Busy week this week, but I wanted to participate before the deadline. Great job, everyone!

lmao I'm sure that's gonna stop about 0% of the bots XD

Hi there mate! Actually for anything color/value kind of topic I would almost always give credit to the 10 minutes to better painting videos from Macro Bucci It also specifically gives you the very insight on how to practice grayscale->color process and the best point of introducing color in there! The main thing I believe you think "bleh" on some simple shape is that there are no contex in the image so everything appear floating and out of touch, or appear as something you copy/pasted onto a blank page. Context is important, because object would interact with them. Specifically in 2d painting, edges would blend in certain places, both for artistic visuals and more importantly for (de) emphasizing certain parts of the image to make other parts appear more attractive and dynamic. Marco also talked in his video on edges. I believe your skeleton/mannequin drawings are already good enough to start painting colors in them. Give it a go!

To me the two things that immediately jumped out is the lack of water reflection of the white female body in the center, and the left figure looking a bit wonky.... Otherwise to my eyes this piece looks overall very solid. I especially love the tone and lighting of that male figure. This image on first glance looks like it has the look of those classic galley-ish paintings. Could be nice to polish a bit more maybe? like the crop could potentially be on a wall or something :D

Sounds interesting! So sick of always having some weird problems with the bloated photoshop. my canvas keeps flickering!:D

That's pretty interesting. It gives a subtle texture to it

And yes, by uploading to proko and it did yet another conversion trip due to image down-scaling, it's not as bad when I noticed happening in my project files tho

I think you got the shape pretty nicely done. I would probably say the edges doesn't have much variations. The shadow needs to be tighter/sharper when it's closer to the apple. Also the edge of the apple seems to be uniformly sharp, to a point it almost looks like the apple is pasted on top. Try adding a bit stronger reflections of those yellow towards the edge of the apple and it will show as "in context" a bit more. keep up the great work!

Oh hi hi! This is a interesting combination/remix! I think you captured the feature nicely, people should be able to tell that's the elements if they know what you are up to. I don't actually know much about the style choice of yours, I think I do see this kind of more or less free-form look from time to time, but I don't really know what's the incentive behind such stylistic choice? Is it something you learned from someone?

I went and checked Jeff's website and wow I loved those group portraits. They showed a lot of personalities and tension between those people. The idea of which I have never really considered in the designs of my paintings. Maybe it's a good idea to think about it.

I can see those individual ones just from the thumbnail! You have a really good value and color relationship in them. Shapes are bit off than the original pieces but I think this is very well done!

This is looking great!

Hey, @quizzy! I see what you’re going through, and I totally agree with @Yiming Wu - it’s a matter of shifting the mindset about how the work should be done. As Yiming says, a longer piece is almost never done in one sit, so splitting the process into several sessions can be a great idea. Start noticing how your own process works - when you notice you lose focus and the work isn’t flowing well anymore, that can be a good moment to take a break. But that doesn’t mean the work is finished, and that’s fine - after a while (minutes, hours, even days or weeks), it’s good to come back to it with fresh eyes and a rested mind to try to see more clearly what could be improved - then do another work session, then take more breaks as needed, and so on. That’s how most professionals do it. Along with that, try observing how you can break the process down into stages. For example: 1) PREPARATION - Usually, preparation work can come first: develop the idea, draw thumbnails to figure out the composition, research visual reference, maybe do some color studies or separate sketches for specific elements that will be in the piece. 2) ROUGH - Then, based on the thumbnails, doing a larger initial rough sketch might be a good following step. For me, this is usually done very intuitively and loosely, in a way that helps me materialize the idea as best as I can without having to worry too much about techniques or “correctness” just yet. 3) TIE-DOWN - After the rough sketch is done, I find it helpful to do another more careful sketch pass on top, and, this time, it’s all about making adjustments so it looks “technically right”. I give the piece a more analytical eye and try to apply all the techniques I know of to see how I can improve it. In other words, I’ll go over the whole piece again and re-draw it with the specific goal of fixing mistakes, making it better and getting the construction and composition as solid as I can.  4) FINISH - Once you’re happy with how the more careful sketch turned out, you can then start to put into practice your finishing/polishing process - and this could mean different things depending on the style and technique, but since you’re working with painting, it often means rendering. Rendering is usually the longest stage in a painting and, at least in my experience, it can take up to at least half the amount of total hours you’ll put into the piece, or sometimes even more. With some practice, these things combined might help you get to that mindset shift and even start to plan you art pieces as projects, not just sketches. Hope this helps. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, just let me know. Best of luck!

I've been starting to deal with a lot of the same problems. A lot of my focus has been on black and white, or grey scale, pencils and inks. Recently for commissions I've been doing a lot of colour work. I quickly ran into the same problems where my composition worked great in the ink stage, but started to become really shakey with the colours. I've definitely started making the shift to designing my pieces with the colours in mind. A necessary lesson to learn, even for pencillers/inkers because someone's probably going to have to colour it. I'll see if I can find some links, but I read a lot of stuff about perceived brightness and the LAB colour spaces.

Humm I think you could just change the way you think how a piece is done. Do some more "realism" stuff (whatever that means)... Try to get a photo study to as close to the original as possible, if you are impatient after an hour, just do an hour, and get back and do another hour on top of it at the later of the day or the next day. because each time you get back to it you find mistakes and stuff, you can easily fix them. What kind of medium do yo use? If you are using watercolor then probably that's not very good for working too much. Gouache, acrylic or painting digitally could allow you to work over top of existing stuff until you get it right.

Hi @Yiming Wu thank you for this valuable feedback! We are always looking for ways to improve.

You've done a great job! I like how you did all the green-yellow hues, a lot bolder than I can manage. Looks like that the aspect ratio of these two images are not quite the same? yours appears to be a bit stretched vertically? also notice the river bank and the path down below, the shape isn't quite there. To me I feel the feeling of "brighter light" is not as much in your study, maybe it's lack of the hue shift towards a bit yellow, especially in the water and the sky line where the atmosphere could scatter light and a lot of times it will shift a bit.