Tuesday, September 9, 2008

the good, bad, and self portraits

Self portrait tonight. Took longer to sorta find the colors than to actually draw. I always quit my drawings when I feel I may have stumbled on "proof of potential" (or sooner), thinking, "Don't F this up!" I kept seeing yellows, but they never looked right in the pallette.


I removed that naked/leather chic pic. It really makes me wanna barf for some reason.
scratch. Heavyish.
Attempt at one of gabe's dudes. I freakin love this character (gabe's).

Muscle mag. He really was that saturated. I freakin hate doin' abs, I just get lost. Fun lesson on how to screw up shadows.
That beer ad you see on the internet sometimes. I couldn't get the orange to ever turn our right on his cheeks and forehead. I like the painterly feel though.
muscle magazine cover.

John Madden, magazine. Cool lighting from the sides that put a shadow down the middle of his face.
first color self-portrait in a long time. I'm almost proud of how bad I look. I'm not doing any more self portraits without a desk lamp or something for some dramatic lighting.

from scratch. It's pretty clear I need a pallette to work from!
Magazine kid.

scratch.

3 comments:

Kelsey said...

Hey man, nice sketches and studies. This shows a lot of dedication to learning and practice. It looks like you are learning some good tonal fundamentals. Some of your proportions and shape quality are still sort of wacky. I would recommend making sure to balance your tonal studies with tons of pencil sketches in a sketchbook. Keep a sketchbook with you at all times and draw in it when ever you can. That said, I need to do more of that myself! Anyway, nice progress, keep at it.

patconnole said...

Thanks! I have a lot more luck with color than lines, so I avoid sketching at all costs! gots to do it though. I'm secretly hoping all my form/proportion problems will solve themselves with enough painting.... but I know sketching is probably the key.

Elaine said...

I agree with Kelsey, you've got some great values worked in there, but you really should be concentrating on getting the sketch more anatomically accurate before moving onto color and shading. Also, you're very contrasty on some of the pics, you might want to try using less blacks. I like what you did in the first portrait with the blues for the shadows. If you're painting the piece (rather than doing it cell shaded or vector style) I wouldn't worry about defining specific colors before you use them. I usually start with a range of values in one hue and mix other colors in after I've got my tones established.