Telaron's try at making an art portrait

[Issyl]

The helmet and curiass need more highlights to make them look like metal rather than stone.

[Frogger5]

Bring out your inner contrast, noble one.

[usr-sbin]

A colored version. I'll do the face later.

Thanks Telaron, It looks good, is there any chance of changing the colour of his clothing or not?

Adam

[Telaron]

Yeah, sure! Any ideas? I haven't been that active in the forums lately, and I just read your post. Sorry about that.

[Telaron]

A colored version. I'll do the face later.

Thanks Telaron, It looks good, is there any chance of changing the colour of his clothing or not?

Adam

[usr-sbin]

Yeah, sure! Any ideas? I haven't been that active in the forums lately, and I just read your post. Sorry about that.

No problem Maybe red or blue?

[Telaron]

How'd that second post get there? Red of Blue? I'll try it out!

[Telaron]

I tried several colors. See what you think. I also gave the #3 a brownish mustache.

[Frogger5]

I'm leaning towards the bottom two.

[Neilarmius]

It looks like he wears crushed velvet. I'm not sure if it's intentional. I think you've done a great base- He looks well proportioned if a little vacant. In case you haven't have a read of kitty's tutorial.

Eyes are not at the exactly same level. It might be picky but it's the first thing you go to when you recognize a face.

[Telaron]

Eyes are not at the exactly same level. It might be picky but it's the first thing you go to when you recognize a face

Yeah, the face is the hardest part.

[Jetrel]

I took those helmets you posted earlier and polished them up for mainline. Thanks.

(The image below is the zoomed-in version; the quality of that wouldn't be suitable for mainline, but when it's shrunk down, it hides all the flaws/individual brushstrokes.)

[Telaron]

Awesome! You really made them look great! I'll have to take these and study them.

(The image below is the zoomed-in version; the quality of that wouldn't be suitable for mainline, but when it's shrunk down, it hides all the flaws/individual brushstrokes.)

So how far did you zoom in? (for my future reference when drawing icons)

[Jetrel]

Awesome! You really made them look great! I'll have to take these and study them.

(The image below is the zoomed-in version; the quality of that wouldn't be suitable for mainline, but when it's shrunk down, it hides all the flaws/individual brushstrokes.)

So how far did you zoom in? (for my future reference when drawing icons)

400%; that is, 200x200 pixels. In general, most CG art should get done at some multiple like that, of the source material. Something like 2-4x; anything above is overkill, and runs the danger of slowing down your machine, and/or butting up against the maximum resolution of your drawing tablet.

However, it can be really hard to grapple with the whole canvas at that size; I'm still gradually easing into it. If there's too big of a canvas to fill, you can basically just get lost pushing irrelevant details around, when there's much more important "whole picture" issues that are wrong. This has probably been the biggest thing that's made me fail to get into digital painting several times over; I've tried to bite off too big of a canvas, and the results have just been a train-wreck. My first icons were actually just painting directly in the final 50x50 size, because that's all I could handle. But that was actually my first digital painting ever that actually succeeded and looked good; because the canvas was small enough, pixel-wise, that I was able to actually fix the issues with the "whole picture".

Kitty is probably fuming if she reads this, because, yes, you do need to also practice control of large brushstrokes that cross a large canvas. It's a fundamental skill you will need at some point.

However, that's really, really hard, and it's something the average person has little-to-no practice with (whereas with smaller strokes, they've been getting some hand-eye coordination over at least a decade of writing). It's something that's not natural to (almost) anyone, and if you want to learn it, you have to force yourself to practice doing it day after day. Which is fine if you've already decided you're dead-serious about getting good at art, but that's precisely where we lose many potential artists; they're not, they haven't decided, and if fact, even if they could be very good artists, that either scares or frustrates them too much, and they quit forever. Most people have to have some taste of success before dabbling in something turns to actually being serious.

Drawing on a tiny canvas with 'writing'-like brushstrokes may build several bad habits, but it also jump-starts the good habit of wrangling the whole canvas, rather than working on it in small parts. Regardless of how you mechanically do it, at least getting into the right mental habits, early, is a huge, huge benefit, even if it comes at the cost of some bad-habits in the mechanics of how you move your hands.

[usr-sbin]

I tried several colors. See what you think. I also gave the #3 a brownish mustache.

They look very nice, I have to say I think that the third colours suits the character the best. However, the eyes seem a little vacant as if he is staring of into the distance although its not too important, just a personal preference.