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Why Cats Paint
Once you've grasped that material I find:
to be the logical follow-up.
I put a link and more pics in my blog. Direct amazon link:
For all the BOB ROSS fans out there.
P.S - I own one of these and it’s most definitely one of my top 5 purchases from Amazon.
my suggestion is to find a small painting group run by a real artist. i pay $65.00 for 6 once a week sessions that go 2 1/2 to 3 hours. the artist will critique your work, give you suggestions, and sometimes do a demo or even paint on your painting to show you haow things should be done. the other thing to do is findsome books at the library and see step by step instructions. here is one i borrowed from local library, https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Paint-Acrylics-Small-Paintings/dp/1631590561
>The initial conflict is that creative things are dangerous
YES. I have so much trouble with this question! What I have found helps is doing lessons out of a book. I know it seems silly, but if I can do a lesson out of something like Learn to Paint in Acrylics with 50 Small Paintings, I can think of the thing I am doing as "a lesson" and not "aa creative thing". But once the lesson is over, I can tell myself "well, here I have been messing around with paint and nothing bad happened, so I can keep playing with it and nothing bad will happen" -- and that seems to help calm me enough to slide into being creative.
The trick is, it needs to be a lesson in the material I want to use. So a watercolor lesson if I want to work mostly with watercolors, etc. But that helps a lot.
I'm not sure how compatible those styles are tbh. One is realistic and moody, the other expressive, colorful and stylized. By all means give it a try, but it's harder to get technical critiques.
If you just ask "is there something wrong with X", in a stylized piece like this, it's nearly impossible for anyone other than you to know. You're almost better off just finishing the piece and asking others "what do you think of this style?"
I guess if you feel like you're not getting a sense of volume (it's feeling flat) and don't like the lighting, then you'll have to understand form and light a bit better. Maybe get a copy of Color & Light:
https://www.amazon.com/Color-Light-Realist-Painter-Gurney/dp/0740797719
One quick tip for volume and lighting is to respect the basic forms of things like the head (essentially an egg), arms, legs, torso (basically cylinders). Shade them according to those forms first, and make sure that any detailed features sit on top of that, not just on a flat surface. In other words don't ruin that overall basic form shading when adding in the details.
Hope that helps a bit. Good luck!
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Color-Light-Realist-Painter-Gurney/dp/0740797719 one of the best books on light and color
one of the best things you can do it paint from life for color and pretty much every skill, get a lamp a cloth/t-shirt some fruit or simple objects and do a still life painting ,doing it with a lamp at night means you can come back the next night and have the same scene.
The only textbook my instructors ever had me purchase for my illustration degree was Imaginative Realism by James Gurney (the Dinotopia guy). Lots of good stuff in there, practical stuff that will be great for art in general, not just fantasy stuff. It's an older book, so you should be able to pick it up pretty cheap. Here it is on Amazon.
Was thinking the same thing. Much like this book I've had for many years.
Ovi gore prozori u usporedbi s stolicama imaju tri metra, al možda si tako htio. Stabla mogu bit puno bolja, čak i za crtanje pod nastavom. Ove tanke črčke po putu izgledaju ko da si dao mlađoj sestri da završi.
Inače, materijali su pogođeni poprilično okej (staklo, krošnja, drvo), kompozicija je oke i sama činjenica da si završio je super.
Skini s torenta ovu knjigu, super je za osnove crtanja krajolika.
Having gone through so many books since school and afterward, Color and Light, A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney is probably the best one I've ever gone through. You'll see it recommended a lot by other artists as well.
Using reference is not a bad thing. A lot of great artists have reference. But don't have one reference and copy that. Have a lot and pick and choose what you want to learn from them.
Let's say you have a guy sitting outdoors during the sunset. What is he doing? What pose is he in? You could look up lots of drawings of people to give yourself an idea of what you could do. You could also look up photos of people in sunset what are they doing? Are they resting? Are they having a picnic?
Once you've decided on that, you can take photos of yourself in that pose so you can reference that as you draw. You could even put yourself in the same lighting so that you can refer to that as you paint. If I'm not wrong, James Gurney sometimes comes up with models and takes them outside and takes photos of them for reference.
What about style then? You could look up lots of artists you admire and want to imitate. Look at what you like about them. Do you like how a particular guy draws hands? You can reference that. Do you like how another guy does linework? You can attempt that too.
What about backgrounds? Take lots and lots of reference pictures or find photos of a grass patch in sunset, if that's what the guy is sitting on.
Then put all of this visual references together, and you've got original content.
I read about it in his book Color and Light! He talks about a few other limited palettes too. It's a fantastic book I would highly recommend to any landscape painter!!
https://www.amazon.ca/Color-Light-Guide-Realist-Painter/dp/0740797719
Pogledaj ovu knjigu, ima je za skinut šatro besplatno, https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Scenery-Landscapes-Jack-Hamm/dp/0399508066
Mislim da će ti dobro doć. Npr voda bi mogla bit vodoravnija, a ne da se kuži taj potez ruke koji ide u neki luk. Kućica da se vidi i s druge strane stabla. Iza breza provalija. Golo stablo lijevo nema odsjaj u vodi. Ogroman i neprivlačan potpis. Al sve u svemu ic okej.
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1631590561/
​
First projects are basic but it has some neat-o ones too.
​
Next project in it is to paint a piece of toast :)
Jack Hamm has a good book Drawing Scenery: Landscapes and Seascapes concerning landscapes.
Harold Speed also has The Practice and Science of Drawing which covers some very informative compositional, drawing, and painting theory.
It looks like both are available on internet archive too if you want to flip through them.
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If he's wanting to get into drawing, I'd suggest picking up a book or two from Andrew Loomis. They were written back in the early-mid twentieth century, and they're still popular among artists today, and for good reason.
I personally have Drawing the Head and the Hands by Andrew Loomis, and it's a wonderful reference tool for drawing/painting the human face. [Amazon]
Another great artist's reference book is Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney. [Amazon]
"Drawing Scenery: Landscapes and Seascapes" by Jack Hamm is a relatively cheap thin introductory book ($13.49 new, $4 - $7 used). This book is filled with pencil sketches, whereby the author demonstrates a lot of the basic techniques of image composition. Some topics covered in this book (randomly pulled from TOC):
- Commanding observer's attention
- Focal points and areas
- Charting the eye's course
- Principle of "the Threes"
- Entry point & follow-through of a picture
- Comprehension factors in a picture
- Contrasting values
and lots more.
Then the book dives into strategies for
- trees and foliage
- rocks and mountains
- clouds and skies
- water: oceans, lakes, rivers, falls
Simple pencil sketches --> powerful concepts applicable to image composition in most other media.
In the meantime, I would highly recommend buying this book: https://smile.amazon.com/Natural-Way-Draw-Working-Study/dp/0395530075
Books are kind of iffy. Most content creators would rather make a video than a book. James Gurney's Color and Light gets thrown around a lot as a great reference. The old How to Paint Citedel Miniatures books were decent, though they're long out of print.
Scale 75's Steampunk in Miniature is alright, though it suffers from not being proofread by a native English speaker. There are a couple terms that they throw around in the book that don't make any sense until you've read half the book and see enough examples to know what they're talking about. I assume that Scale 75's other books are of similar quality.
I would suggest learning more about the nature of your materials and experiment with different painting styles. You’re painting wet on wet now, more or less. Perhaps try a Grisaille underpainting, or work your painting up in thin layers. You talk about doing glazing on top of what you’re doing right now, but it’s generally recommended with oils that you work fat over lean. This isn’t just for looks, it’s to prevent imperfections in the paint later on. Oil painting doesn’t dry, it cures. Think of each layer as a tectonic plate which will move around as the painting ages. Fat thick layers with lots of oil will move around a lot more vs thin leaner layers that are cut with solvents.
Get this book. It’s one of the books that should be required reading for serious oil painters. Learn your materials in more depth. Learn about all the materials that aid oil paint. You might love cold wax for the textures you can create, or you might like neo megilp or liquin, or any of the other oil painting mediums that can help you level up.
I’d also suggest checking out oil paint company YouTube channels for more info. Gamblin’s is very good, I also like Golden’s channel which has info about oils through their Williamsburg line.
Also, check some painter documentaries and find out how the people you like paint. Experiment with their ideas.
All those things will help you figure out what his bothering you and will help you level up.
If you want to research paint pigments, I would strongly suggest The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques And if you want to check out the pigment codes on your paint (which they should have if they aren’t hot ass garbage) look at art pigment database . Note: it doesn’t matter which kind you have, the same pigments are used across mediums, the only thing that makes them different is their binder. This will get you started.
You’ll have to do your own poking for glass, ceramics, and industrial paint, dyes, etc. as that is a bit beyond my wheelhouse. I only know enough to make an educated guess on that business
Check out Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist by James Gurney.
Color and Light by James Gurney is a nice reference.
awesome! It's a great resource. I should read it again, for a while I was reading it like once a year or so. This is another good one for composition https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Scenery-Landscapes-Jack-Hamm/dp/0399508066
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter (James Gurney Art) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0740797719/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_SJB2Bb2KHP47J This one is great for understanding color and is really good if you're going to use traditional media.
I'm guessing they used a photo reference - if not, I'm as stupefied as you.
However, this is an amazing book on the topic by the guy who illustrated Dinotopia.
I'm only casually interested in art, and I learned a lot from this book. Plus it's just visually stunning. Highly recommended!
Thanks.
Most artists rehash their work again and again. It's the baby steps approach. Draw the same thing everyday, it'll get better.
I have posted only finished art, I'll PM you the link.
Once I post more of the evolution of this project, I can share the link here.
Here's a rule to follow from Kimon Nicolaides author of the Natural Way To Draw. Draw half a page everyday.
He give more directions but that will do it. You'll see incredible progress quickly. My contribution to the daily drawing is draw the same things differently everyday.
https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Way-Draw-Working-Study/dp/0395530075