still alive!!

So here we are again. To make it short: I was terribly busy doing stupid schoolwork the last few days, thus I wasn't able to do any personal stuff at all. BUT now I have 3 weeks of holiday, and I am finally able to kick it again, hyping up the intensity, work on comission work and get better an better more and more into the direction of being independent from my school. I can feel it, it's gonna happen, soon I'll be free :D

So as in my last post, I want to dive deeper into digital stillifes, which are extremely fun to do.
Right now I don't want to get to much into specific rendering since I want to get confident with seeing and especialyl picking values and colors first. In fact I have made it one of my bigger goals now to work more on my brush economy, forcing myself to stay focused all the time and just smack in the right brushstrokes all the time. I hate it when I get lost in readjusting the drawing and values and and and all the time. Painting should be just like smack smack smack, finished, bitch!! :D

sooooo here's the last stilllife, not rendered to death but I definitely feel like I have learned everything i wanted from that one.


I have also started the same stillife under daylight lighting conditions. It's not finished yet but i wanna post the process in here nevertheless, so you're gonna see more steps and the finished piece in the next update. So here we go:

Step 1:

my first step, no matter which painting I start is always to tone the canvas in one color having a value which might be described as the middle value of the entire painting. So right here it's clear that it's gonna be a rather "middledark" lighting situation.

Step 2

In the next step i roughly block in the background. As I have already posted I really want to pay a lot of attention to brusheconomy in this one and in future stilllifes. So to be able to go with that i want to get the vales as close to what i actually see, since I don't want to come back to the background as far as valuework is concerned. Later I am going to get back into it to adjust color variations and edges, but NOT the fucking values! Period!

Step 3


here I am just smacking in the shape of the garlic, I am using a clor which is pretty much the base color/mid value of what I see. Again since this this is the shape step, I am trying to get it right now and not later

Step 4

and heres the basic block in with the grape

Step 5

So after stage 4 was finished, the painting process was like 5 minutes long or something like that, so pretty quick. Now in this stage, even if it seems that a lot has happened, it actually hasn't. This stage is all about seeing the basic values and general color shifts. So what i do is, I squint at the subject and before I put down a stroke I count the different VALUES I see in the garlic. I make sure that I get the numbers of values, describing the basic shapes, right in this case it was about 4 or 5 values. there are actually many many more, but most of the values I am gonna use from now one serve to render the form on a more detailed level. this stage is all about putting down what's absolutely necessary to make the basic forms read. another thing I do is to compare shifts in colortemperature and smack them down as well. in this case it was about getting the relation between yellowish, greenish and blueish shadowtones right.

Sooo these stages for me are the most critical ones. these stage determine the drawing, the value pattern, the rough color palette. They make pretty much all of your atmosphere and lighting situation read. if they don't read, there's no use to keep going on.
the next steps are much more about getting into subtle color and valueshifts in order to render the object, as well as paying attention to edges the first time :)




So that's it for now. more steps coming soon :)