Replying to Painting With Corel Painter And 4x5 Wacom Graphire

Thanks for the feedback. I'm a third year fine arts major at a state University. All can say about art education in general is that the quality of it is directly proportional to the time and effort you invest. Where I attend, nobody knows a thing about digital art or conceptual illustration and as far as my fellow students and most of my professors are concerned, I'm the kid who doodles monsters in his spare time. Honestly though, I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm there to learn traditional principles and methods And believe me, those are absolutely essential. Life drawing alone is one of the most important disciplines an artist can practice. I'm not saying that an art education is essential because there are plenty of people out there who don't have one and do better than a lot of us but an art education is a great experience that will broaden your perception if you let it. It'll also help you get an idea of how others might view your own work.

You have a nice little site there. You're already on a good path just by having it up and exposing your work. If I were you, I'd showing it in every online art forum I could think of. There are tons of great resources for artists on the net. Especially ones who choose our medium and genres. Check out sijun.com, cgtalk.com, conceptart.org and gfxartist.com for starters. I guess if I were to offer you some personal advice, I'd say that you should draw from life more. This is a great skill building discipline for any artist and is indispensable as far as artist development is concerned. It's not just to learn realism but it's to train your eye how to interpret what it sees and train your hand how to control it's medium. People have a natural tendency to draw or paint what they think something should look like rather than what it actually would look like. The goal is to gradually shrink the gap between those two conflicting aspects so you can create content that is entirely your own and make it convincing.

Good luck man. And get your stuff out there.
-Noel

First of all, that is fantastic, as is the stuff on your site.

Just curious, are you self taught or did you get schooling? I have been thinking about going to design school myself, so if you went I would like your thoughts on it.

Also, I would like any comments you have on my art,

http://majestictreef...com/artwork.htm

and my best piece that I haven't added to that page yet,

http://majestictreef...m/lizardman.jpg


All the ones not done in pencil were done directly in photoshop.

You have a very painterly style, and I would really like to pick that up.

Just after reading your awesome tutorial, I decided to check out your site. Nice art there..

Anyway, Your index page does not have a valid title. IT is not recommended and will affect your search engine ranking adversely.

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Thanks. NilsC actually pointed this stuff out to me the other day. I'm no webdesigner so stuff like this has always been a difficulty for me. I'm doing all this html with an ancient freeware copy of Adobe Pagemill. But after he sent me a sample of my own source code for my index page, figuring it out was pretty easy. Right before you posted actually, I just uploaded a new index page complete with a title.

I was however still wondering as to how I might go about adding content that search engines and spiders would be attracted to. For the most part, webdesign is still a complete mystery to me.

Thanks again for the feedback.
-Noel

Just after reading your awesome tutorial, I decided to check out your site. Nice art there..

Anyway, Your index page does not have a valid title. IT is not recommended and will affect your search engine ranking adversely.

Thanks. There tons of places where one can find great tutorials that blow mine out of the water. It's usually just a matter of finding the sites of individual artists who make them.

One that I can think of right off is David Levy, the (former?) art director for Acclaim entertainment (which went bankrupt). He even has sreen captured movie files. http://vyle-art.com/...age/painter.htm

Again, thanks for the kind words, man.

That was, in one word, "FABULOUS" Noel.. Describing the conception of an artform is no mean task - even tough I've always wanted someone to go ahead and do it in a way that it would show even a lamer how to do it. And yet YOU had the guts to do it... literally step by step, as any artistically challenged person and a "lamer" like me would prefer. That was simply a brilliant piece of work out there. Thanks for sharing it with us

"soon" being now...

6. There were a few things I didn't like and they needed to be fixed. I got rid of the little insect limbs as they were more of an ugly distraction than a supporting element. I'm also rendering the facial features more to tighten up what I do like.



7. Now it's time to lower the contrast a bit and darken it up in preparation for the addition of more dynamic lighting and eventually color. Like I said, this is a quickie for me. Normally I'd just plan this stuff out a little better. I've also decided to reintroduce the insect legs back into the piece only this time I'm actually giving some thought as to where I place them. The canvas just seemed weird with just a floating head coming from the upper corner.



8. Now I'm adding some more directional lighting in on a second, somewhat transparent layer. Just general airbrushed white over the flatter areas and some finer highlights with the camel hair.



9. Now it's time to introduce some color. Keep in mind, normally I'd just paint in color if I intend for something to be in color but that's when I at least have some sort of color scheme in mind when I first start. This is all spontaneous and so is the color choice. I'm just experimenting with flat colors (I settled on a crimsonish maroon) to put on a new "colorize" layer and then airbrushing in some orange highlights on to that same layer... Hopefully by now, you've realized how chaotic and inefficient my process is and you no longer have any desire to try and emulate it.



10. I collapse everything back on to one layer and put in the finishing touches. I add some proper gold-orange highlights where they need to go and clean up what needs to be cleaned up.



Here's the final image.


Feel free to ask any questions you may have.

Hey everyone. I just completed this tutorial for my website. It's sort of a documentation of how I completed this specific piece. It might be helpfull for those who are curious about using the computer as means for digital art. This is all done with Corel Painter and a Wacom tablet.

1. I start pretty simple with what I like to call a base coat. It's just something to establish a bit of texture. I'm getting ready to start one of my quick (by quick I mean 30-45 minute) self-portraits.



2. Originally this piece started as a normal self portrait. I used a variation of the loaded pallet knife to just define some quick forms and some lights and darks.



3. Because it had started to look like one I had already done, I decided to have some fun with it rather than start over. I changed some of the features so they'd look more skeletal.



4. Now, I'm just sketching with a camel hair brush. I'm keeping everything one one layer and I'm really just doing this all on the fly.



5. I'm now starting to smooth out some of my strokes in order to make my forms more coherent. I'm using some larger camel hair brushes and the pallet knife.



The second part will come soon.