Learning & Practices - Great start to this week!

Hey all, I'm very excited to share some new paintings / practices that I've done within the last two days. Thanks to the internet and resources on it, I'm able to learn tons! Yesterday I purchased a super cheap tutorial on values, "How to Improve Your Values" by Anthony Jones. While it was a quick 45mins it was an important 45mins. In short he explains putting local value first before lighting information. I should have known this, but it seems like I never corrected that bad habit. Below is an example of my first attempt with this fresh new outlook!

This character was inspired by the video game Civilizaton Beyond Earth, she is a Pan-Asian Cooperative spy/agent.

I've always wanted to make my digital painting look more traditional, there is something about that oil painted stroke feel that just feels.. warm and I guess you could say it pleases my "aesthetic sensibilities," whatever that means. I also want to improve on my ability to bring a more vivid and interesting color palette. So thanks to a little digging on youtube I found myself a video on Monday on how to achieve just that, by an artist named of Ahmed Aldoori, Well, it's about using an underpainting and colors but it feels more painterly than what I've been doing. I'll share the video and my work below!

Helpful stuff! Also grabbed his brushes, nothing too out of the ordinary but it gave a different light to what I always considered was the "hair brush." So was also something learned. Below is an image I did in my own style, but using the same approach.

Anatomy wasn't the focus, and I found myself noodling on it just to fix things here and there. So I called it done in order to move on. So she may not be the prettiest woman out there, but I do like the style and color. 

Of course I've also done some Master Studies during this time, they're nothing crazy or to call home about but I'll share it just to share it, this was done before the new approach in values (this was done on Monday). Looking forward to my next study. These we're done in 15mins a pop. My goal was to get the major white/grey/blacks in the right-ish position to learn composition. So ultimately, squint hard enough and it should look the same. 

Lastly, a friend of mine asked me to make something creepy and gross. Again this was before my values lesson and would have benefited greatly from it had I done it after, but it does show a good before and after on what I've learned. So behold some quick 30min sketch-paint of a creepy dude-thing.

Yay! You're at the end! Well, almost. In other news, I'm starting to pick up commissions within my gaming community for super cheap, I'll be testing the waters on doing commissioned work, the goal here is to gain some experience with handling projects, people and hitting deadlines, etc. (just got my first one!) All things going well, I with a little bit of luck will go for commissions publicly. This will help not only with bills, but also with tutorials, lessons and online resources that can make up for the lack of formal education I decided to opt out on. To top it all off, I'll be starting projects of my own designed to strengthen my ability to... well, design. So more conceptual art, less illustration art. 

As always thanks for reading!

Also remember to check me out on Artstation or DeviantArt!