(This is the first in an open-ended, ongoing series of posts I’ll be doing where I where I delve into personal introspection, philosophy, theory, and such. Oooooo… FANCY. Yes, this means I will likely ramble and tangent with some regularity.)
For those of you unfamiliar with my artistic background, I’m still relatively new to the digital medium. No formal training in it, nor any formal training for traditional art aside from 2 art classes between the age of 15 and 17 (one of which I failed the first time around due to wanting to work on my own projects, actually). I’ve found a handful of video tutorials online that have been useful, but for the most part it’s strictly been me just trying to figure out things on my own. For most of 2007 I almost used Painter exclusively. If you saw the work that I was doing in early ’07, or even in the middle of last year, you’d see substantial difference and visible improvement. For that matter, there’s a visible improvement in the work that I’ve done just in the last 6 months. It is, as it says, a process. ;)
My linework itself, when drawing something initally, is often very sketchy. Always has been. I think that, in my recent digital experimentation/learning, I’ve not been as focused with needing to clean up the linework. I will say this: going digital, for me, was very much learning a new medium from scratch.
Some of you will be familiar with a number, if not all, of the pieces of artwork that follow.
I’m going to being with some speedpaintings from early ’07 when I was first trying to find my way around the digital medium (all in Painter).
(Click for full-size.)
Now a couple of the first finished pieces I did a few months later, that were still solely in Painter.
Now, the last batch of exclusively Painter finished work that I did was in mid ’07. Here are 3 sample pieces from a Luchador project I did for some friends at that point:
I think the problem is that I’ve got two personal styles vying for the same production space in my head right now, and I’ve been trying to find a proper fusion for them. What actually put me into this rapidly evolving/changing learning overdrive was the Disco The Boy Detective piece I did here. I was working on ideas for Hyper, and when a one-off of Disco came up, The Muse shoved me in the passenger seat, and took over. 4 hours later I was staring at something very outside of my artistic comfort zone.
It wasn’t until I started participating in the Remake/Remodels on here earlier this year that I started to truly get a grasp on the tools at hand. Before that, I had been in the midst of a several month artist’s block. This piece was an absolute epiphany for me– causing something to click and jump-started things inside me (no, it was not a chestburster). Mind you, were it for an actual paid piece, I wouldn’t be comfortable with calling it “finished” at that point, but for 4 hours, I was thrilled with it. So I started doing other things outside of my comfort zone. At that point, I was doing my linework and initial colors in Painter, then porting it back and forth between Painter and Photoshop for layer filtering and such. My skillset and my style(s) were improving, evolving rapidly as I pushed myself outside of my comfort zone. I’m still very much in the midst of the early part of that, and as such, my style is wildly in flux. Every piece is trial and error, a learning experience if we actually choose to learn from it.
My “inking” is currently in flux as well, as I’ve not found a program that suits my liking for it yet. The linework in ArtRage is done with the regular brush at minimum size. I have yet to find a brush in PS that I can ink with that doesn’t look like it has pixel bleed issues. Painter probably had the closest thing I wanted, but it had the potential for getting a bit on the inconsistent side. While I’ve got a copy of Manga Studio EX, I have a love/hate relationship with it right now, as it’s not as readily accessible/intuitive for a beginning user.
I’ll go into my first foray of utilizing photograpic aspects in piece in another post, sometime in the next week.