Aqueducts Painting

Well, I've had enough of this painting so I'm deeming it finished.
I'd like to clean it up a bit, mainly the background/foreground stuff, get some more detail in there, but I just don't have the patience for it and I honestly don't think I'd ever truly finish it if I tried.

http://i.imgur.com/qnlW4Jk.jpg

The character was supposed to be the Scion, but when I tried to paint blonde hair, it looked weird, and for the life of me, I couldn't get it right. The armor is loosely based on the Elite MTX set, but I have a hard time seeing the details in such low res that I just made my own thing and tried to break up the monotony of white and grays that would kind of make some sense (leather padding for the plate and chain mail).

Can i edit that one? Im looking for something to waste my free time

i know what u mean about patience, the time it takes to do big bits of art, even in digital, its ferocious. I dont think Ive ever gone as far as I would have gone with a thing had time not been in play.



Its a shame cause the womans face and the whole hip area are exquisitely described. I think the scale/perspective of the arm has gone a bit astray. Its a very hard angle to capture, when I get into positions like that things often get a little crazy. I try and keep everything on layers that can be scaled and liquified/warped into order. Part of that obviously is working at a level of finish that is far below what youve done here, my stuff looks like an absolute mess of scribbly bullshit until quite late into the thing often, esp when theres tons going on.

A bonus of that though is that you cna work really fast because you dont care about surface detail at all. Youre literally drawing matchstick skeletons, balloon heads, basic muscle shapes, just the fundamental structures beneath everything. Then when I do start to actually paint on the surfaces, the skin over these shapes I dont really add light beyond the bare minimum ambient, non directional light needed to make sense of the thing. So its completely flat looking, just areas of colour and maybe texture. I add the light last so that I can still mess with the thing a lot right up until the end, which lets be more rough and work faster up to that point. I add the light and shadow with transparent layers of colour. The horror part of that way of doing it is making vectors of the basic shapes if you want to be that precise, I detest vectoring and that part sometimes takes me to breaking point like uve obviously got where its just f this, were done.

It works for me as a workflow overall though. I cant do the thing where I draw something 100% precisely, and then in 1 pass paint the thing 100% precisely. I mean maybe I could but my patience is just not up to it, Id never finish it to the point where i was happy, its 2 very long and very painstaking processes.

Obviously method and workflow is a very personal thing, different methods work for different people. But you might want to experiment with doing things in different orders, trying different processes etc to see if you can find quicker ways of bringing it all together. Maybe theyre not even quicker but theyre just broken down into more steps that each feel faster and more fun to complete. Maybe they let you have a degree of control to edit fundamental things in the image at far later stages. Because youve obviously got skill, that painting is on its way to being amazing, its just how do you get to that point without burning out so that you can take it the extra mile.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

Spoiler

i know what u mean about patience, the time it takes to do big bits of art, even in digital, its ferocious. I dont think Ive ever gone as far as I would have gone with a thing had time not been in play.



Its a shame cause the womans face and the whole hip area are exquisitely described. I think the scale/perspective of the arm has gone a bit astray. Its a very hard angle to capture, when I get into positions like that things often get a little crazy. I try and keep everything on layers that can be scaled and liquified/warped into order. Part of that obviously is working at a level of finish that is far below what youve done here, my stuff looks like an absolute mess of scribbly bullshit until quite late into the thing often, esp when theres tons going on.

A bonus of that though is that you cna work really fast because you dont care about surface detail at all. Youre literally drawing matchstick skeletons, balloon heads, basic muscle shapes, just the fundamental structures beneath everything. Then when I do start to actually paint on the surfaces, the skin over these shapes I dont really add light beyond the bare minimum ambient, non directional light needed to make sense of the thing. So its completely flat looking, just areas of colour and maybe texture. I add the light last so that I can still mess with the thing a lot right up until the end, which lets be more rough and work faster up to that point. I add the light and shadow with transparent layers of colour. The horror part of that way of doing it is making vectors of the basic shapes if you want to be that precise, I detest vectoring and that part sometimes takes me to breaking point like uve obviously got where its just f this, were done.

It works for me as a workflow overall though. I cant do the thing where I draw something 100% precisely, and then in 1 pass paint the thing 100% precisely. I mean maybe I could but my patience is just not up to it, Id never finish it to the point where i was happy, its 2 very long and very painstaking processes.

Obviously method and workflow is a very personal thing, different methods work for different people. But you might want to experiment with doing things in different orders, trying different processes etc to see if you can find quicker ways of bringing it all together. Maybe theyre not even quicker but theyre just broken down into more steps that each feel faster and more fun to complete. Maybe they let you have a degree of control to edit fundamental things in the image at far later stages. Because youve obviously got skill, that painting is on its way to being amazing, its just how do you get to that point without burning out so that you can take it the extra mile.

Oh yeah, I vastly prefer the digital medium, but for some reason I can't get into the habit of using the tools that come with it. I mostly paint on average of 2 layers, this one had quite a bit more because I haven't really done backgrounds in digital before and wanted to make sure I could change something without scrapping the whole thing, but I ended up spending very little time on it because I didn't like having to sort all the layers I had for it. Usually I start with just a quick sketch, then start going ham with the paint, maybe separating 1 or 2 things from the majority of the work (face, or hair usually) and if something goes awry or I change my mind on something, I either have to start over or paint on top. I know it's inefficient to work like this, but I'm not reaching for professionalism or anything, and I definitely have more important and fundamental things to work on rather than technical stuff, so at situations like this, I'd rather call it quits, take what I can learn from doing it and move onto something else. Perhaps I'll change my ways someday.

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Jideament wrote:

Can i edit that one? Im looking for something to waste my free time

Sorry for the late reply. Technically I can't stop you but what did you have in mind?