EPTAnyways, this summer I've resolved to really buckle down and the hard but necessary thing that has to be done to become trained properly for the real world of an illustrator. Lots and lots of painting! Quick paintings, black and white paintings, limited palette paintings, still lives, plein air, figure, portraitures, from imagination, etc. etc.
One of the hard truths of preparing yourself for a career in most art fields is that you really just need to do a lot. There aren't really short cuts. The amount you need to have passively in your head is crazy, and the speed necessary to generate paintings fast enough for commercial use is crazy, these things are developed mostly through lots and lots of painting. And drawing.
And so I will do lots and lots of paintings, mostly in acrylic paint since its water soluble and opaque, also it dries very quickly which means I can fuck up and put paint over it easily.
I've always been focused on drawing, and when I say drawing I mean the ability to describe a form 3-dimesionally via tone. I'm opening myself up more to color since I have a good, shaky grasp on principles of drawing and I feel that I can't enter a professional environment without any experience in color, so thats an area I plan to expend particular effort into.
Do you want to improve at drawing? Painting?
Heres what I do, and heres what I will encourage you to do as well if you want to paint/draw along with me and want feedback or just want an excuse to improve.
Quick painting.
20 - 40 minutes on each painting. max of 9x12" size.
Paint from life.
Paint a still life, paint a person who will sit down for you for some time, paint anything you can see, don't paint from photographs.
Those are the absolute essentials. If you really want to focus down on one thing, here are my recommendations for improving those particular aspects of work.
Learning Value
Value, tone, darks and lights, when you're first learning this I recommend you find a white surface, and a collection of objects, all of them should be black or white or close to black or white.
Put a black item near a white item and light them so that your black object is receiving a lot of light and casting a shadow onto your white item.
The point of this is to learn to control your value, the black item may be black but is it ALWAYS darker than the white item? Is the black item in light darker than the white item in shadow?
Learning Color
One of the best ways to learn color is with limited palettes.
Heres a good palette from which to paint with.
1x warm Red
1x cool Red
1x warm Blue
1x cool Blue
1x warm Yellow
1x cool Yellow
1x Titanium White
Any warm and cool of Red, Blue, and Yellow will do you fine. These colors will allow you to mix any color you really need to mix. It isn't without limitation, but the limitation is absolutely the point.
If you own a tube of paint labelled any variety of "flesh colored" throw that into the trash and burn it because thats absolutely not how you should be painting flesh!
Warm+Cool RBY will let you mix most any color you need, but you will have to mix the colors you need which will teach you color properties. If you need a green you need to mix it out of yellow and blue, there won't be a tube of green.
I'll add more palette suggestions and what not when I have time (and when Cox turns on my god damned internet) and I'll also post my studies and if you decide to do some studies and want to post them thats great too!
P.S. Fuck Cox.
