Storm Engineer
Storm Engineer
Hungary
Independent fantasy/anthro/creature artist, furry, kinda gay and mildly autistic.
Storm Engineer
Hi Karla! :) First of all, I want to thank you for publicly standing up against problems in the art world and the industry. You are one of the few powerful pőositive voices on art social media. So my question: I love industry-style art, but industry work is not for me, I'm rather an illustrator/fine artist who prefers painting his own ideas. Do you think there is demand for fine art in an industry-like style? P.s.: I love your work and also how cheerful you are! :)
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Storm Engineer
Hey Marco! I'm struggling because I can't figure out what it is that I'm doing wrong with my colors and lighting. Sadly I can't afford your course, so I wonder if there is any other way I could get an opinion on some of my recent works, about what am I missing color/lighting wise?
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Storm Engineer
Hi! Question: Have you ever tried digital? If yes, how you liked it? If no, do you plan to?
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Storm Engineer
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Storm Engineer
QUESTION: What's the best alternative for oils if you paint in a small un-ventillated room?
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Storm Engineer
This is how Schoolism works: You can take part in a single course for thousands of dollars with a small limited class and direct mentoring by the teacher, or you pay $30 a month and you can see all videos of ALL courses, but you can't get advice, can't hand in homework, etc.
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Storm Engineer
QUESTION: Schoolism has a subscription where you pay a small amount and can access all videos, but can't interact with teachers. Would you do something like that? The course prices are fair, but for people in poorer countries hundreds of dollars can be impossible to afford. Eg. I live from $200 a month.
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Storm Engineer
Nice! I really want to get into sculpting. I hope there will be more than just a few videos available for free though because sadly, as much as I would love to pay for this course, I don't see myself being able to afford it any time in the coming years. :(
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Storm Engineer
I think Skelly is up to something... dark.
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Storm Engineer
It has been very thoroughly covered in the past months why you should _not_ do it - at least not now, not until the many very serious issues with it are fixed. The facts that it is extremely damaging to the environment, that it's a gimmick that borderlines a scam, and that it's built like a pyramid scheme where a very few people make big money while everyone else loses money are only the three biggest problems to name. This article does a very good job summing up the problems: https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3 Then there is also the rampant plagiarism and art theft of people turning other people's works into tokens and selling them without the actual creator's permission or knowledge. I personally think the entire idea is nonsense and is nothing but a money grab scheme for the NFT platforms because it tries to solve a non-existing problem: it is based on the premise that digital art being infinitely reproducible is somehow bad and that we must manufacture artificial scarcity and that's the only way digital artists have "freedom". But as a digital artist who lives from his art, I see that as complete backward thinking. Literally the opposite of all that is true. Reproducibility is not a weakness, it is a strength. It allows me to utilize my art in many ways, from selling my own prints and merch to license it for use. I do not need any middle-men (such as NFT platforms, or galleries for traditional artists) to do these things, I can do it all myself. I literally could not have more freedom in how I use my art. I can also sell commissions. And if I really want to create artificial scarcity, all I need to do is make a limited edition premium print run that I hand sign and number, and it does exactly what NFTs do, except does it simpler, cheaper, and in my opinion, much better. And if you buy a print, that's physical, tangible, and definitely yours - meanwhile NFTs usually link to content stored on the platform so if the platform goes down one day, all those tokens become very expensive digital paperweights. Just to be clear, I'm all for innovation and smart technology. I'm a digital artist after all, also doing 3D modeling and a little programming and webdev. I want to make sculptures using a combination of 3D printing and traditional sculpting. So it's not that I'm against things that are new or very technological, not at all. Quite the opposite, it is my familiarity and experience with innovative technology, and research into how crypto-currencies and NFTs work that tells me that crypto art is just a really, really bad idea. Even if you insist on creating artificial scarcity digitally, this is a very bad way of doing it. Also, if you don't trust me, watch the Draftsmen episode where Stand and Marshall talk about crypto-art.
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Storm Engineer
I have many favorites. If I really try to narrow it down, then I guess: Caravaggio, Velázquez, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, Bernini, Munkácsy, Sargent... I really don't want to choose just one. But if I absolutely had to, then Rembrandt.
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Storm Engineer
I'm Storm, from Hungary. I'm a digital artist mostly interested in anthropomorphic animals (or "furry art"), creatures, fantasy. I'm doing art full time as much as my health allows and make my living from furry commissions. I'm greatly inspired by classical painters, especially late Renaissance and Baroque but also some modern masters. My influences include Caravaggio, Velázquez, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, Sargent, Bouguereau, Craig Mullins, Karla Ortiz and many, many more. There are several anthro/furry artist influences too, like Bubblewolf (https://www.deviantart.com/bubblewolf), Reykat (https://www.artstation.com/reykat), Nomax (https://www.artstation.com/nomax), Honovy, Pacelic (https://www.artstation.com/pacelic), Veramundis, Yanchek and more. My dream is to develop a style similar to classical painters, but paint the anthro characters and things I like. It is also my dream to be able to make a decent living doing art and to become an art educator one day. Here are some of my better pieces:
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Răzvan C. Rădulescu (razcore-rad)
Hello, I'm Răzvan from Romania. I'm currently a freelance programmer working mainly with https://www.gdquest.com/, we're a small team making game development tutorials and courses primarily. I'm a digital arts hobbyist and skurted the idea of concept art for a while, but I guess I wasn't ready to dedicate myself to spending that much time a day drawing and painting. Currently I don't have that much to show cause at the start of the year I did the unreasonable - I erased my HDD by mistake and lost all the images I made over the years, but that's not a big problem, I didn't like 'em that much anyway :)) I recently submitted some illustrations for this Krita + Huion challenge. I didn't win, but it was fun. For the challenge we were supposed to pick a season and illustrate a day in the adventure of Kiki and Leon (the mascots). It is what it is! :)
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Storm Engineer
Oh, another Krita users! :)
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Storm Engineer
The best thing you can do is to get your devices, and especially the main device you use for work calibrated. For that, you need to buy (or borrow) a hardware tool called a colorimeter, which then works together with calibration software (they always come with one bundled, or you can use the very powerful but slightly complicated Open Source program called DisplayCAL). By doing this you adjust your screen to a standard, so any other screen that is calibrated will show colors very similarly, or even near identically. It also ensures that if you print them on a calibrated printer (which is what professional print shops will have) it will look pretty close to how it did on the screen. Of course, un-calibrated screens (which is what the majority of ordinary people have, especially phones, and especially cheap phones) will never be accurate, no matter what you do it will look wrong on some screens, but calibrating your main screen still gives the overall best result of it appearing acceptable on as many devices as possible. Also, any sort of color presets, like eg. the various modes on your TV or phone (usually called things like warm, cool, movie, game, night, etc.) will completely throw off colors when used, so keep that in mind. You must disable any such features on your device. Also, general good practices to ensure it will look acceptable on screens that are crappy or very off: - Never go all the way to 100% white or black if you can help it - Avoid very dark, low contrast images. These may end up merging into a black blob on crappy screens. Generally, any detail that is in the very darks and is not well visible will likely get completely lost on many phones. - Apply some sort of noise or texture faintly over the finished image. This will help to avoid color banding on crap screens (banding is when colors that are supposed to look like a gradient will instead look like areas or bands of distinctly different colors). One simple way is to have a layer filled with just noise, set that to Overlay or Soft Light mode, and the opacity to something very low, somewhere between 3% and 15%. This is what I do, except recently I started applying a Gaussian Blur filter to the noise first, this makes it look a lot like film grain, which is a popular aesthetic.
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Storm Engineer
First of all, what works for productivity is unique for each person. Second, just because some people put out a lot of work does not mean that you have too as well. So don't feel like you are expected or obligated to upload more. In a large part speed simply comes with experience, but it also depends on technique and medium, personal style and just being a different person in general. You need to find your own pace. If you genuinely feel that you work slower than you could, that things take more time than you feel they should, then you can try to analyize your own workflow and technique to find out what are the elements you can improve on. But don't think that you need to be faster just because others are faster than you. That said, doing quick sketches and speedpaints where you give yourself a very short time limit and you are not allowed to continue once it's over, is a good way to practice getting faster. When you do that first, you will fail, you will keep running out of time without even getting halfway done, but you need to keep doing it over and over, for weeks and months and you will intuitively figure out ways to be more efficient. BUT... training for speed only really works if you have solid fundamentals to build upon, otherwise what you will end up with is formulas that you stumbled upon, that make things faster but you don't really know why and you are locked into the limitations of that formula. That is not true speed, it is a trap. Making a _good_ drawing/painting is always more important than doing it fast - unless you have a job where you need to crank out things within a very short deadline at all cost, eg. concept artists.
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Storm Engineer
I have just got an XP-Pen Decon Fun L, their latest release, and I'm really impressed. Feels much better in every way than the Wacom tablet (Intuos Pen&Touch Medium) I was using before. Smoother, more accurate, pressure is much smoother too, and has tilt sensor - and it costs a mere $50. Probably the cheapest tablet out there with tilt support. My only issue was that while they claim to support Linux, their official Linux driver does not have tilt so I had to use a workaround, so now I have tilt but the second button on the pen doesn't work. On Windows or Mac however, it should work without such problems.
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joshua robinson
just wondering, is this course for people that have a decent understanding of colour theory? or is it for people like me that barely understand it?
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Storm Engineer
Based on a look at the lessons it seems more advanced - however, Marco has several amazing videos on YouTube that tackle more basic elements, so I highly recommend you check those out. His "10 minutes to better painting" series is also amazing and it does deal with colors too, among other things.
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Storm Engineer
These videos are not only always the highlights of my week, but are also giving me a sense of momentum. They serve as a weekly reminder of what my goals are dreams are. I'm really gald thjat you gyus are back from break, I felt much more lonely without my weekly dose of Stan and Marshall.
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Lila Stageberg
Stan; I am a doctor, and I originally took a Life Drawing class in college with the idea that I'd learn enough to draw diagram-type pictures for my patients. Well, no, I learned to be even more embarrassed of my work than before. I am stubborn though, and kept drawing with not a lot of progress for...decades. Several of them. One thing I found with drawing human figures is the appreciation for any configuration of body parts that works! People get around with the strangest posture and movement! The ability to move, balance, sit/stand/walk just floors me with its grace and precision, even when we slip an extra 5-75 pounds on a skeleton not designed for that. I plan to dedicate my allegiance to Proko 2.0 by rededicating to daily practice of drawing and asking for feedback! That is the missing piece, you are SO right! Along with the community part because we are all more social than we like to admit sometimes. I would like a drawing group, with some loving accountability. Is there a mechanism to have that happen? There is SO MUCH on this new website maybe I missed that. Let me say again how much I appreciate your work, how inspiring you are and what a spectacular website with you and your fellow experts! I am grateful. Lila
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Storm Engineer
Learning to draw is hard. Learning too draw _well_ is even harder. But if you didn't make progress for decades, very likely you didn't know _how_ to learn it properly. Because just drawing isn't enough, you need a method and mindset for learning. Most importantly, you have to be deliberate in your actions - any study, any practice you do, you have to know what you are doing and why are you doing it. I believe Proko will be a great place for you to find what's missing from your puzzle. The anatomy course is really great and while lot of it will be things you already know, there will be plenty of information that are specific to the artist's point of view. Having medical understanding of anatomy, and knowing how to draw it are not the same things. :) Also, there are already some great videos on both the Proko YouTube channel and some other channels that tackle the fundamentals of drawing itself. Because before you learn to draw anatomy, you need to learn to draw, in general.
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