Digital drawing - Jared

[amberdreams]

Another digital experiment - the base photo was one of wolfpup2000's gorgeous HQ Chicon pics.  I used it to make the first sketch, then as reference for the rest of the drawing.
I'm not sure the shading and highlights quite worked on this one. Too much white methinks.
Teaser

Comments

[marciaelena.livejournal.com]

Beautiful! I love how expressive his face is here. His eyes! <3

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much!

[reapertownusa.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is lovely! Marciaelena is right - you did an amazing job with his eyes! And his hair. Hair likes to mock me.

I think the white for the highlights is coming off as odd because it's laid over that brown texture base and not blended with anything else. I think in this case, you'd either want to do a full sepia tone paint (mimicking charcoal or colored pencil with that base, I'd imagine) or just not highlight. You can get away with shading without a full paint layer, but I think it's a real challenge to pull off bright highlights that way when you're not drawing metallic surfaces.

Skin just isn't very reflective and has only a few high contrast highlights unless it's wet or under intense, focused light so in this case, I wouldn't use white in many spots even with a full paint - maybe highlight with more flesh or earth tones?

Just some ideas, because goodness gracious girl, I couldn't draw Jared's half this well. It really does look amazing. I still don't get how you or anyone else can draw on a tablet like that...

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

I've toned down the highlights, and I think it looks better now.I have no idea how to get the brush textures to look like watercolour and such - I know you are supposed to be able to do all sorts of clever things with tablet and software but I'm not there yet (not even close!). The photo ref I was using was from a con so Jared was a bit shiny and glowing with people's flashes so it was a mistake to try and replicate that kind of shading!

Thanks for being so detailed in your comments, it's really helpful!

[reapertownusa.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't worry about that - you're wonderful with traditional arts and I've never understood making digital mimic traditional. Digital does some fantastic things traditional can't, but if someone wants their art to look like traditional...they should do traditional. I was thinking with the dark paper background that you might just want to use the same thought process as how you do traditional mediums on dark paper, not trying to make it actually look like them. And sometimes photo references and their lighting makes my head hurt.

You always do such beautiful work and you've picked up the tablet so insanely quickly. Seriously, I've been using a tablet for years and I still have to do nearly all my line art by hand to scan in. What you've learned so far is incredibly impressive - keep up the gorgeous work!

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

You are very nice to me, thank you!