Master Study Fails and Get back up agains...

braden H

@chrisaakins Oh wow! Much improved already! And don't feel bad about your first one not looking right. My first master study was... truly awful, lol

chrisaakins

@Braden-Hallett you should post it. BARE YOUR SOUL!!!

ArtofAleksey

@chrisaakins procreate has a free artist handbook you can download on ibooks or from their website. I read it it’s great and some things translate over to photoshop. Also Udemy gives you like 75% off on your first online class, I bought a photoshop class (it’s a design class but still) was $12

Kasey Snow

I love it! This is encouraging, I've just started doing master studies again and BOY am I rusty!
I kinda wanna do a thread like this of my own, or maybe there could be a community thread for everyone to post theirs in?

I think your second take is REALLY close, huge leap there from the first one. Right on!

Nyrryl Cadiz

@chrisaakins you almost got it. I can see that you need more work on the form but you’re in the right direction.

burvantill

@chrisaakins Great improvement! I was going to say, don't be so hard on yourself, it's only the first one, but you whipped out the second try before I could encourage. lol.

Chip Valecek

@chrisaakins Just like mine the first one is always a kick to the gut LOL. But with your first one I can see you are headed on the right path. Compare your first to your second. Huge improvement already.

When I was working on mine, I already had some gumroad tutorials from Matt Dixon which really helped me understand the way he colors/paints his pieces. Do you know if your artist has something like that just to catch his process?

DOTTYP

@chrisaakins Your second study is much improved and the line work is really good. If you have trouble with linework in digital try Lazy Nezumi it will plug into photoshop and Autodesk sketchbook and gives very stable line work or you can do the line work traditionally and then scan it and colour it.

TessaW

Great job @chrisaakins. Are you utilizing the eraser tool at all in helping with edges and gradients between light and shadow?

demotlj

Super improvement. I wish I could learn from my mistakes that quickly!

chrisaakins

@TessaW No??? Is that a thing? Like I use the eraser tool if I bleed into an area I don't mean to, but that is all. Is there another technique?

TessaW

@chrisaakins Have you ever done charcoal drawings, where you use a kneaded eraser to get soft highlights and transitions back into the drawing, or use a harder rubber eraser to get sharper details? It's sort of the same concept.

For example, on your master-study's torso- you could have shaded that in, in one solid block, and gone in with a large soft eraser to get that soft gradation from light to shadow. Additionally, you could go into the face with a small hard eraser and erase in some hard edges between the light and shadow. This is of course if you have a separate layer on top of a base.

It's one way of many to work, but it does end up being a pretty efficient process, in my opinion.

Here's a video- starting around 1:40 shows one way to use this:

https://www.ctrlpaint.com/videos/hard-and-soft-shadow-edges

chrisaakins

@TessaW I know exactly what you are talking about. Great idea!

chrisaakins

@Chip-Valecek I don't think so. He did show his work in a grey scale. I may try that.

TessaW

@chrisaakins And one other note- if you do end up using some form of the method, you can use erasers with textures in them to help with style consistency.