So at first I really wasn't sure if I would ever post these in here because they all sucked so hard at first, and well, posting studies of which one knows that they suck is never that easy (at least not for me)
So I've been spending the last 3 days doing studies of moviestills. Actually I started doing these with no real intention to learn anything specifiic out of them, but doing stuff like that really helps to discover things which you do wrong so after one hour at the most you end up with quite a big list of things, you really suck at :D
Sinc I was at least kind of going for studies of cinematic lighting I ended up saving a bunch of portrait-moviestills and even though I am able to nail the lighting quite accurately right away I had HUUGE problems with the portraits themselves, setting myself a timelimit of three hours was just breaking my balls, and as you can see the first ones just suck SO hard it's crazy.
At the same time I know that I am actually able to figure out aportrait and eventually end up with decent likeness if I am just given enough time. So knowing this I figured out that the flaws lie in my process itself, it's just not efficient enough, so I decided to focus my studies on optimizing my process.
As you can see with these they all look really different, concidering both style and finish, in most of them I wasn't even able to finish the portrait itself.
But then in the 8th painting I figured something out which might work and after having lost quite a bit of time in the beginning of it, just doing the wrong thing I did end up with what I would concider the best study until that time after I had changed my prroces completely after having only one of two hours left. Well, so I figured that I might actually have discovered something there and give it another shot with a 9th painting and indeed I managed to pull this one off in two hours having by far the most accurate (as far as likeness is concerned) as well as the most finished looking painting till now. And if I compare the last one, after a dramatic change in my technique it'S at least for me crazy that the 1st and the 9th paintinga re only 3 days apart.
So what was my mistake all the time (mistake meaning that it just didn't work for me, many artist work this way and achieve amazing results).
I always used to start mypaintings with very broad general brushstrokes using very hard edged brushes with quite a lot of texture. SO my base was practically a bunch of very concrete brushstrokes creating very hard shapes. For some reason I really really struggeled working from this base because soemhow there just didn't seem to be anythinga ccurate to build up on, just a crazy mess of somehow accurate values and colors, so this didn't work. Then in the middle of the 8th portrait I just decided to blur all this shit, leaving practically no visible brushstrokes to distract me, to then keep on working into this blurry base with the soft round brush getting more and more concrete shapes as my brushes got smaller. So this worked really well so I kept doing it till I had the portrait mroe or less finished and I even had some time left to add a little bit of texture here and there. Since this turned out to work I started the last one with a loose linedrawing and then blocked in the values witzh very big soft edged brushes right at the beginning and amazingly EVERYTHING went so much easier and smoother from the very beginning, so that I had the portrait actually almost finished by 45 minutes so that I could use the last hour completely focusing on details and likeness-issues, getting more texture in there. Also it was waaay more easy to work out the focal point because I did not have to care about bluring ro softening edges because everything was already soft, so that I just had to keep on painting and the focal points woud create themselves.
So yeah, these are the conclusions out of tehse studies, for now it seems to work best for me working from a lookse linebase, defining all the rough proportions and then jump in creating a loose very soft valuebase.
Now that I think of it, I did have the same problems with the portrait of the fat dude from the last update. I fucked up a LOT in that one trying to get a good and accurate drawing before I started to paint it, and so I ended up with around 7 different linedrawings of 7 different fat dudes and as soon as I started paiting into them they all turned out like shit. in teh end I just started from scratch, with evry rough thick lines very big soft colorblobs and I sculpted the drawing for the portrait out of that big blurry mess ending up with a finished piece. Now that I have done the studies I really figured out what just didn't work with the first versions of the fat dude.
now enoug text already, on to the pictures. I feel that this series of moviestudies once again shows eprfectly that it is essential to fail, in order to feel the need to change the ways we are doing things to make room for new things, and new ways which might work better. I learned a shitload out of them!!
these are in chronological order so that the stuff I just wrote can make sense :D
OOOOOOH and tomorrow is a big day as far as my one year goals are concerned, gonna write more about it tomorrow night, really excited :)
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