October 2022 Proko Challenge Submission

Does everyone painting now create art as their primary source of income? What was the transition like from art as a hobby or art as a student to art as a primary or major income source?

Hi, I'm working on my portfolio and I'd like your opinion on which character or which components from different characters to use for a final illustration. The character is from a desert tribe that uses armadillo, grass, and dark stone in various ways. They are relatively peaceful so weapons are not a big part of this concept. The tribe mainly gathers and explores desert areas.

Here's my submission for the Odd Bot challenge along with some process sketches. Fun prompt!

Hi, I would appreciate some suggestions to push this further. I was thinking maybe add some areas of color or decals. Push the values more? Any other thoughts related to the design or anything else? Thanks!

Playing with "balloons" idea. Making a floating bot.

I really like this portrait and the active feeling you created with different textures. Something that jumps out at me is the neck and the hair kind of blend together. Maybe play around with making the two a bit more distinct? Also, there is a lot of blue so adding a very small but bright highlight of yellow somewhere around the eyes might be interesting. All that being said, it's great as is no changes necessary but those are a couple ideas to think about. What's your process in creating portraits do you go straight in with paint or draw the shapes first with lines?

Here are my thumbnails. (The first image is my submission, the others are just my practice versions. I included them because I don’t have source photos.) I learned a TON by doing this. I got a much better handle on water control, and composition simplification by painting these thumbnails over and over until I was happy with the direction. I intended to paint landscapes reminiscent of scenes you might find in my home state of Ohio. In each scene I tried to incorporate a mix of lost and found edges to help evoke feelings of nostalgia and solitude. These are all watercolor on paper. (Daniel Smith pigments, and 140# cold press Arches paper.) These were painted with Escoda Reserva brushes sizes 4 and up. For each thumbnail, I used the same palette consisting of Carbazole Violet, Cerulean, Phthalo Blue, Cobalt Teal, Ultramarine Turquoise, Pyrrol Orange, Prussian Blue, Indanthrone Blue, Quinacridone Rose, Carmine, Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna, Hansa Yellow Light, and Quinopthalone Yellow.

yes!

who will win the fight?!

Here's my direction for the snowball fight, any suggestions for composition, shapes, anything else?

Demon prince

It was a routine day until Lemar spotted suspicious activity. He leaned over to take a closer look.

The is something off with her checks and forehead. I am trying to get better, can you guys help me figure it out? SVP

these are great! I also aspire to draw from imagination but get stuck with characters/other-things that look very static or stiff. Any suggestions for how to improve that? Your sketches look very alive, dynamic, interesting

Here's a movie poster of my life depicted as a sci-fi mystery!

Hi, I always enjoy seeing someone practice gesture since I have been trying to improve my understanding of it for a while now as well. I believe to see a couple of difficulties I had too, so I will jump right in! (The amount of text is proportional to the amount of encouragement I'm trying to convey - not the amount of mistakes). First, what I learned is, that gesture is not equal to figure drawing as a whole or to drawing things that look nice necessarily. Gesture drawing is concerned with what is going on, not only based on the visible shapes, but also movement wise, regarding force, weight and balance or even emotionally, with what the person intends to do. This is also why there are a lot of different attempts to capturing gesture. While Proko tries to make gesture look clean to some degree, leading to it being closer to a figure drawing, other artists are not at all concerned with that. I recommend looking at different strategies and trying them out. Personally, working through the first 30 pages of Nicolaides "The natural way to draw" helped me immensly in understanding gesture as an independet part of the figure drawing process. You can find the complete text online. Alphonso Dunn sums up this "looseness" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvjB0rj6yAc&t=328s . Just add it to the list of Lea. Some remarks which are more on the sympomatic, less important side: Spending 5 minutes on each gesture drawing is quite long. I would recommend some timed practice with 30s - 2m. You might find, that this is not enough time to put everything in the picture, which is just what one wants, because clothes and objects do not belong in a gestural drawing, unless they help you convey the point. As an example, I think it worked out in picture 3 while you could have achieved a more gestural representation by trying to see the motion through the clothes in picture 4. Well this got a bit lengthy. Sorry! Good luck!

Hi, looking for some feedback as I push this further. Any suggestions for changing big shapes/colors before I move in for detail?

Sorry to hear about Marlow, looks like a fun dog! I really appreciate the clear anatomy and negative spaces between limbs. I read @Blaise Chambers review and I agree the pose could perhaps be pushed a little more and in my opinion the front leg could be extended and back leg extended a bit too, almost leaping to really fit with the movement lines and dust rings. To me the left eye could be a little bit smaller(?) It's behind the right eye and it appears bigger but it's further away. In any case as other reviewers have mentioned it's great as is. If you left it alone it would be a hit. Thanks for sharing and opening this up for critique!