[invicta]

I've been lurking here forever evying other people because of their huge talents.. ..but now it's time for me to actually start posting.

I'm quite new to digital painting, alhtough I've had a wacom tablet for years.. ..however now I decided I'm going to make good use of it and start painting - seriously (If you CAN take someone with my poor talents seriously;) )!

Anyway, here is a start of a character I started today, so far about an hour in Photoshop7. I got my anatomy reference from poser (cheating! ).





Any kind of comments and critique is very welcome, so I can improve. Thanks a lot!

I'll post the progress of the image into this thread.

[faeklone]

Personally I don't care if you used reference or not, that's not the point. If you're not secure with anatomy don't sweat it. You'll get it with practice and use of reference.

As for your picture, the face looks fine, although a little muddy. What I would suggest is that you don't treat certain areas as I'm going to work this up to a finish and then go onto something else. Work the entire picture with value and colours to make it look about right before going in and adding details. That goes for a background as well. Most times a solid colour like you are using can actually change the look fo the pice while you are working on it. things can seem out of place or not right and while you're fixing it, you are actually wrecking the piece. Using the overall value and colour approcah to thing you can see how the different parts of the picture are reacting to one another and change things accordingly.

Keep posting, and keep looking. You learn both by doing and by looking.


_________________
"It's not the tools you use but how you use them that counts."

[Mikko K]

Moikka,

�l� k�yt� mustaa taustaa. Ikin�

Okay, I'll write something in english.. Talent and imagination are a bit overrated in my opinion. This piece shows lack of experience more than lack of talent. So I suggest you start by putting something else than black or white to the background, because your eyes adjust to that making other values hard to get right, as faeklone said.

In PS, you can use an adjustment layer to desaturate the image. Try putting one on top, check every once in a while if you're actually painting with Value or just hue / sat. Right now the hair seems to have somewhat more saturation than the face, so you should either add more to the skin or remove some from the hair area. You can pick colors more easily in PS if you change the picker to HSB.

Just keep working on this mate, you'll improve, no doubt about it.