at it when you work on it. I did.
It really is a matter of practice and experience I think. When that experience builds you get better and better at making educated guesses.
You start to pick up on how combination of greys and highly saturated colors work and all sorts of neat little observations of what works and what doesn't.

Making sense of colours amongs all that detail you can see can be a hassle. The old artist trick is to squint your eyes so that you can't see all that annoying confusing detail and instead you can concentrate on the general color.
I don't really squint, I actually just cross my eyes. You know, the way you look at those magic 3d pictures? I can do that at a whim and I have found it far more better way than squinting. For one, your eyelashes don't get into way and darken/desaturate the view.

q #2 : Yeah, lot of people seem to consider eyedropper tool sort of cheating. Personally I think that it is awesome tool for studying colors, but, one should never ever abuse it.
what I do is I try my hardest to match the color just by looking at it at first. But if I just can't get it right after multiple attemps I take the eyedropper tool, get the exact color from the photo and the compare it to what I initially thought what the color was.
I compare them and try to figure out where I went wrong. I make note and move on. After a while you simply don't need the color picker anymore because you can do it all by just looking and comparing colors.



Q #3: in digital medium underpainting isn't really neccessary, but it is a neat trick to have in your arsenal, and it does yield some happy accidents on occsion.
I don't always do that stuff in my paintings, but there are sittuations where it can be especially useful. for example in forested scene or scene that is just otherwise green all over. That rusty red coming trough the the greens really really works, and many many artists use it to their advantage.

Q #4: Yeah, the mask tool is really great tool and I use it alot. One reason being that you can't really draw straight line with the lasso tool, so making random organic shapes (like snow pathes on the side of the mountain) is rather easy.
There's very little to tutorialize. You draw the shape with lasso tool, hide the selection with ctrl+h if needed and brush over it with apropriate color to achieve the result.
To get the right shapes is just matter of time and study.

Q #5: I have bunch of brushes I have gathered from various sources but I tend to use about ten of them really regularly. The others are there to create some random texture or patterns or just to create particular blending..
I do also create my own brushes when needed. My list of brushes is in constant flux.


I hope you found my answers atleast somewhat useful.


Another Band of brothers screenshot study. Trying to force myself to really think before each brush stroke. I tend to paint really intuitively, so this is actually rather hard. Stop, think, paint. That's the plan.

[Ville_S]

Photoref study and Charles Darwin bust WIP.

[NickyBeats]

very nice studies man! i was just checking out you and sam's blog, heretics of Dune, sooo awesome!! keep us updated man!

[noodldoodl]

Hi Ville, thanks for the reply to my questions; very informative. I will be giving the mask/lasso tool trick a run out later, as it's something I've not tried on my landscapes. Hopefully it'll give them an interesting edge.

I guess practice is the key

noodldoodl

[Satu]

Cool tips you gave to noodldoodl, read them also. Been just starting to test out the lasso tool myself.
Awesome studies as always. Yeah about thinking while painting. I have really huge difficulties with that one. But maybe I have a chance, if you paint intuitively without thinking every brush stroke and still you've become awesome. I'm the worst kind of intuitive painter

[Mr.Pryminista]

Some really nice studies you've posted and some good info/tips for noodldoodl. Thank you for that!