336 days left

Sooooooo todays shitstudies. the concept behind these is pretty easy:
Basically trying to simplyfy more and more trying to get into the very basics of what makes stuff read (lightingsituation, form, material). The more I simplify without loosing the overall impression the less I will have to memorize in order to reproduce it from my head. Sounds logical, seems to work, so I'll keeep doing it :)

study study

soooo hey everybody, just a quick studyupdate with some knights and armour and stuff. I started painting a sketch from the weekend and fucked up so hard, not getting done anything that I actually decided to take a step back, doing some more studies and then hit it again.
So hard, so bad, and still so rewarding, gonna keep doing these for the rest of the week and then give my knight-piece another shot
First one around 3 hours, second 2 hours.
More stuff tomorrow :)

341 days left

whew again one week passed by, jeez this goes so quick.

Soooooo well I didn't post any studies since I had to get some stuff outta the way which needed to be taken care of for some time now, so now that this is done I can focus on my goals and the deathlinechallenge again.
Also, I spend some time to reevalue my goals and actually realize that they probably weren't the best ones to reach the "big one", meaning being able to work fulltime freelance until november this year. Until now my plan was primarily to focus on studies improving my skills FOLLOWED by personal work, improving my portfolio. After thinking about it for a bit I came to the conclusion that for me right now, or even for everybody in general it might be a way better idea to handle this the other way arround which means focusing on personal portfolio work followed/supported by focused studies. I kinda feel that "studying" has become quite a strange thing on forums like conceptart.org and other communities in general. People and especially starting artists tend to focus exclusively on "studies" making them their comfortzone, completely neglecting the most important factor of actually using them to improve in work that is done from mind. I kinda found myself in that situation as well, not too heavily but just enough to realize that I just don't get as much out of them as I could.
So for me the new way I am gonna handle my personal goals will be to focus on personal work, followed by studies to improve my skills where it's needed the most to complete a piece of work.
With this piece I actually managed to turn the bad habit of mindless studying arround just in the right moment. So what I wanted to do was to actually apply all the stuff I've learned out ot the moviestills in a personal piece, without knowing what the personal piece would be the time I did them. But I think it worked out quite nicely in the end, and I really wan to get deeper into these overcast/rainy/snowy greyish lightschemes, it's just wicked fun to paint that stuff :)
Oh one thing I have been noticing as well is that my workflow is actually getting faster and faster, kinda strange that this is the first time that I am really figuring out ONE way to work, until now I have basically just been doing anything, figuring stuff out as the process proceeded. Feels kinda nice to actually have control over the process :D

uaaaah

hahaha

okay here we go again with the studies of the last two days. Although I got crazy sick I had a great weekend but kinda wasn't able to get anything done during the trainrides. So what I did the last two days was obviously more moviestills (geez game of thrones is jus amazing if you want to practice overcast lighting). as you can see I've switched up my method quite a bit as i got along, because I really wasn't happy with the "rubbery" look these studies get as the rendering gets tighter and adding textures would be an extra step which would just cost more time, which is fine for personal work  but when it comes to doing studies where time matters I figured that there must be a better sollution which adds a little more texture right in the beginning.So this is how I did the 4th study, which didn't take more time than the others but looks waaay better and more interesting. In the last two studies I wanted to just concentrate on color an basic proportion, so they are basically painted with a brush which almost hasn't got any pressure sensitivity, only a little fuzzieness to break the brushstrokes up a bit. SO the task was to try to pick the right color and put it down as it is without any rendering through blending but only through subtle value changes. This was huge fun and I probably learned the most out of the last three.
I also filled a few sketchbook pages doing some basic headconstruction but it turns out that my  shitty scanner is just too old to run with windos7 so I will have to take a few shots with my camera in daylight tomorrow
Soooooooo well these are the last moviestills for now since I think I might have absorbed enough to finally hit the new personal piece I had on my mind for quite some time now, on which I will start working tomorrow :)
I have also uploaded the psd files (unfortunately not exactly fullsize since they became just too big to upload, but the size is still pretty decent)

http://www.mediafire.com/?583bcx58556zt

356 days left. PUUUUSHING IIIIIT

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO just one two hour study for today. Gonna spend the weekend visiting my Girlfriend whom I am unfortunately only able to see once a month since I live in Berlin, SO I basically spent my day at work + Packing some stuff. I will do as many studies as possible on the trainrides, probably some anatomystuff in my sketchbook.
SO for today ehre wo go with anothe r1,5 hour moviestill study, stuff actually starts feeling comfortable,meaning that I can start trying to finish them even more in that short amount of time. I tell you it is just NUTS how much you can get done if you set yourself a certain amount of time!

357 Days left

Hi guys, just a quick update with todays studies. First one is just a quick warmup thingy, second one the usual hardcore 2 hour portrait cranking. This is just getting better and better. another thing I noticed is that I am getting better at nailing the proportions right away (yeah that second dude actually had the craziest messed up face ever :D )
Another thing I did today in order to fullfill my one year goal was visiting the tax office to bother the nice ladies there with all my noob questions concerning freelancing and especially concerning freelancing while still having a fulltime job. I did that and now I am "officially" allowed to get income from freelance work without getting in trouble with the law as far as taxes are concerned.
So this was kinda a big psychological milestone for me right there, things are getting really serious, there's no way back. Due to some other tax related stuff (which I don't wanna explain right now, would just take way too long) this entire plan has actually become a "do or die"  situation, if I don't make it, I might be fucked pretty hard. Damn this stuff feels awesome! I am so pumped, it's just crazy :)

Oh and one other thing concerning this update. That first warmup thing sucks really really hard, and it kinda bothers me that everytime I am updating this thing here I tend to feel rather insecure about posting the shitstuff. I hate that, such a stupid egothing, I don't want to have anything to do with it anymore, so from now on I will just show every study I paint, in here. Studies are not supposed to be pretty pictures, they are actually meant to make room for failure and learning. A failed study teaches much more than a great looking one.

358 Days left...

uuuh last update already 3 days ago :)
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 :)

Big things...

Hi everyone.
Finally another update and quite a long one as well (well textwise).
In April 2010 my lifesituation kinda sucked. The main factor for that was basically that I decided to go to artschool. A school which I couldn't afford so for wich I had to get a credit in order to be able to pay the monthly fee. It turned out however that the school sucked crazy hard so I found myself trapped there having to pay 350Bucks each month, money wich I didn't have and wich I would have to pay back eventually.
I desperately needed to change my life and so I decided to give myself a timespan of one year to work crazy hard to be able to make a living with art so that everything can be okay again.
Well and that's exactly what I did, in a course of a few months I practically learned hwo to paint digitally and by January 2010 I got a fulltime job as a conceptartist, and live in a great appartment in berlin basically not having to worry about anything.
But things need to go on. As much as an improvement my livingsituation right now is compared to one year ago things just need to go on. There are still a lot of things whcih I want to improve or simply change in order to become the best person of myself that I can possibly be living the best life I possibly can.

So it's on again. A few days ago i decided to give myself one year to reach new big goals I am dreaming of to improve myself in every way possible.
Coincidentally the crimson daggers started the "deathline challenge" just two days ago which is basically exactly this: give yourself a year to reach your crazy goals. To get more information just check out the livestream site and listen to the recording titeled "deathline challenge".
http://www.livestream.com/danielsdangerroom#

So the time is now, the goals are set, and there are quite a bunch of them. They actually all kinda relate or lead to each other but nonetheless there will be quite a crazy amount of stuff coming towards me which needs to be handeled. So here are my goals:

---By November 3rd 2012 I want to be a fulltime freelance artist able to completely earn a living with freelance work.---

Together with this there are a lot of other goals whcih need to be reached first and which will mark milestones to the big one:

I want to structure my Daily workingschedule as following: Due to my fulltime conceptartist job rightnow I do have to spend 8 hours of each day at work. After the workday I am going to work for at least 6 more hours doing studies and portfoliowork, so my schedule will be as following: Getting up at 6am, being at work until 4pm, being home at 5pm, deathlinechallenge-work till midnight

I want to get a broad base of internetpromotion going, trying to use every medium possible (my blog, communities(!!), livestreams etc) I want to start using the internet in every way possible to get my work out there

I want to devote serious time into actively searching for potential clients, getting a big list of companies I can apply to work for.

I want to get absolutely familiar with the business side of being a freelance artist (taxes and stuff like that)

I want to gear my portfolio more towards the kind fo work I WANT to work on

I want to save up 7500€ to be able to pay off the credit I had to take for the one year of artschool I attended so that I can pay it all back and close this shitty chapter in my live. So that I can start a live as a freelance illustrator without having to worry about things like this.


So there they are, all my goals to be reached in 365 Days, pretty overwhelming and to be honest I still do not really know HOW to exactly tackle some of these, but I do know that I will work harder then I ever have. Compared to this year the goals of the last one were crazy easy, at least from my perspective now.
So lets do this 365 days of pure hard work, and 3 have already gone by, so there are 362 left, time's running :)

Lets start with the work of the last 3 days, things are going great so far, I am able to keep up with my schedule, getting some serious stuff done and I am pumped as hell.

So heres a portrait of a fatass dude and todays Masterstudy. I wat to get better in portraits so there will be more of that stuff for the next weeks.
I have uploaded the PSD file of the Repin study with all the layers included, feel free to check it oooout :)

http://www.mediafire.com/file/09mnpji3gwjc2vd/repin.psd