Son of the Black Eye portraits: COMPLETE

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kitty
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits - in progress: Flar'Tar

Post by kitty »

you two seem to make a great team! your collaborative works are a huge step ahead your seperate works! girgistan's costumes keep getting more interesting, recognizable and detailed while spaceinvader's shading gets more consistent all the time!


i don't know if you still accept crits on flar tan, but here are a couple of problems nevertheless:

* i don't have a problem to have his face all shadowed out but right now it looks like he is wearing a veil ( and his beard being an end of it)
* i have a problem with the way you depict orcish skin - it looks like cloth not skin... do some (preferably photo reffed) ethic skin colour studies to get a feel how skin reflects light etc. i also suspect it is too dull and needs brighter highlights.
* trunk anatomy. his arms are different length. his left arm doesn't connect to the body. his left arm has two ellbows (or none?) - check the arm musculature in general. he needs more neck musculature. i did a rough PO to explain some of this...

but still: good work! keep it up!
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thespaceinvader
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits - in progress: Flar'Tar

Post by thespaceinvader »

I did fear I may have shortened the right arm a little too much. Thanks for the redline. I'll see what I can do with it in the am =)
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits - in progress: Flar'Tar

Post by zookeeper »

If you're feeling like it, I think you could thicken the blade of the other knife/sword. It looks pretty thin for an orcish weapon. Realistic maybe, but you hardly see it in the 205x205 one.
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits - in progress: Flar'Tar

Post by thespaceinvader »

Fixed up along kitty's redlines. I call this finished.

I decided I like the effect of the face, though, so that stays.
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Girgistian
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits - in progress: Flar'Tar

Post by Girgistian »

Good work. A few things I'd like to mention though:

- The folding on his left wrist seems to be too dense and out of place - it just suddenly stops.
- The sword's lineart doesn't follow the shading in general. It's as thick at the spots where the light hits the blade as it is in the shadows, and the sharpened part just goes over the lines.
- Personally I'm not too fond of the face effect either, but have it your way.
- The breastplate is asymmetric. The golden thing going under his left pec goes mostly by the body and maybe slightly curves up, whereas the one on the right side curves down
- The dagger's blade goes a very long way along the hand-protection. I think the blade isn't supposed to be that wide (or if it is, rather farther away from the hilt).

Generally small things, and not equally important. You decide what to do.
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thespaceinvader
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits - in progress: Flar'Tar

Post by thespaceinvader »

I'll fix a couple of them - the breastplate, the sword, primarily.

The dagger blade is supposed to be slanted down like the sword's - it doesn't really show from this perspective, but I can live with it. And i think the wrinkles on the glove are minor enough not to matter. I'll fix the rest, though, and then call it done.

EDIT: done. Adding to the first post.
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits

Post by woodmouse »

Wow, that's really cool! I hope I could do that good portraits... What's the "secret" of your and Kitty's, Melon's and Girgistan's portraits? :) I have only edited the mainline portraits made by other people, because I needed "unique" portraits for The Zones... :oops:
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits

Post by thespaceinvader »

Practice. And the portrait tutorial.

For me, it's also having someone's sketches to colour - I can ink and colour quite well, but the planning stages still elude me. But yeah, practice practice practice.

And the portrait tutorial.

If you want some more help/more detailed help, feel free to drop me a PM or cath me in IRC (if i'm actually at the computer...).
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Mirion147
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits

Post by Mirion147 »

Nice! Despite my saying it's "Nice!" I do have one problem with it(which I really wouldn't mind if you didn't listen to me). It almost looks like he's sleeping. You can see the suggestion of a nose and almost of his eyes but it looks as if they're closed.

However if you don't feel like changing that, thats fine.
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits

Post by thespaceinvader »

Like I said, I'm happy with the effect of the face - I've tried other ways of getting it to show, and none of them worked quite as well.
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits

Post by Jetrel »

woodmouse wrote:Wow, that's really cool! I hope I could do that good portraits... What's the "secret" of your and Kitty's, Melon's and Girgistan's portraits? :) I have only edited the mainline portraits made by other people, because I needed "unique" portraits for The Zones... :oops:
The secret is that most of art is actually science, and you can't break the rules of these "sciences" that govern it (for example, anatomy, perspective, etc). You can only 'bend' these rules, and you can only bend them where psychology and human perception patterns allow. Even picasso couldn't break these rules in his work - in fact, most of his work relied on them.

:eng: A straightforward way to learn to make decent drawings is to:
- study anatomy. Know the major parts of the body, and how the big muscle groups layer over each other, but also know what the different joints are capable of, and how balancing works. That is, know how to adjust a human figure so it looks comfortable, rather than stilted).
- get a basic grasp of perspective. That's just some basic geometry.
- get a good grasp on shading. That is, again, pure math - if you look at the basic mechanics behind raytracing, you're good to go.
- get a basic grasp of the psychology behind "composing" a drawing. There's some math to this (equal distribution of "area of a certain color/shade" across a line of symmetry, with the distance from that line of symmetry as a coefficient is one good rule of thumb), but some of this part is a little "artsy" and intuitive. It's really equivalent to being a good photographer - when you're drawing, you're drawing an imaginary scene in your head, or photographing an imaginary model. Pick a good camera angle, pick a good pose, otherwise your drawing will be just as blah as a badly-frame photo would be.
- Only bend the rules where you know psychology will allow it. (c.f. anime/comics and exaggerated facial features/body dimensions).

Books help. Practice is mandatory. Being willing to abandon comfortable ways of doing things, for methods that are objectively better; and being willing to constantly try new ways of doing stuff even if you've got something that already works, is absolutely mandatory.

And you need ~5 years to go from "completely talentless at art" to decent/good at drawing.
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits

Post by YaymeQ »

Hey, a while back I was reading a really good thread where Jetryl was talking about shading and the mathematics of it. He said he was going to make a tutorial out of it but I can't find it now and I don't think he made a tutorial yet ... does anyone know where that thread went? It didn't start out as a talk on shading (Which is probably why I can't find it) I think it started as someones attempt at a portrait.
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Mica
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits

Post by Mica »

He did make a tutorial for it, but he's redoing it IIRC.
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Girgistian
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits

Post by Girgistian »

The thread's name would be "Wolf Rider Portrait".
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kitty
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Re: Son of the Black Eye portraits

Post by kitty »

i'm sorry to contribute to hijacking your thread but i can't leave jetryl's statement uncommented. :P

of course he *is* right. you need to understand the basic principles, anatomy, perspective etc. furthermore you don't only need to understand them but you have to practise them until you know them by heart and you use them automatically.
and that is exactly my point: art is not like science. it isn't enough to know the rules (or science) behind and then use them like a formula. when you draw the human figure knowing how the muscles connect is worth nothing if you haven't internalized the basic shape (which is of course determined by the bones and the muscles beneath) and drawn it dozens of times. drawing is not about scientifical knowledge but about building a mental library and using it after gut feeling. but gut feeling doesn't mean like one wants but after a feeling based on intense study and knowledge.

same goes for the shadow stuff imho, knowing the degree in which the shadow will fall is of no use. do a lot of life drawing and still lives (that is a LOT) and draw boxes and spheres and then it will start to click and you will start to do it right without reference. you will know how the things really look like when you have looked at the things long enough, not when you know an abstract number.


end rant
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