Vielmond

Shit, you’re right! I’m still not back back yet, got some things to work out, but yeah... Thank you!

P: Bem vinda de volta após exatamente um ano! :)

It can be something other than the classic anatomy, color theory etc books, like something showing the evolution airplanes/cars/buildings/{insert name here} designs, and even anthropology related books in the vein of Guns, Germs, and Steel. I need to fatten up my wishlist for Christmas.

Vocês têm sugestões de livros de arte e referência interessantes?

Here's a cool resource for you, guys!

Do you know when you need to paint skulls, vehicles or some object full of crevices and details that change and get obscured by different angles? It can be hard to find good references, sometimes you need to learn how it looks from unusual angles like the underside, but no one take photos of the underside.

Well, the folk at Sketchfab do. It's a project that has been running for a while, and wow, it has grown since I last checked it! Some incredibly kind museums joined and are sharing 3D scans of their collections, to not speak of the high quality scans of almost anything by regular users. You'll also find original 3D models there. It's amazing, a wealth in information at your fingertips, almost as if you had the object in your hands. Enjoy!

Aqui vai um recurso legal!

Sabe quando você precisa pintar crânios, veículos ou objetos cheios de depressões e detalhes que mudam e se sobrepõem de ângulos diferentes? Pode ser difícil encontrar boas referências, às vezes você precisa descobrir como ele fica de ângulos pouco usuais como debaixo, mas ninguém tira fotos debaixo.

No, sorry. :(

My surname isn't broken German, it's broken French (language I also don't speak). It's probably supposed to be "Viel + monde", Old World, but the trailing "e" must have fallen in the Atlantic Ocean when my ancestors made their way south.

The current form, "viel + mond" translates to A Lot of Moon [sic] in German, right? It has an even better meaning in Dutch: Fell Mouth!

P: Você fala Alemão? :)

R: Não, desculpe. :(

Meu sobrenome não é Alemão errado, é Francês errado (língua que também não falo). Provavelmente deveria ser "Viel + monde", Velho Mundo, mas deve ter perdido o " e” no Oceano Atlântico quando meus ancestrais vieram para o sul.

Prints availvable at Society6 | RedBubble | INPRNT

I've been working on it on and off past month. I think I accidentally gave her black powder in that pipe, lol.

Uh, isso é constrangedor. Quando mudei para meu PC atual meu arquivo de brushes implodiu. Tudo está fora de ordem e duplicado e nunca arrumei isso. Não consigo mais identificar todos. A boa notícia é que a maioria dos packs de pincéis estilo "pintura" são derivados dos mesmos sets. Não será difícil encontrar algum similar, senão idêntico.

Tenho brushes demais e não uso 1/5, então só tentei pincéis aleatoriamente. Alguns que usei no início estão destacados na primeira imagem. Não tenho ideia de onde peguei esses, mas há uma porção deles nesse set. Os da segunda são pincéis de ruído-que-se-passa-por-folhagem que creio serem do Jaime Jones. Ajudam a misturar, suavizar ou bagunçar as coisas. A terceira imagem mostra o set do Tatitati, que são os que normalmente uso.

Gente, podem ajudar? Você reconhece algum desses sets? D:

Q: Where can I find this vegetation brush pack you used?? 😍 I need them!!

A: Uh, that's awkward. When I made the transition to my current PC my brushes file imploded. Everything is out of order and duplicated and I never got around fixing it. I can no longer identify all of them. The good news is that most painterly packs out there are derivations of the same sets. It won't be hard to find similar, if not the same brushes.

I have way too many brushes and I don't use 1/5 of them, so I just tried brushes at random. Some I used at the beginning are highlighted in the first image. No idea where I got those, but there's some of them in this set. The ones in the second are useful noise-that-can-pass-as-foliage brushes that I think are Jaime Jones'. They help to blend, soften or mess up things. The third image shows Tatitati's set, the one I usually use.

I’m so happy with my mixer brushes experiments. I never liked vegetation brush packs, they looked too artificial and flat. It turns out I hadn’t figured how use them yet. Silly me!

Putting vague concepts into words make me think and develop them. It’s nice, because my understanding of art is always evolving, and this type of question helps the process. (:

Used the mixer brush to actually mix colors instead of only giving the finishing painterly touches. It gets too grainy too easily, but it's fun! I only regret not having painted it in a higher resolution. I'll definitely give it another try.

Since there isn't much stuff I can post at the moment I'm posting a WIP instead. Hopefully I'll get to finish all personal WIPs I've been hoarding this year and make you all happy! :x

[pergunta sobre estudos e paisagens, tradução para Português no final]

I have many tips! Without more details I'll give you a broad answer. It might contain stuff you already know. I hope that's fine!

You can start by acknowledging that when you're comfortable enough with one subject (as characters), but not with others (as environments), the first, and second, and fifteen attempts at the new subject may look terrible. Yes, this situation sucks! You're experienced enough to realize those works aren't your best, but you lack subject familiarity and a personal approach to achieve the expected results. Hitting that invisible wall is highly frustrating. Acknowledge it’s not your fault, those unsatisfying paintings are not a proof of your failure as an artist or student, they're nothing but a by-product of learning process. You have no choice but weather those feelings if you wish to bring your entire skill set to a uniform level.

The good news is that you can tailor your approach to your current skill set: If you're used to paint characters you can treat your background as a character, as a group of characters! Treat that tree in a forest full of other trees as a character in its own right, complete with little details and quirks. Carefully depict the color changes happening on its weathered back, the greener base due the moss, how its silhouette gracefully twists, its branches interweaving with the next tree. Give it your undivided attention while you're working on it, don't treat it as just background noise.

Now that you have a strategy to deal with the components of the scene you need to think how you'll conduct your studies. Studies are essentially copies, therefore a successful study is an accurate copy of your subject, right?

I hereby commit the temerity of saying that's wrong.

Study: Application of the mind to the acquisition of knowledge, as by reading, investigation, or reflection;

You'll learn something when striving for perfect reproductions, but it won't be what you were hoping to learn. You'll train your muscle memory, your brushtrokes/gradient/line art accuracy, you'll improve your spatial location and maybe even perspective visualization. These all belong to the "mechanical" skill set of artists, not the "theoretical" skill set. Accurate lines will help your sketching, they'll make the piece aesthetic pleasant, but they won't enable you to create good backgrounds because you need to understand backgrounds in first place. Understanding takes place before you have the chance to use your perfect lines. But alas, every time you're just accurately copying stuff you're developing your mechanical skill set instead!

I'm very fond of using mechanical skill in this context. It describes perfectly what happens when you're pouring your entire being into creating a perfect reproduction: You stop asking questions. You stop trying to understand what's going on in the image because you allocated all of your energy to the technical side of the process; to the shapes, color gradients and positions. When you're busy playing the seven errors game you're not reflecting about the content of the image, you're reflecting about its 2D representation on paper.

Make of learning something new about the natural and architectonic world your new study end goal from now on.

I like to use this image because it's a real-world example of back when I hadn't the faintest clue of how approach environments.

They were 30-45 min paintings. My goal was to not do perfect copies but learn something, anything from each painting. For that I purposely used big brushes whenever possible, no color picker, and didn't care if it happened to look like unreadable crap in the end.

The first painting taught me that my perception of greens was fairly bad and shadows are important to give depth to unconventional POVs. I learned that snow can be so blue in the second painting. The third hinted at the saturation role in depth. The fourth confirmed my idea that shadows weren't just base color + black. You don't have to experience a revelation, you only need to learn a small thing at a time and spot patterns.

After this set of studies I painted an original environment applying what I observed. That way I assured myself I understood what I noticed and also trained my mechanical skills. That's my method for studies: Quick copies, an original, rinse and repeat.

The other thing that helped and still helps me is building a visual library. That's why I came to Tumblr! I have a secondary blog where I collect a lot of references for landscapes, clothing, cultures, everything and anything that catches my eye. That way I get better acclimated to the world diversity of... everything, and I have where to go to open my mind before starting a painting. I research before working on landscapes because I want to make sure they don't end looking all the same, and the natural world is so big and complex I can't possibly store all this information in my mind alone.

Wrapping up:

Treat your environment components as characters in their own right.

Develop a different study approach, better focused on your true end goal.

Expose yourself to the subject you're studying and research before starting.

Bonus:

If depth is giving you grief, allocate some extra time to study perspective.

If volume is getting into the way study basic shapes as well (spheres, cubes, soft concave, curved surfaces, etc).

If the environment feels too flat and plain or too "draw on" and unrealistic you might have issues with your level of details. Usually you'll add more details near the focal points and gracefully decrease it the farther you go. Think of LOD in games:

(Courtesy of Traction Wars)

(It's a question about lineart, shapes and going from traditional to digital. English translation below the cut)

Agora me sinto culpada por passar meses sem postar!

Foi um pouco difícil me acostumar à tablet e aos programas no início, mas também seria me acostumar aos pincéis e tinta. Ferramentas digitais ainda são ferramentas, você terá que aprender a usar alguma coisa de qualquer forma. Já a teoria, os fundamentos de cores, perspectiva e tudo mais são exatamente os mesmos, não importa o meio utilizado.

Me corrija se eu estiver errada, mas sua dificuldade parece ser descobrir o papel de seus sketches na pintura digital? Para chegar à sua resposta você precisa se perguntar uma coisa: Você gosta de trabalhar com formas ou você é fascinado(a) por elas?

Há um mundo de diferença entre os dois. Você pode amar observar um estilo de arte sem ter que adotá-lo. Adoro linhas bem feitas. Acho sketches particularmente fascinantes pelo mesmo motivo que me torna uma pessoa pouco indicada para responder à sua dúvida: Eu sempre fui… *sussurra* péssima com linhas. Quando trabalhava tradicionalmente eu mal podia esperar para pular para as cores, e fiquei mais que feliz em eliminar as linhas do meu trabalho quando passei para o meio digital.

No mundo da escrita diz-se que há dois tipos de escritores, e todos os escritores são uma combinação desses dois tipos. Os outliners são os caras que escrevem uma outline, um resumo, antes de começar. Eles delineiam cada ponto da história e sabem exatamente onde querem chegar. Não necessariamente seguirão o resumo ao pé da letra, o importante é estruturar a história antes de começar. Já os discovery writers descobrem a história conforme escrevem. Eles começam com algumas coisas em mente, como personagens e situações, e têm alguma ideia de onde estão indo, mas como chegarão lá e qual será o resultado final só descobrirão durante o processo de criação.

Como pintora sou do segundo tipo, a mais pura “discovery painter”. Tenho noção do que quero pintar, mas mal esboço antes de começar. Só sei onde chegarei no meio do caminho. O meu trabalho nasce do caos, não da ordem. Das formas e cores, não das linhas. Nem os meus esboços têm cara de sketches, eles são na verdade speedpaints. E isso é, na pintura, uma tremenda desvantagem. Espontâneo? Com certeza. Mas cheio de erros e voltas que poderiam ser evitados se eu trabalhasse com linhas.

Linhas são bonitas e úteis. Só o que me deixa feliz enquanto trabalho são as cores. Sempre foram minha paixão, sempre contiveram mais informação com menos esforço para meu pequeno cérebro. Sou incapaz de enxergar volume em linhas. Elas funcionam como marcos, mas são chapadas. Eis o motivo de usar formas tão cedo no meu processo.

Se você se sente confortável com linhas não as descarte. Trabalhe com elas, as use ao seu favor. Continue esboçando no papel! Fortaleça esse seu lado que gosta de estruturar seu trabalho antes de começar, trabalhe o gestual para ganhar a espontaneidade que procura. E procure artistas parecidos com você, observe os processos deles e como resolveram o dilema de ordem vs energia, linhas vs cores e formas. Aprenda com eles.

Sinta-se sempre livre para aprender as coisas que te fascinam, mas não despreze as que ama fazer pois elas serão seus pontos fortes.

Para fechar esse post, gostaria de deixar esse link. Ele é um excelente exemplo de como um sketch bem estruturado ajuda na hora de pintar. Olha que pinceladas lindas, por vezes quase geométricas, todas de acordo com o estilo do traço do esboço. As linhas ainda transparecem nas formas, e são elas que dão um ar de espontaneidade para a pintura!