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Sam Nielson's Fundamentals of Lighting
1 min read
I finally made it through the final assignment of Sam Nielson's Fundamentals of Lighting course!
I learned an incredible amount on this course and I'm very happy to be freed up to make some personal art again. I'm looking forward to apply the skills to some new art this coming year.
In the meantime, here's my final assignment result. Note that the line art was provided by Sam Nielson himself; the assignment was to render the image with color and light.
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Git gud: how to improve your art
5 min read
A big part of getting better at your craft is learning how to learn. It can be frustrating if you work very hard on your art, yet you never seem to make much progress. However, with some focused effort, you can turn it around and improve by leaps and bounds in a way you never thought possible.
The first step is to decide what aspect of your art you want to improve. Now if your answer to that is "EVERYTHING!", hold on for a moment. You can't improve everything at the same time.
You have to pick ONE small aspect. Be specific. "I want to get better at drawing characters" is too broad. "I want to learn how to construct better faces on my characters" is a much better goal.
Now that you have decided on your goal, you need to do research. If you are not as good as you want to be, that means you have a gap in your understanding. In order to fix it, you need new information. If you simply keep practicing without new information, you won't get any better.
Look online for the best tutorials that you can find on the subject. Bookmark them, and study them closely.
Find photo references. If you can't draw something well, that means you don't really know what it looks like. Make sure you understand your subject from all angles. Even if you want to draw a stylized version, you still need to know what it's supposed to look like in real life.
Find your inspiration. Look for art pieces by other people who have done well in the area you're trying to get better at. Use these pieces not to copy, but rather to compare your work and to see how close you are getting to the skill level you want.
So you've done your research, but you're not done yet! Here comes the most boring part, but it's also where you will make the real progress. It's time to do your homework!
Go through those tutorials and follow along with them. Don't just read them, do all the steps and draw your version of the tutorial result.
Once you've drawn the result, compare your drawing to the tutorial. Is it just as good? If not, try again! See if you can do it better the second time.Keep doing this until you can draw it just as well as the tutorial version, or at least until you have made significant progress and you can draw it better than your first version.
Now you've done your homework, so it's time to apply those newfound skills to art of your own!
Go ahead and make your art. Be sure to keep those reference photos on the side, and make it the best possible piece you can do.
After you finish your piece, compare your result to your art inspiration. Is it just as good? If not, what is that person doing differently from you? Maybe their lines are more polished? See if you can fix your piece and match the quality.If you don't get there all the way, that's okay too. You can use it to set your next goal of what to improve about your art.
So you've made your new piece, and if you've done all these steps, it might just be your best piece yet! Now it's time to show it to the world, and the next scary step; get feedback.
Post your work on a forum and ask for feedback on the specific thing you practiced. People are not always inclined to help you, but if you are specific, it's easier for them to reply.
You may get some comments you are not happy about. Just take a breather, and realize two things:
- They are only trying to help.
- They may be right.
So before you get defensive, simply ask yourself the question: what if they are right? And if they are right, what can I do to make my piece better?
Depending on your medium, this step may not be possible. But if you can, apply the feedback to your piece. It may be disheartening to go back and work on a finished piece, but it's another opportunity to improve your art skills.
Congratulations! If you made it through all these steps, your art is now better than it was before. The next step is to simply decide on the next aspect to improve, and repeat the whole process!
The great thing about this approach is that you can get noticeably better with every single piece you make. Sure, doing all that research will take some time. But if you go for quality over quantity, in the end, you will be much happier with your art.
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Everything is a design
3 min read
Recently, I've been trying to figure out how to make my painted textures look more detailed and realistic. I've never been able to just use textured brushes or photo overlays and get a decent result out of them. So instead, I decided to look at some close-up photos of things like rust and scratched metal, and really, really study them. And then it hit me.
Those detailed and confusing textures, they are really just shapes. Small shapes, but shapes nonetheless. They have contours, they have lighting on them. You can study and draw the small shapes, much in the same way that you can study and draw the big shapes. All you have to do is to get interested enough in those small shapes to study them in their own right, and spend a good amount of time drawing them carefully.
And when you study real-world textures up close, you'll also notice another thing. There is so much variety! Not one flake of rust is the same as another. They have different shapes, different sizes. Some areas are much cleaner, others are more detailed. Which brings me to another point.
If you uniformly apply the same texture brush, your work will look neither realistic nor good. You will want to think of the textures as a design. Try to vary up the size, the shape and the density of the details. Try to make interesting groupings of a bigger detail, a medium detail, and a smaller detail. Don't give everything even coverage, you'll want some less detailed areas for the eye to rest. Try to work in some bigger color transitions that you can still see when you squint at your image. For instance, you could paint your metals to look brownish near the bottom where it gets dirty, blue near the top where they reflect the sky.
Everything in art is a design, from your overall composition down to the smallest detail. If you stop thinking of textures as something you should be able to quickly slap together with a few textured brush strokes, you can improve your work a lot. Texture has to be earned.
Once you know how to get a good look by painstakingly painting tiny details, you can probably find a more optimized approach using brushes and overlays, as well. But before optimizing your workflow, you have to learn how to create the right look in the first place. Ofcourse, this might sound like it's the hard way to doing art. But I think doing things the hard way is actually the shortcut to leveling up your art.
Those detailed and confusing textures, they are really just shapes. Small shapes, but shapes nonetheless. They have contours, they have lighting on them. You can study and draw the small shapes, much in the same way that you can study and draw the big shapes. All you have to do is to get interested enough in those small shapes to study them in their own right, and spend a good amount of time drawing them carefully.
And when you study real-world textures up close, you'll also notice another thing. There is so much variety! Not one flake of rust is the same as another. They have different shapes, different sizes. Some areas are much cleaner, others are more detailed. Which brings me to another point.
If you uniformly apply the same texture brush, your work will look neither realistic nor good. You will want to think of the textures as a design. Try to vary up the size, the shape and the density of the details. Try to make interesting groupings of a bigger detail, a medium detail, and a smaller detail. Don't give everything even coverage, you'll want some less detailed areas for the eye to rest. Try to work in some bigger color transitions that you can still see when you squint at your image. For instance, you could paint your metals to look brownish near the bottom where it gets dirty, blue near the top where they reflect the sky.
Everything in art is a design, from your overall composition down to the smallest detail. If you stop thinking of textures as something you should be able to quickly slap together with a few textured brush strokes, you can improve your work a lot. Texture has to be earned.
Once you know how to get a good look by painstakingly painting tiny details, you can probably find a more optimized approach using brushes and overlays, as well. But before optimizing your workflow, you have to learn how to create the right look in the first place. Ofcourse, this might sound like it's the hard way to doing art. But I think doing things the hard way is actually the shortcut to leveling up your art.
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Back from the dead with a little update
2 min read
Hey everyone! I'm posting this little update to share what I have been up to lately.
I put aside my personal projects for now (my Grom model and a new crafting project) to work through Sam Nielson's Schoolism course Fundamentals of Lighting
I wanted to take take the opportunity to really recommend this course to anyone that likes to paint, including any 3d artists that like to do hand-painted textures. I found the material in this course to be absolutely eye-opening. It really takes the guesswork out of your shading, and it's already made a huge difference in my work even though I'm only half-way through the course.
And no, I don't get paid for saying this! XD I'm just that happy I'm taking this course, and I hope other people will be helped by this as well.
So without much further ado, I'd like to share my lesson 5 assignment results.
The basic outline was provided by Sam Nielson himself; the assignment was to render the image with fur, hair and realistic lighting.
I put aside my personal projects for now (my Grom model and a new crafting project) to work through Sam Nielson's Schoolism course Fundamentals of Lighting
I wanted to take take the opportunity to really recommend this course to anyone that likes to paint, including any 3d artists that like to do hand-painted textures. I found the material in this course to be absolutely eye-opening. It really takes the guesswork out of your shading, and it's already made a huge difference in my work even though I'm only half-way through the course.
And no, I don't get paid for saying this! XD I'm just that happy I'm taking this course, and I hope other people will be helped by this as well.
So without much further ado, I'd like to share my lesson 5 assignment results.
The basic outline was provided by Sam Nielson himself; the assignment was to render the image with fur, hair and realistic lighting.
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Slowpoke artist is slow
1 min read
I'm mainly writing this message, because having a happy new year greeting still up in May is stupid. XD
I should have known better than to put up such a seasonal post, knowing that I take many months to finish a new personal project, LOL. I swear I'm working on stuff! It's just taking LOOOOONG. o_O'
I expect to have something to show in about... erm... three months from now. *cries* I'm clinging to the idea that at least it will be epic, but I'm not even sure about that. Damn you free time, where has thee gone! DX
I should have known better than to put up such a seasonal post, knowing that I take many months to finish a new personal project, LOL. I swear I'm working on stuff! It's just taking LOOOOONG. o_O'
I expect to have something to show in about... erm... three months from now. *cries* I'm clinging to the idea that at least it will be epic, but I'm not even sure about that. Damn you free time, where has thee gone! DX
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