A few monochrome watercolor studies. The subjects are different, but the approach was similar: focus on value balance, shape arrangement, and edge control without the distraction of multiple colors. The window tracery uses clearer shapes and edges, while the forest relies more on value shifts and soft or sharp edges to create depth. Another study keeps more watermarks and blooms, letting the shapes blend naturally. Even with one color, small changes in brushwork, values, and edges can create very different results.

Whenever I spend more than a few hours on an artwork, something happens to me which I'm sure a lot of others suffer from as well. Let me know if this sounds familiar. It goes something like this: over the course of a project, your eye starts to become estranged from your work. It begins as a lack of excitement for what you're doing. "This feels a lot like the not-so-fun kind of hard work." Then it progresses into not seeing anything that you're doing right, only the mistakes. It's kind of like an allergy that increases in severity with exposure. You push through and make the thing, somehow, but the whole time you have a growing, nagging thought. "This sucks." And you step back and you gag. It's true! All you see are problems. Crappolla! A steaming waste of precious expensive materials. The prevailing sentiment is failure, disappointment, and self-rejection. And no amount of consoling or praise makes it better, either. In fact, the more people insist that it's good, the more you feel actively repulsed. "They're just saying that to make me feel better." Or, "They don't know good from bad anyway." The very idea of looking at your art after this period of seeking reassurance makes you ill. It's like a poison that blocks all your objectivity. It makes you wonder why you try at all. This is something that I've heard Mark Carder dub as "the artist's curse." Sometimes I get it worse than other times, but boy did I get it with this illustration. I look at the finish of this and go "bleck," but I don't need a pat on the back or anyone consoling me. It's okay not to like what you've made. Just don't let it rule you. Don't let it make you immune to compliments. I just have to accept that my dumb brain is activating its inferiority complex, and I will eventually move on and realize it's not all that bad. There's always an opportunity to do better next time, anyway. Or do the cycle over again, at least haha. What do you guys think? You ever get this? It's like, you know it's probably pretty good, but you also think it's objectively awful. Weird feeling.

Looking for critique on my paintings

Here’s a hazy night scene. At night, the shapes and values are often very close to one another, so finding variation within those subtle differences was a really interesting challenge to paint. Someday, I’d love to take a walk on a cold, damp night somewhere in Northern Europe.

I painted two floral still lifes, and it was interesting to see how different color combinations changed the overall feel. A café I often visit occasionally replaces its flowers with fresh bouquets. The light fragrance always makes me feel instantly better.

One of the fun things about watercolor is that it never behaves exactly the way you expect. Especially on smoother watercolor paper, the paint tends to sit on the surface and gets pushed around by the water, so brush marks show up easily. On the other hand, lifting out highlights is also much easier. On a side note, halfway through painting this, I suddenly really wanted salmon sushi. 😂

Hello family!! I have already painted my first finished traditional illustration. I did It acrylics on watercolour paper. Every feedback helps me a lot to improve my drawing. Im happy with the result because I started drawing and paint 2 months ago. Referente by noct.co in Pinterest. Thank you so much!!

Without getting too deep into it... it's safe to say this has been one of the hardest summers of my life. A lot (like a lot) of ER visits, multiple week-long hospital stays, and the loss of a very close loved one three days ago. From late May until now, s**t has been flowin' steady and shows no signs of stopping. Before you break out the world's smallest violin, though, I'm okay. I'll be okay. My family, on the other hand... And yet. I have never been more productive art-wise. I work almost every night on drawings or paintings or writing. It's like a fever. I can't stop. Don't want to stop. Out of the ashes of trauma and loss and depressive episodes, has arisen a phoenix-like passion for life and love and all the gorgeous things in it. I did not think I could enjoy anything so much as I enjoy being alive, right now, writing and painting and breathing (I'm also a novelist. In case you didn't notice my garrulousness. I put it to good use elsewhere, too haha). Nothing like a little tragedy to put things into perspective. I get such wonder putting what is ostensibly dirt and colored mud and wax on a surface and having it become a cherishable object. It can be a beautiful woman, a heroic man, a story, a face. Doesn't matter. All of it is humanity. In the blue of her eyes lies my entire life story. Isn't that a funny thought? This is the kind of stuff I always wished I could do, and I'm doing it. Even though life is brutal right now, it is also incredible just to experience it and grow as a human being because of it. How lucky we all are to be artists in this community on this website. A corner of the internet, where things grow. Where the love of people creating beauty is somehow outweighing the world's desire for destruction. Thank you, friends. Thank you, Proko. Love you, Gram.

Here is my latest project. I thought it would take me a week but it have taken months. With a lot of challenges like chemical ractions and physics 😅 drying times and waiting for material i notice i will need. Like different caps to the spraypaint to try to get even shine. Or a special spray to even cracks due a chemical reaction. Or more varnish because it has taken a lot more than i thought because of different challenges. They where just plain wood from the beginning. I sanded them and spraypainted them. Sketched the motives. That i have sketched on my ipad at first to have an idea. Brushed on gesso. And painted with acrylic markers and acrylic paint and brush. And varnished them with spray varnish with uv-protection. Ive ordered wall mount so they will be hanged on a wall somewhere 😊

I feel like I’m missing something from my art to take it to the next level any help would be greatly appreciated

My attempt at a Drew Struzan-style colored pencil portrait. It's no secret that I adore the man's art, especially his looser comps and sketches. So I tried to capture some of that essence with this while retaining my own caligraphy. Or in other words, not trying to be a total imitator and be myself with it. I'm a little more timid than he was with the bold linear marks, but I tried not to shy away from allowing definitive shapes and lines to form, either. It's such a balancing act between keeping the realism (soft edges, more tonal and simplified, etc.) and bringing in more abstraction and linework and detail. I think I struck it pretty well, but my mind always goes towards more subtlety and less bravura for some reason, even though it's the bravura I crave. I guess I don't feel like it'll look realistic enough for my taste if I go too heavy into the linear stuff. But I like it... so... What do y'all think? How could I improve for future works? How can I incorporate more abstraction and linear style rendering without killing the realism or becoming an imitator? Love to hear some people's thoughts on this. Thanks for looking, at any rate!

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much information a drawing really needs. Landscapes like this contain a lot of elements, and every area could be pushed further with more detail. But if everything is explained too clearly, the image can start to feel busy. So this time, I wanted to focus more on how much detail to give each area. I kept most of the image within a middle-value range, and saved the clearer details for the focal areas.

Does anyone play with Procreate for studies before getting out the brushes? It feels totally different. I swear every "oil brush" on there changes the value of the color selected. I'm new and working with paint is foreign, but this feels totally different. Is it at all analogous to oil paint? It feels and responds so different that I'm unsure it will be as helpful in getting faster iterations as I had hoped. Trying to do quick studies before committing to paint and hoping to get some idea of a process that works for me. Thank you for your input. It is always genuinely appreciated.

pen testing

Started a lay in, but I'm realizing the reflected light is going to pose a problem for my newbie eyes and skills. I often hear that inventing can make things wonky... Wondering if simply compressing the values of the neck such that the reflected light there is darker would be a possible solution or will I end up chasing my tail?

Here are a few brushwork studies of grass and trees. When drawing natural subjects like these, I wanted to try arranging the strokes in different ways and see what effects they would create. Using the split marks of a fan brush as a base, or dragging the broad side of a flat brush to create a sense of direction, both turned out to be interesting experiments. Looking back, I think I could do a little less refinement next time. Leaving more of the underlying brushwork visible might bring the result closer to what I had in mind.

I just got into painting last week. Got an easel. Gonna set up a proper space for oil painting. Can you share a picture of your space and what things you've found essential or even just massively beneficial to your process? A proper cleaning of the space will be my next step... Thanks!

When painting black objects, it’s easy to instinctively treat them as one solid mass of black. In this still life study, I wanted to explore how objects that appear nearly black can still have their own color tendencies. Although color perception is subjective, comparing warm and cool shifts, along with the direction of each hue, makes the color relationships easier to understand.