Preserved Topic: WIP jason

I'm a tormented painter :P I want to be expressive and just let it flow out of the brush but next you know an hour is gone and I've been messing with little details. Case in point:



This was just going to be a quick abstract expressionist type tree. I started messing with grain now I have ideas for details. Still very much not realistic though, the ideas I mean. Dun want it to be realistic, for the most part.

What do you think? What's it need? What you wanna see in there?

Jason

Oh, Jason, when did you start doubting yourself? This is not design -- you're not trying to make it user-friendly, or easy to navigate. You're trying to express yourself. You're not aiming for realism, and you're not reaching for substance. You're just painting.

Want help on your technique? I don't think you need any. Need help on ideas? Sorry, fresh out - use yours. I think you've got a good thing going here. Keep going with it.

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s t e p h e n

Its past nap time and time to nap again? That tree looks a bit like it would burn my back if I leaned against it though. For the pic so far I really like the wood grain? would love to see more ?loose? detail in the grazz, sky and orange stuff. Maybe another tree or two to balance out the composition? or some other object. Also the tree needs to be blended into the grass a bit? maybe toss some red dirt around?

Lovin the bold colors? *cough* purple *cough*


                                                           

Sweet, Jason.
Looks like , to me , it`s flowing nicely from the brush. It`s a good thing when the hour(s) disappear that way.
" What`s it need ?" Another hour....
" What you wanna see in there ?" More. Doesn`t need to be realistic to have detail. When you get to the point when your brush floats around , not knowing where to light, it`s prolly done.

I like it.

stephen, I began doubting when I began showing my stuff. Most people like tthe pieces I hate or had a terrible time doing, and I like the ones they hate. Heheh, thanks.

tired of looking at it. It was good to do something all made up for once. It was cool to think of all the possibilities, even if I don't have the technique to pull them off


Anyone that wants to offer some criticism can go for it. I like hearing it :

criticism? can't think of any, except - how about more?
your tree reminded me of rousseau's jungle series

Love love love the coming of paint in this place

Jason...me likey. What a great tree..what a great feeling...what a great impressionist kind of feel to it.

Critiques? Just these: Smudge tools are terrible things if overused with diffusion brushes. Try texturing a bit more with your strokes (both brush and the smudge tool used like a dry-brush )
Dodge and burn are evil things, they never account for colour variation in highlights and/or shadows. Life has coloured lighting, warm and cool colours to bring out tone and shade, keep loving those. On the Dodge and Burn scale is also the idea of just using the same colour with more white tone added. You wanna get experiemental? Go that route..colour colour colour.

Aside from those tips (not really critiques) it's splendiferous.

PAINT MORE
POST MORE

Okee, I'm done.

Ooh ooh! I'm loving the frequency of there threads as of late.

As for the painting. Darn, what you been smokin! That's a nasty combo of colour ya got packed in there. I'll ingore that green border cause the patterns are soo spunky. So angry yet so calm. Yah, I like. Very nice. Thanks for sharing.

Well, you already did what I was going to say I'd like to see - more detail in the sky, and better interaction between the grass and tree.

Beautiful stuff =)

Very strong.

I just had to come back and compliment you on the colours again.

Ya had me think?n about this piccie when I wandered all the way down to the shop and back for some more smokes. I realised something -- I really suck at working with bright-saturated primary colours.

I might be able to work up to a single bright primary if the piece is fairly monotoned but getting bright reds, blues, greens and oranges to work like that?

Not a chance in hell! I've tried it before but it always went bad or I got too scared and toned it down.

So again I'd just like to say, well done. I think this needs to live on my desktop for a couple of days.

JKMabry: Great stuff it reminds me of some of the early 20C stained glass work (although details escape me - pos. 1920s-1930s and Scottish??).

I like it a lot - lets see more

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Emps

FAQs: Emperor

Reminds me of that scene in Pleasantville.
Makes me want to set things on fire.
Me like.

Fire Gooooooood

                                                           

DG

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Smudge tools are terrible things if overused with diffusion brushes

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Why? Cuz you don't like it? Surely there's a better reason than that! To what are you referring here too, specifically? And what is a diffusion brush? I'm very bad about using exotic brushes, I've never used a brush that didn't come with Photoshop, and mostly the soft and hard edged roundies so far. Little confused as to what you're talking about, my lingo isn't up to speed probably

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Try texturing a bit more with your strokes (both brush and the smudge tool used like a dry-brush)

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I'm not sure what you mean, you are talking about something like Socar Miles' or somesimilar style? Dry brush?

I never learned to paint, I was a drawer, Ebony and architectural pencils, sometimes pens or Prismacolors, that's about it. I always laid an amount of graphite down the 'pushed' it around with a tightly rolled piece of paper, a smudger (?). I guess this is an extension of that technique/habit. Fall back on what you know. I tell myself that comfort is key to letting expression flow, I'm not buyin it tho.

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PAINT MORE
POST MORE

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I've been posting my stuff at DA since March. I asked for help in my very first post, never got jack and looking around for a while I realized it was more a place to show off and get exposure than share stuff or help (look at my pageviews, I'm a poor pimp ). I may very well take you up on that request. I'm beginning to think DA's a nice place to store stuff and that's about it.

Izzy Drac Emps

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Lovin the bold colors? *cough* purple *cough*...That's a nasty combo of colour ya got packed in there...reminds me of some of the early 20C stained glass work

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The colors I use are a lot of things, mainly railing against the grunge, dank, dark crap that's so pervasive on the web the last few years. I love most of the styles mentioned, when perpetrated by good artists but man, I want my mind and heart to be full of positive joyful things more than negative dark things, so this is what I try to put into it; hopefully it's what spills out as well. There's enough atrocity in real life, why my art yeah? Plus it's really hard to use super saturated colors like this and not make people cringe the challenge is cool.

And yeah, I've definitely noticed some similarities to stained glass, didn't plan it that way, perhaps a subconcious influence, I've always liked it.

That's a lot of words for me, I'll be quiet now until, Peter talks over my head again milkin it while I have you on the line man

Thanks for the encouragement and helps, both mean a lot.

Jason

I really can't offer any critiques but I can add my voice to the others that I really like it. Art like this is the very essence of subjectivity. It almost seems that if one critiques it too much, that quality would be lost and it would no longer have come solely from your mind's eye.

Keep it up friend!

. . : slicePuzzle

Jason:

Nope, not because I don't like it. Hmm, how to explain this.

Remember a thread ages ago, where I went off on a rant (yeah..shut up..I know the ambiguity there) about "Photoshop Clay"? What happens with a lot of digital painting is exactly that. The "texture" created with the standard brush tool, using a diffused brush (soft edged roundie) is too "perfect" in how it formats and spreads. To make anything comparable on paper would require a soft cloth and hours of precise rubbing. The reason it's so hard to do in life is also the reason it's so easy on a computer. It's nearly mathematical in it's perfection, which makes it seem so foreign to us imperfect peoples.

Ever watch a film with heavy CGI and realize that you can automatically pick out the CG parts no matter how small? It's probably (highly probably) that exact lack of imperfection that's doing it. It seems unnatural..forced..overdone.

When I mentioned texturing, and drybrushing it was to say this: If you play with the kind of brushes you're using for your smudge tool, you'll find that your blending with it becomes a touch imperfect...textured...natural (Opinion time) I, personally, like to take a good dissolving brush (speckly crap) and set my smudging percentages high, then do tiny little drags to get that rough/smooth blend going on. Everybody else has their own methods, but it's the tiny little details that aren't smooth..aren't "clay" that make it seem more natural...even with an unnatural subject or a surreal style.

In the same way, taking big fat hard edged brushstrokes to block everything out, and then refining here and there looks/feels/seems more natural than trying to draw or paint a perfect reproduction of what you see in your head without starting steps. Thinking in pencil terms, smudging (dry brushing, smoothing whatever the hell we wanna call it) with different textures, brushes etc. is like crosshatching.

Now The Big Fat Disclaimer
When I mentioned that they were tips and not critiques, I meant them just like that I love this. I love the colour, the thought, the flow and the feel. I wanted to toss those few things out as something to consider working on for whatever route you want to go. If this is what pours from your head onto the monitor now, there was obviously nothing else for me to say about technique or vision, so that (and this) is what ya get

I agree with Bugs, there's only so much to critique about painting and it's almost all subjective. Didn't want to do that aside from offering what tiny bit'o'thought I might be able to sling.


MORE!!!

and yes..posting to DA for critique is like masturbating with a cheese grater.

Mildly amusing...mostly painful.

~cough~

great great great, thanks! I'm getting good things here, exciting things that make me wanna do more stuff.

About subjectivity, I couldn't agree more. All I ever want of art is to be stimulated, to make me say 'cool'. That's all I want my art to be too, I want it to make people say cool, on whatever level, and want to stare at it for a bit and imagine.

A big part of what I find myself getting lost in at museums or galleries is technique, strokes, the weird fractal like order to the texture of a painting. While art is subjective as anything, learning new techniques can only help the expression flow, as opposed to being limited by what you know how to do. I appreciate advice and schooling on stuff I don't know. I actually did use a cross-hatch looking brush on the sky parts, both warm and cool parts and had an inkling of the difference it provided, thanks for the reenforcement, it's 'taking' I think.

so thanks for the tips tools techniques!

Jason

shit... I learned that relatively recently with coding...

if you do the same stuff you always do and ask for help on every new tool, all your stuff is gonna keep coming out derivative and you're gonna hate it..

you only seem to do cool shit when you actually put pencil to paper (or fingers to keys) and try and do all that shit that you don't think you can do. Messed up, ball it up and try again, and again, and again...

Not only do you learn the cool new shit, but you build a silod base on the old stuff, the basics, and what simple tools do.

Like Sherloc Holmes said to Waton, "Without you to come up with all the wrong answers, how would I ever come across the correct ones?"

My little theory is that when you fuck up, it forces you to wonder why you did, and if you take the time to step out for a cigarette and ponder all you're failing at, you come up with about 6 or 7 different new ways to try. Failed at those? Try again.


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JK - this is some beautiful work, i thoroughly enjoyed just looking at it!
well done.
I only have two little issues, but the work as a whole is totally amazing.
mushroom - why is it the only object in the piece that is casting a shadow? why doesn't the tree cast one in the same direction? what about the grass? what i would like to see is the mushroom's shadow being cast as tho the tree is the light source... but that's just me. plus the highlight on the mushroom seems to be in the wrong spot perhaps.
grass - it lacks consistency. the background grass looks just delicious, as does the long grass around the base of the tree, but in the foreground, and especially around the mushroom, it turns into a green mat or something.

ok, that's me.

once again, beautiful work.