Tony
Tony
Mars
Vibhrat Chaturvedi
Feedback for the website... To see the latest comments I need to refresh page everytime and it refresh the video too.
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Tony
3yr
You can click Lesson Notes below the video and then click Comments and it’ll update them without refreshing the page.
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Tony
Hey, Marco! When working from reference, I sometimes want to adjust the lighting to better suit the feeling of the piece or to draw attention to a specific area, but I worry that getting creative with the lighting will break its consistency. Can you talk a little about how you decide to make those creative choices and how to avoid breaking the illusion of a realistic light source? Thanks!
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Tony
Hey, Aaron! With the help of Stan’s figure drawing course, I’ve managed to improve my keyframe poses, but once I start adding the in-betweens it gets jittery. I then try to add more frames to smooth it out, but that slows the timing. How do I add the in-betweens more efficiently? Thanks!
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Levi Simpson
I think the most common approach or answer would be to learn from artists who's styles you admire by doing some master studies of their work. I believe Stan and Marshal did a video about this, calling them art parents or something. But really, another way of going about it is to just play, experiment, and try new things, even new mediums. You may have a particular medium you want to use, but you may learn something playing with something else you could carry back over into your preferred medium. But you have to give yourself some time to just mess around and push yourself. So I guess my advice is to play and try new things. :)
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Tony
3yr
Hey, Levi! This seems to be the general consensus, so I’m definitely going to be doing everything you’ve mentioned. I think it basically comes down to switching my priorities from spending most of my time working on finishing pieces to show to people, to spending most of it sketching, experimenting, and studying from other artists. Thanks for the helpful advice! 😁
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Izak van Langevelde
I suggest you study Proko's videos on shading, which teach a solid understanding of light and shadow, instead of just copying photos. He exaggerates the core shadow, and you may or may not like it, but it is a good example of a somewhat stylized approach, with a solid foundation.
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Tony
3yr
Hey, Izak! Thanks for the tip! I know there are a lot of stylized ways to shade something, so hopefully as I get better I’ll be able to play around with that in more ways.
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James Doane
Only you can answer that question. You need to find your own style that makes your work uniquely yours. Very nice work though!
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Tony
3yr
Thanks, James! The plan for now is to get comfortable with other brushes and adopt some art parents to study from, so hopefully that gets me familiar with some other styles and techniques. Also, I checked out your YouTube channel and really enjoyed what I watched so far, especially that montage of like 50 different pieces. They looked amazing! 🤓
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Hisham Ali
Hey Tony! The best way to inject style is to adopt "art parents" as Stan and Martial recommend. Pick artists who's style you want to emulate, wether its in their shape design and calligraphy, composition, colors, etc. Work on studying and copying there work, and you will start to intuitively inject a lot of that style into your work. Eventually it will morph into something of your own as you start to understand why these different artists made these style choices, and you start to create your own style!
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Tony
3yr
Hey Hisham! It’s funny that you and Aline both mentioned the art parents thing. I totally agree and will be focusing my efforts in that area until something comes of it. Thanks for the suggestion! 😁
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Aline Fouard
Hey Tony, I'd say find some art parents, as Marshall likes to call them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxJOjvsj3j0 : People whose style you like and will inspire you to start making your own stylization too. You can even study an artist by trying to do a new painting in their style (not copying one of their painting but working on a new subject and doing your best to make it look like their work). This, obviously, is for studying purpose only, as you don't really want to become a clone of any one artist. Doing this exercise multiple times with a good variety of artists will lead you to think and come up with your own mix of stylistic choices.
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Tony
3yr
Hey Aline, thanks for the advice! I do remember that episode and told myself I’d eventually do that, but I think I’ve been too confused by art I like, in terms of how it’s made. I see the brush work and I have no idea what brush to use to recreate that style and I end up postponing the whole thing. I will be experimenting with new brushes and messing with brush settings this week, so hopefully I can find or create something that matches a style I like and then I can finally do a study of some artists whose style I enjoy. I also like the idea of eventually doing their style with a different subject. Sounds like a fun way to learn so I hope to get to that as well. Thanks! 😁
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Serena Marenco
Hi Tony, I would advise you to use a different type of brush, not one with a round tip, and not to worry too much about blending. Experiment a bit with different brushes and see which one gives you the result you like best. I struggled with it for years because I couldn't get rid of the "plastic" style until I started using only two or three brushes for everything, a marker from a Kyle T. set. Webster's set, one of his gradients and, above all, the default star brush of Photoshop, which I had snubbed up to that moment considering them useless. Using these three unlikely brushes I was able to replicate the effect I was getting when I was colouring with pencils and watercolours.
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Tony
3yr
Thank you, Serena! I’m definitely going to be testing out new brushes this week and doing a lot of experimenting. I’m also glad you said plastic, because that’s a great way to describe what I don’t like about this piece and some of my other ones. I’m on Procreate and a bunch of the default brushes have cool edges and textures, but they don’t behave in ways that I like, so I guess I’ll start messing with the brush settings. I have to get familiar with them at some point, so I might as well get started on that. Thanks again for the helpful advice! 😁
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@jdn
im sorry that i don't have any helpful advice and i hope that some one will help you with this because its such a beautiful piece i love it! . keep up the awesome work i love were your going Tony. 😁👌 btwz i have not been posting because im working on my technic and ive been doing a lot of wood carving and it just so happens that i cut right into my thumb to night 😂👍 lol i wont be doing very much now other than drawing and watching TV lol maybe its not so bad after all 😉👌✌🤞
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Tony
3yr
Ouch! I hope it wasn’t too bad of a cut. Wood carving sounds cool though. Thanks for the kind words! 😊
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Tony
So here is my latest portrait, this time of Evil Ed from Fright Night. I think the likeness came out accurately enough, but I’m not happy with the style. It almost looks like I took the photo and just added some smudges and effects. I don’t want so realistic a look, but I don’t want to lose the likeness, so how and where can I add more style and personal preference? As far as personal preference, I already changed the composition, made it greyscale, changed the brightness, contrast, and gamma. I made some adjustments to a couple of areas, blurred some areas to not distract from the focal point, and added some of my own detail in the eyes. After all that, it still ends up looking like I could have just photoshopped the actual photo and saved myself hours of rendering. Any general feedback or tips to overcome these specific issues would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! 🤓
Tony
Hi Cornelia! I’m currently learning digital painting from photo reference and I’m finding that the more accurately my art matches the reference, the less I enjoy looking at my own work. How do you balance accuracy with personal style and do you have any tips for how to not end up becoming a human copy machine? Thanks!
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Tony
Duuuuude, I love these! 🤯 I would be so curious to see a time-lapse of your process cuz I have no idea how you put so much personality and life into it while being so efficient and stylish with your brush work.
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Jessica Harrison
These are really rad! I really like what you did with dragging the edges of the head and ear back on the Dr. Loomis portrait. It gives the piece as sense of "memory" if that makes sense. To help get comfortable pushing those hard edges you could always add a layer on top of the drawing and experiment with pushing hard edges in certain places, that way you can see where you'd like to push them without fully having to commit. Generally with cast shadows they start off hardest in edge the closer they are to the object casting it and as they move away from that object their edge becomes gradually softer.
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Tony
3yr
Thank you! 😁 Now that you mention it, I feel kinda dumb for not thinking of that already. 😅 When I started trying to learn to make portraits I decided I wouldn’t let myself trace, use a grid, measure, or use multiple layers, because I wanted to push myself to develop observational skills. I think I got so used to it that I forgot using more layers was an option. I guess I know how to start experimenting with edges in the next one! Thanks again! 😄
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Sketcher Ameya
both are awesome and I think you have a great art style'
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Tony
3yr
Thank you! 😁
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Serena Marenco
Hi Tony, I would try to accentuate the contrast between the light and shadow parts, otherwise they are good portraits. Well done!
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Tony
3yr
Thank you, Serena! Yeah, I can see in the thumbnails that it’s hard to read because of the lack of contrast. It’s just another example of me sticking with how the reference looks, even though artistically it’s not the best way to design it. I’m working on another portrait right now, so I’m going to make sure I address the contrast before I finish. Thanks again! 🤓
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Tony
I just made these in the last two days and was just hoping for some general feedback. Both done in Procreate with the vine charcoal brush. I tried using the smudge tool for the first time with these and I really like how some of the transitions look, but I’m still having difficulties with better edge variety because my photo references are typically low quality, so I’m left with figuring out where to put hard edges on my own, which I’m not very comfortable with yet. In the livestream today with Lane Brown, he mentioned making cast shadows have harder edges, so I’m going to look for that in the next portrait I make, but for now I have little Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis 🎃🔪 and just wanted to see what you all think. Thanks! 🤓
Tony
Any advice on how to develop better edge variety if your photo references tend to be low quality and a bit fuzzy? I like to draw movie characters from older movies and it’s tough finding high quality photos, so my work looks a bit blurry as a result.
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Olga Bruser
That's really cool! what stands out to me the most is the lack of hard edges and maybe you can use a hard brush in some areas and then erase with a softer brush and this was have a better control of the edges. You can also use a lasso tool for that and again erase if it's tooo hard/sharp edge. Hard /soft edges can help you control the focal point and make the painting more appealing in general, it also can create an illusion of depth, depends of how you do it. You can pick artistically where soft/hard edges feel best. Maybe there's a better way to do it but I do it intuitively. Best way is look at reference of masters or artists you like. By the way a hard edge doesnt have to be super sharp, you can use a super fluffy brush and then make it smaller to control the hardness. Or the opposite, can do the entire painting with hard brush and then make a relativly harder brushstrokes, so it's a matter of style. I hope it's helpful, I'm not an expert :P Keep up the good work
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Tony
3yr
Thank you! I totally agree about it being too soft everywhere. I think the main issue is that I keep wanting to make portraits of characters from older movies, so all the reference photos I find are low quality and a bit blurry, so I end up creating it how I see it and I get something without enough hard edges. Then I get too intimidated to choose where to put harder edges so I just leave it the way it is. I’m definitely going to keep experimenting with adding my own hard edges or maybe using a different brush for that part of the process. It’s very helpful when other artists point these things out to me so thanks again! 😁
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Sketcher Ameya
It is really awesome and I do not think that if you will leave it like this , it will even matter
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Tony
3yr
Thank you! 🤓
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