Thank you for making this video. I struggle with rendering skin and faces because my mind overthinks all these details. To show yourself struggling and learning helped me sm. You’re a great teacher
It's so validating to have such a fantastic artist as yourself analyse their weaknesses so thoroughly and with such detail. It's really easy to look at your work and just assume you know exactly what you're doing and just have total dominium of your medium, so this is very eye-opening and it helps me feel less bad about my abysmal skills
I love how you don't shy away from leaning from others. I feel like the art community is so scared of tracing that they forget that so many of the old masters of painting are that good because they learned and studied from others. I always learn the most when I copy from others in a study to see how they do things. now, don't copy and post it online and claim it's your own. That's bad. but just learning and copying I'm your own time and never claiming it as your own is fine. if you post it, credit the original artist. preferably ask them first too
Exactly what I just wanted to mention. I always felt a little ashamed when tracing something and I would still say you should try and get to a point where you won’t even consider it any more. That should be the goal I guess.. But it’s so reassuring to hear someone say it’s okay if you change it enough and try to work on different skills at that particular project anyway. So thank you for that! Beautiful results btw! :D
Someone reminded me of this recently - even master painters copied one another, tried others style, etc to learn their own skills. It's not shameful to learn from others - it's how EVERYONE does it.
as a beginner artist, I never thought I'd be able to relate to a professional or anyone with even a little more experience than me. But hearing you talk about the struggles you had, especially about the brushes, made me feel not alone in this. And like the end goal isn't this impossible to reach destination as much anymore. This is going into an art favorites playlist for sure
speaking as painter, take up sculpting, it helps understanding the dimensions. There's George Bridgman's Anatomy books, which has body broken down into block. Everyone has a different system, I had a friend, we would go to life painting, and he would only bring red blue and yellow for his supply, and work with that.... it ended up being a muddy theme, but that wasn't as bad since we were working with retired artists and they gave wonderful insight. So there's no wrong way to do this.
It's interesting to see that a lot of why you have issues in the beginning is because you don't pick the "right" references for the project - You're immediately drawn to the familiar flat/studio lighting, which is perfect reference for your regular style. However, for rendering (especially while figuring it out,) that type of reference is much more difficult to work with because of how subtle you have to be. Once you start choosing reference with more dynamic lighting and stronger contrast between light and dark, you start to have a lot more success. It goes to show how much our "tools" (medium, reference, method, etc.) can shape both our art and how we perceive our own skills. TL;DR for people looking to learn rendering: start with reference that has a strong sense of value and contrast, before you move to rendering more subtle lighting like studio lights
Also, your portraits look fantastic. If you're still feeling they need a little more texture for realism, experimenting with adding some spatter/a speckly air brush or something else with a small stippled texture to your highlights might be worth trying (basically anything to break up the smoothness)
I personally think when we use the phrase “ugly phase” it can make that whole stage sound and feel negative. It diminishes its importance and beauty. It can be seen as a construction phase. The same as a sketch can be full of construction lines we have to construct the light and form too. It’s more like a shape forming phase, than an ugly phase. Or we could just call it the beautiful phase and smile and look forward to the joke and fun of viewing it differently.
I love how in your 5th painting, you can see how that breakthrough immediately altered your next pieces as you understood the process better. Those moments of learning are my favorite!
The fact that I always think your art is so great but then realize you struggle with parts of it just like everybody else. I'm definitely going to use this video to help myself get better at rendering too. And yes you're on my list of an artist who's work I really love.
One tip I can give for this type of practice is using pictures of old people as reference, or people with sharper features. It's very tempting to use conventionally attractive models for your art but their soft features are making it harder to figure out the dimensions of the face and make up might mess up with noticing the natural color variations of the skin. I noticed my art improving when drawing old people, I promise, it's fun!
I really think you came on leaps and bounds. Even for the last portrait, where you're working with quite a flat reference, the subtle touches in your render really made it pop-like the hair texture. Excited to see your future progress!
I am also currently working on improving my painting skills and my unwarranted advice would be to first stick to painting the portraits as they are before stylizing them, you know the old learn the rules before you break them adage. Also I’d say to color pick more from the reference not just for imitation purposes but so you can learn more about where in the color wheel the values are coming from in various sections of the lighting. That’s my two cents, you did great tho, I loved all your portraits! ❤
I think the really importsnt thing in realism in art is shape design. If you design good shapes to represent the different planes of the face, you have a good form, and then its just a matter of modifying your edges. So you have to know some anatomy in order to do realism, so you know which parts of the face would be obscured by shadow in the first place, the objective is rerpesenting those little dents and shapes in our skull as best as we can while also stylizing it and showing our vision about it
I'm OBSESSED with content like this, it's so helpful to have you talk through your struggles and see how you overcame them!! Thank you for making this video, I've been wanting to do the same!
Yes, yes, yes! I just started this sort of process lately and I'm honestly a huge fan of this sort of work. You're not overthinking, blurring tracing with stylizing REALLY helps you understand form and how to apply it to your style, and studying how others render can teach you about ways that you do it yourself, and maybe even, make things easier in the long run. Huge fan of this process and this video. I'll be honest, I never watched anything you posted before but I'm all in now. Great video and VERY inspiring!
thanks for being so vulnerable and honest in this video. i can furshure relate to painting anxiety. i too dread the "ugly" period when rendering a painting. but this is my sign to tackle it like you did. what i like about your video is that you set clear goals for yourself and acknowledged what needed improvement but also what you did well. congrats on the progress!
When you're an artist who started off drawing stylised and never learned the foundations of drawing before getting popular hehe It's good to see a large creator going back to the basics I'm sure it'll pay off so much in the future with your usual stylised work (looks like it already has!)
thank you for this. I've been holding myself back for too long afraid of the "ugly part" of the process. Your video really popped on my timeline at the right time. I know you're not 100% satisfied yet, but it is such a significant progress from the first few pieces. Some are actually fire portraits
This is so inspiring. Your progress over 12 portraits In phenomenal, and your humble, objective critiques of your own art is very refreshing. Every artist is on a journey to improve their work, and we need all the help we can get! Thank you so much for sharing your journey.
This topic is what I’ve been thinking about with my simplified drawing style recently. I've been stuck with the idea that I have to keep only one style for a long time. When I start a piece every time, I'm always torn between rendering or simplification of my drawing.
Something that helped me so much with understanding the planes of the face (particularly mine) was MAKEUP, it’s so fun to paint and powder your face and mess with your natural colors, just like with painting
Oh and another thing a portrait painting professor talked about once was to *push color*, which I think you’re already on, but pushing out unnatural colors like greens and blues and such from skin tones to give them a bit more depth- it’s something I’m unsure of and am still working on but it’s fun to draw portraits in unusual colors (like a green skinned person) to help me see where these colors might work in a naturally skinned portrait
seeing you talk through you process and watching your breakthrough was really awesome. i think you broke down what you had to do and how you had to get there really well, and it definitely helped frame some problems i have myself in terms of rendering! thanks for sharing!
This is an excellent idea. I am 100% going to try this. I appreciated you talking about the idea of getting so afraid of failing that one doesn't try at all. I have this issue and it is getting to a point that it is pretty detrimental to me. TIme to change that. (kinda skipped around the video as I'm kinda busy rn. 100% returning to it to watch you paint and talk in detail :P )
As a beginner artist, understanding how you analyze each weakness and learning curves from each painting helps me nitpick my methods or the way I paint!
A fundamental part to learn to draw good portraits, is to choose the right photo, with great contrast of light to be able to see better the planes of the face
I've actually been on the same journey with my own art recently! It's so cool to see how you're starting this process and how you've been thinking about your work as you go. Thank you for sharing!
it's really refreshing to see someone as accomplished as yourself show us you challenging yourself by tackling your weaknesses and working on improving yourself. i'm nowhere near your skill level but i'm working on improving my portrait drawing skills now and it's really tough, but this video was very inspiring, thank you :)
This is awesome! It's really good that you tried out the new technique lots of times to try and get a better understanding and the progression definitely shows ☺
Great video explaining your struggles. Some advice for the eyes looking flat is to render the eyelids with more volume, I notice that the eyelids look almost flush with the eyeball. Other than that you could try adding more occlusion shadows around that area since it tends to be the focal point of the face. General advice for rendering realistically is to make sure you shapes are indicative of planes of the face. I remember being told to practice painting only using hard edges which forced me to design interesting shapes that read well; this translated well when I then added edge variety back into my pieces (I spent 3 months painting mostly that way).
You killed this! As artists we’re so hard on ourselves. Thank you so much for posting this. I loved the approach you took to become better. You definitely hit your goal. Well done. 🎉
This was amazing to watch!! I had to keep remembering that you're a professional artist, and you're working on stuff outside your comfort zone, but it was wildly disorienting to see such amazing pieces come flying out of your pen and then hear you say, "I'm not happy with THIS," "I'm not wild about THAT!" You're a little like a musician who plays a few standard rock chords, wins a bunch of Grammys, then muses about how he doesn't sound enough like Arnold Schoenberg. At the same time, you showed us what you were going for, and what you were struggling with, and how you came closer to your goal, all the while embracing learning from other artists, and showing your effort and your progress. You start off saying you're pretty good at this art thing, and I have to agree, except by "pretty good" I mean "INSANELY good!!" I'd love to have some of your discarded stuff in my sketchbook. I'm subbing your channel to see what I can pick up by osmosis.
I personally found it really useful to do studies of half completed sculptures. The planes of the face are less smooth and the lighting tends to have good contrast to help understand the forms. Studying good charcoal drawings helps a lot too. This is a great video and very insightful, thanks for sharing it.
This was so fun to watch! It's nice hearing a pro artist talk about their art in such an objective way, with the strengths and weaknesses! Very inspiring
Great video, definitely can relate. Something I learned I think from Angel Ganev was to get away from the "pretty" references, at least at the beginning. Look for more sharp features, sharp light, so you can see better the different shapes and planes of the face (I found really useful to draw more male characters) then when you have a better understanding of where these planes are and why are you shading something, then you can translate it easier to a more softer face
This is my first time stumbling on one of your videos and I have to say how much this video motivated me to take new approaches with my drawings. I feel like I learned so much within this 17 minute video so thank you so much. Also I have to admit that your art is such a stunning mix between realism and cartoon style and the way you use shapes to define faces is really really satisfying. ❤❤
For drawing eyes an artist that I like, ErgoJosh, does eyes a certain way that really helped me understand the shape of them. If you think of the pupil and iris as more of an inner cone rather than a flat shape pasted on a sphere it gives it more 3 dimensionality and I feel that gives eyes more of a realistic look.
I love how you show how to use tracing as a learning tool, since often tracing is just given the stigma of being bad and something to not do. Although tracing shouldn't be use to create finished pieces, it's a great tool to learn shading, coloring, and lighting, as well as focus on other techniques while practicing art, which is exactly what you demonstrated. Amazing!
I do think your eyes in the way you were shading them were steadily getting better even if you didnt realize it in the moment :) Im an artist as well and want to have a more painterly style but I'm also very afraid of the ugly stage, I always feel like I dont know what i'm doing when it comes to things like shape and form and specifically what colors to use to make the piece rlly pop. But you showed me that even an experienced artist like yourself still struggles with these things as well and gave me some encouragement, thanks for making this video.❤
I’m surprised how good you got at simplifying to the point where it comes as your disadvantage sometimes. In my opinion you should try some practicing each face feature separately to understand all volumes. Use volume lines to help you. Most noses you had wrong or too stylised and easy sketch of volume lines could help you avoid hiding your insecurities in “stylised” label. You know your issues and you sound like very aware yet still avoiding through ugly phase. Can’t wait to see you overcome this ❤ you almost got it.
While I’m not aiming for realism, I’ve recently realized my rendering game upped significantly when I stopped thinking about lighting orientation like a beginner. Now that I had an idea of how the light looked I needed to think about how my ideal lighting effect would alter overall colors.
That was quite exciting to watch and I love the progress you made during your trial! I would like to reccomend an YT named istebrak, she has phenomenal videos about rendering the face; since she is an art teacher. She is very good at explaining the 'hows' and 'whys' and has many videoes about the eyes, lips and nose! Another is Marco Bucci, that man is a coloring god I shit you not. He has many wonderful videos about color and lightning theory and gives you quite the depth of understanding of its usages. He really knows his colors and his portaits are fantastic, so maybe they could give you some inspirations for using fun lightning and shadows for your own portaits :)
Question - i know you were struggling with what brushes to use, so what brushes finally started working for you towards the end? Need to know because I have the same struggle. Thank you!! Amazing growth btw💫
i found this video at the perfect time as I'm going through the same process of improving rendering right now! it's sooo hard and i wanna quit but I'm taking this as a sign :D
You've improved so much! This is awesome. I just discovered this channel and have been in an art block for months. You are inspiring me so much and I feel like I'm gonna come out of it real soon
Agh this is so helpful to watch you walk through this learning process, I’m going in a different direction and trying to learn landscapes (especially rendering them, and detailing without getting lost). I’ve been getting a bit tired but this is really reinvigorating :)
Great video! I appreciate how open you are with your shortcomings and insecurities in your art. I completely relate to the frustration of getting through the ugly stage. I know how I want it to look, but I just don't know how to get there. It disheartens me how harsh you are on yourself, but your ability to spot mistakes has helped and will continue to help you develop your skills to be able to paint like the artists you admire. You chose some great artists to learn from, they're some of my favorites. Definitely subscribing, I hope to see you improve more!
Awesome video ! Thank you so much for posting it and showing the actual process and thought behind the pieces. Seeing the ones where you seemed to fail to actually work on your goals and fell back into your confort zone all the while actually making progress but not realizing it is very encouraging too. I'm glad you pushed through and ended up creating great pieces ! I also liked that you shared your thoughts when looking back on a piece that you made and updated it. I've never seen another artist do that and it's great to see I'm not the only one hating older pieces. Breaking the rules and reworking older pieces with what you learned along the way is something I'll definitely try instead of casting them aside. Anyways, thanks for the video, I'm going to try the same challenge ! :D
Obviously you have incredible artistic skill in your paintings but I also want to compliment your editing style! Your transitions, comparisons, and jokes were awesome.
Really cool video, it’s nice to see how you learning and improving even though you already have your own style, this type of videos give a lot of motivation to keep practicing, so Thanks a lot for the video, and it’s amazing to see how much you improved at the end despite struggle in the beginning.
This was such a cool and helpful video! I loved that you included your detailed thought process going through the whole thing. I think I’ll try to mimic this process
Funny how this showed up on my TH-cam recommendations, almost like the algorithm knew what I needed to improve my art..... Thanks for this. Really helpful
getting so frustrated with finding the right brush is SO real!! And it's especially frustrating, because everyone always says the brush doesn't matter, but there's no damn way that's true 😭 Don't call your old work crappy though, you wouldn't be where you are without it!!
I really enjoy this video, I loved how you express all your thoughts and feelings on every single page, please please please bring us more videos like this, or at least with this long, it was really enjoyable thank youuu byee
As someone who does a lot of painting, I think brushes are overrated! Find one good big brush that can do soft and hard edges with pen pressure, and one good blending brush and you should be set! It’s all about blocking everything in big and going from there
I’m so glad I found this video. I’ve been drawing since I was a kid (hobbyist) and gotten pretty decent at it. However since adulthood the time I spend drawing has nosedived. I sketch 1-5x a year now, and everytime I do a piece I’m dissatisfied with it because I was consuming art from my favorite artists on IG and YT but not actually practicing, so my skill lagged way behind my standards. I decided I wanted to try painting (I never really painted growing up) and it was SOOO frustrating. Like you, I’m a detail oriented artist, and I expected the piece to look perfect as I moved along without understanding that paintings require an “ugly” middle ground 🤣 during the pandemic I was FORCED to stay in and spend weeks painting, and I actually produced a few pieces I was proud of, but they were all just replicas of ghibli screenshots, so lots of flat colours. I decided to try digital art with HORRIBLE results and again, expecting to be able to produce a great piece by only trying once or twice and focusing on details. This video showed me that 1. I need to be way more patient with myself and have a lot more tries before I call it quits. I have a full time job so that’s hard, unfortunately. And 2, focusing on the bigger picture when it comes to painting is crucial for beginners. I’ve never been a big picture kinda gal 😅 It was great to see you actually improve and how you taught yourself to understand rendering and got closer to your goal. Pretty amazing what you did. That’s the great thing about art, it’s more about the process and the improvement than the finished piece. Off topic-and perhaps controversial- but it’s sad that a lot of AI art users won’t really get to experience that. Thanks so much for posting!
Thank you so much for this. Going back to the basics of values really helped me! I was able to produce something that doesn't look like utter trash because I trusted the process and kept pushing forward c: Now to get in some good practice and polich my style~
My own feeling is that when do practice, starting with reference with more directional lighting might be easier. As directional lighting bring a more clear edge of light and shadow to help you define the shape. Although for portrait photos lighting are always kinda soft(and the change of value is very subtle and it is easy to get lost), but it might be good to bring that harsh edge of light and shadow back a bit, especially for highly stylized portrait.
Great video, I love to see how you study and analyse your references and studies from other artists. Only thing I would personally add would be a note where you found the reference from. Maybe you could link a pinterest board with your references for others to studie as well from them, or just to provide a place where people can find the original artist. Maybe I also missed links to the credit artists, since I was so inspired to start painting myself when I watched the video!
Do with this what you will, but it seems like the two you ended up liking the best are also the ones in which you resisted the temptation to exaggerate certain features (big eyes, tiny upturned nose, etc). When “stylization” means always exaggerating or otherwise altering the same features, same face syndrome becomes, not inevitable per se, but more likely. For example, while I agree that version 1 wasn’t rendered well, I rather enjoyed that you gave Wednesday a hooked nose in the previous version. It at least, looked different from the red, upturned, shrunken nose that has become so ubiquitous in instagram art. But the new Wednesday painting is definitely rendered better, I will agree. Regardless, I enjoyed watching how much you grew and experimented over the course of these 12 paintings.
You did really well to improve, but another area of improvement I see is that you lean to far into warmer tones. Some of the reference images you used showed (at least to me) much more cooler or neutral tones and then in your rendition of them, it was a lot warmer than the reference. For example, in the second to last piece, she has really cool fare skin and then this stark peachy blush that just stands out from the rest of her skin. When you rendered it in your own style, it wasn't just the shapes of her features that makes the piece off from the reference, it's how much warmer and tanner her skin is comparatively. This was a great step to make, I just think the next is not using warm skin tones as a crutch. Figure out how to paint skin tones that are cooler without making it looked washed out.
I found kinship so fast. “Idk what to do with the noses. The shadows confuse me. Idk how to do eyes, it’s hard to find form. I’m pretty decent with lips though.” This is going to be a fun video, I can already tell.
Hey! Great video! I'm currently studying 2D Animation and I'm struggling with my characters and my anatomy course. I like the cartoony - anime vibe of the characters and making realistic characters is being difficult for me, I haven't made a single drawing since I started the anatomy course in January but I think that a challenge like this one is going to help me! I was also checking your channel and it's amazing! I can learn many things from here!
Amei teu vídeo! No final, quando você fala da pintura número 12, me identifiquei muito. Tantos pensamentos que a gente cansa mais de pensar do que de desenhar 😅 Amei seu canal!
the "what brush should i use" problem is REAL
Frrrr
I just use the same 2 and my pictures are fine
@@Scrubbinisame
Thank you for making this video. I struggle with rendering skin and faces because my mind overthinks all these details. To show yourself struggling and learning helped me sm. You’re a great teacher
What apps do you used to draw these arts
@@markmills7544procreate clip studio paint a good alternative is I bis paint x
It's so validating to have such a fantastic artist as yourself analyse their weaknesses so thoroughly and with such detail. It's really easy to look at your work and just assume you know exactly what you're doing and just have total dominium of your medium, so this is very eye-opening and it helps me feel less bad about my abysmal skills
I love how you don't shy away from leaning from others. I feel like the art community is so scared of tracing that they forget that so many of the old masters of painting are that good because they learned and studied from others. I always learn the most when I copy from others in a study to see how they do things. now, don't copy and post it online and claim it's your own. That's bad. but just learning and copying I'm your own time and never claiming it as your own is fine. if you post it, credit the original artist. preferably ask them first too
Exactly what I just wanted to mention. I always felt a little ashamed when tracing something and I would still say you should try and get to a point where you won’t even consider it any more. That should be the goal I guess.. But it’s so reassuring to hear someone say it’s okay if you change it enough and try to work on different skills at that particular project anyway.
So thank you for that! Beautiful results btw! :D
Someone reminded me of this recently - even master painters copied one another, tried others style, etc to learn their own skills. It's not shameful to learn from others - it's how EVERYONE does it.
as a beginner artist, I never thought I'd be able to relate to a professional or anyone with even a little more experience than me. But hearing you talk about the struggles you had, especially about the brushes, made me feel not alone in this. And like the end goal isn't this impossible to reach destination as much anymore. This is going into an art favorites playlist for sure
speaking as painter, take up sculpting, it helps understanding the dimensions. There's George Bridgman's Anatomy books, which has body broken down into block. Everyone has a different system, I had a friend, we would go to life painting, and he would only bring red blue and yellow for his supply, and work with that.... it ended up being a muddy theme, but that wasn't as bad since we were working with retired artists and they gave wonderful insight. So there's no wrong way to do this.
It's interesting to see that a lot of why you have issues in the beginning is because you don't pick the "right" references for the project - You're immediately drawn to the familiar flat/studio lighting, which is perfect reference for your regular style. However, for rendering (especially while figuring it out,) that type of reference is much more difficult to work with because of how subtle you have to be. Once you start choosing reference with more dynamic lighting and stronger contrast between light and dark, you start to have a lot more success. It goes to show how much our "tools" (medium, reference, method, etc.) can shape both our art and how we perceive our own skills.
TL;DR for people looking to learn rendering: start with reference that has a strong sense of value and contrast, before you move to rendering more subtle lighting like studio lights
Also, your portraits look fantastic. If you're still feeling they need a little more texture for realism, experimenting with adding some spatter/a speckly air brush or something else with a small stippled texture to your highlights might be worth trying (basically anything to break up the smoothness)
I personally think when we use the phrase “ugly phase” it can make that whole stage sound and feel negative. It diminishes its importance and beauty. It can be seen as a construction phase. The same as a sketch can be full of construction lines we have to construct the light and form too. It’s more like a shape forming phase, than an ugly phase. Or we could just call it the beautiful phase and smile and look forward to the joke and fun of viewing it differently.
I love how in your 5th painting, you can see how that breakthrough immediately altered your next pieces as you understood the process better. Those moments of learning are my favorite!
This was fantastic. I love when artists talk and walk through their thought process, and show the messy steps to get the style they want
The fact that I always think your art is so great but then realize you struggle with parts of it just like everybody else. I'm definitely going to use this video to help myself get better at rendering too. And yes you're on my list of an artist who's work I really love.
Dude yes, the honesty, the delivery…very motivating and inspiring. thank you for sharing!
One tip I can give for this type of practice is using pictures of old people as reference, or people with sharper features. It's very tempting to use conventionally attractive models for your art but their soft features are making it harder to figure out the dimensions of the face and make up might mess up with noticing the natural color variations of the skin. I noticed my art improving when drawing old people, I promise, it's fun!
I really think you came on leaps and bounds. Even for the last portrait, where you're working with quite a flat reference, the subtle touches in your render really made it pop-like the hair texture. Excited to see your future progress!
I am also currently working on improving my painting skills and my unwarranted advice would be to first stick to painting the portraits as they are before stylizing them, you know the old learn the rules before you break them adage. Also I’d say to color pick more from the reference not just for imitation purposes but so you can learn more about where in the color wheel the values are coming from in various sections of the lighting. That’s my two cents, you did great tho, I loved all your portraits! ❤
I think the really importsnt thing in realism in art is shape design. If you design good shapes to represent the different planes of the face, you have a good form, and then its just a matter of modifying your edges. So you have to know some anatomy in order to do realism, so you know which parts of the face would be obscured by shadow in the first place, the objective is rerpesenting those little dents and shapes in our skull as best as we can while also stylizing it and showing our vision about it
I'm OBSESSED with content like this, it's so helpful to have you talk through your struggles and see how you overcame them!! Thank you for making this video, I've been wanting to do the same!
Yes, yes, yes! I just started this sort of process lately and I'm honestly a huge fan of this sort of work. You're not overthinking, blurring tracing with stylizing REALLY helps you understand form and how to apply it to your style, and studying how others render can teach you about ways that you do it yourself, and maybe even, make things easier in the long run. Huge fan of this process and this video. I'll be honest, I never watched anything you posted before but I'm all in now. Great video and VERY inspiring!
thanks for being so vulnerable and honest in this video. i can furshure relate to painting anxiety. i too dread the "ugly" period when rendering a painting. but this is my sign to tackle it like you did. what i like about your video is that you set clear goals for yourself and acknowledged what needed improvement but also what you did well. congrats on the progress!
When you're an artist who started off drawing stylised and never learned the foundations of drawing before getting popular hehe
It's good to see a large creator going back to the basics
I'm sure it'll pay off so much in the future with your usual stylised work (looks like it already has!)
thank you for this. I've been holding myself back for too long afraid of the "ugly part" of the process. Your video really popped on my timeline at the right time. I know you're not 100% satisfied yet, but it is such a significant progress from the first few pieces.
Some are actually fire portraits
This is so inspiring. Your progress over 12 portraits In phenomenal, and your humble, objective critiques of your own art is very refreshing. Every artist is on a journey to improve their work, and we need all the help we can get! Thank you so much for sharing your journey.
This topic is what I’ve been thinking about with my simplified drawing style recently. I've been stuck with the idea that I have to keep only one style for a long time. When I start a piece every time, I'm always torn between rendering or simplification of my drawing.
Something that helped me so much with understanding the planes of the face (particularly mine) was MAKEUP, it’s so fun to paint and powder your face and mess with your natural colors, just like with painting
Oh and another thing a portrait painting professor talked about once was to *push color*, which I think you’re already on, but pushing out unnatural colors like greens and blues and such from skin tones to give them a bit more depth- it’s something I’m unsure of and am still working on but it’s fun to draw portraits in unusual colors (like a green skinned person) to help me see where these colors might work in a naturally skinned portrait
I really love that you illustrate diverse people, not just in terms of color. I feel seen in your work. 🥰
It’s really motivating to see how you tackle learning new skills, and break it down into manageable tasks.
My favorite artist studying the work of my other favorite artist SamDoesArts? WINWIN
seeing you talk through you process and watching your breakthrough was really awesome. i think you broke down what you had to do and how you had to get there really well, and it definitely helped frame some problems i have myself in terms of rendering! thanks for sharing!
This is an excellent idea. I am 100% going to try this. I appreciated you talking about the idea of getting so afraid of failing that one doesn't try at all. I have this issue and it is getting to a point that it is pretty detrimental to me. TIme to change that.
(kinda skipped around the video as I'm kinda busy rn. 100% returning to it to watch you paint and talk in detail :P )
As a beginner artist, understanding how you analyze each weakness and learning curves from each painting helps me nitpick my methods or the way I paint!
the contrast between the first and last piece is insane!! major improvement! can’t wait to go through this process myself😄
The tracking and stylization made me happy. I feel guilty at times when I did it for studies but knowing a pro uses it also gives me grief. Thank you.
I LIKE HOW YOU CRITIC YOURSELF, THATS THE MARK OF A GREAT ARTIST
YES! THAT'S IT - "The 'ugly phase'" discourages me, too. All this time, I thought I just wasn't learning and progressing😅🤦🏾♀️
A fundamental part to learn to draw good portraits, is to choose the right photo, with great contrast of light to be able to see better the planes of the face
I've actually been on the same journey with my own art recently! It's so cool to see how you're starting this process and how you've been thinking about your work as you go. Thank you for sharing!
it's really refreshing to see someone as accomplished as yourself show us you challenging yourself by tackling your weaknesses and working on improving yourself. i'm nowhere near your skill level but i'm working on improving my portrait drawing skills now and it's really tough, but this video was very inspiring, thank you :)
This is awesome! It's really good that you tried out the new technique lots of times to try and get a better understanding and the progression definitely shows ☺
Great video explaining your struggles. Some advice for the eyes looking flat is to render the eyelids with more volume, I notice that the eyelids look almost flush with the eyeball. Other than that you could try adding more occlusion shadows around that area since it tends to be the focal point of the face. General advice for rendering realistically is to make sure you shapes are indicative of planes of the face. I remember being told to practice painting only using hard edges which forced me to design interesting shapes that read well; this translated well when I then added edge variety back into my pieces (I spent 3 months painting mostly that way).
You killed this! As artists we’re so hard on ourselves. Thank you so much for posting this. I loved the approach you took to become better. You definitely hit your goal. Well done. 🎉
You're one of the best things that has happend to this platform❤
This was amazing to watch!! I had to keep remembering that you're a professional artist, and you're working on stuff outside your comfort zone, but it was wildly disorienting to see such amazing pieces come flying out of your pen and then hear you say, "I'm not happy with THIS," "I'm not wild about THAT!" You're a little like a musician who plays a few standard rock chords, wins a bunch of Grammys, then muses about how he doesn't sound enough like Arnold Schoenberg. At the same time, you showed us what you were going for, and what you were struggling with, and how you came closer to your goal, all the while embracing learning from other artists, and showing your effort and your progress. You start off saying you're pretty good at this art thing, and I have to agree, except by "pretty good" I mean "INSANELY good!!" I'd love to have some of your discarded stuff in my sketchbook. I'm subbing your channel to see what I can pick up by osmosis.
I personally found it really useful to do studies of half completed sculptures. The planes of the face are less smooth and the lighting tends to have good contrast to help understand the forms. Studying good charcoal drawings helps a lot too. This is a great video and very insightful, thanks for sharing it.
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This was so fun to watch! It's nice hearing a pro artist talk about their art in such an objective way, with the strengths and weaknesses! Very inspiring
Great video, definitely can relate. Something I learned I think from Angel Ganev was to get away from the "pretty" references, at least at the beginning. Look for more sharp features, sharp light, so you can see better the different shapes and planes of the face (I found really useful to draw more male characters) then when you have a better understanding of where these planes are and why are you shading something, then you can translate it easier to a more softer face
This is my first time stumbling on one of your videos and I have to say how much this video motivated me to take new approaches with my drawings. I feel like I learned so much within this 17 minute video so thank you so much. Also I have to admit that your art is such a stunning mix between realism and cartoon style and the way you use shapes to define faces is really really satisfying. ❤❤
For drawing eyes an artist that I like, ErgoJosh, does eyes a certain way that really helped me understand the shape of them. If you think of the pupil and iris as more of an inner cone rather than a flat shape pasted on a sphere it gives it more 3 dimensionality and I feel that gives eyes more of a realistic look.
I love how you show how to use tracing as a learning tool, since often tracing is just given the stigma of being bad and something to not do. Although tracing shouldn't be use to create finished pieces, it's a great tool to learn shading, coloring, and lighting, as well as focus on other techniques while practicing art, which is exactly what you demonstrated. Amazing!
Number 8 and 9 are winning! They really catch the eye. It was great to see this study. Now I feel motivated myself.
I do think your eyes in the way you were shading them were steadily getting better even if you didnt realize it in the moment :)
Im an artist as well and want to have a more painterly style but I'm also very afraid of the ugly stage, I always feel like I dont know what i'm doing when it comes to things like shape and form and specifically what colors to use to make the piece rlly pop. But you showed me that even an experienced artist like yourself still struggles with these things as well and gave me some encouragement, thanks for making this video.❤
I love how honest you are in this video - thank you from a newbie to digital art
This video is soooo good, I loved to see a pro’s learning process. Thanks for this, you’re cool!!!
I’m surprised how good you got at simplifying to the point where it comes as your disadvantage sometimes.
In my opinion you should try some practicing each face feature separately to understand all volumes. Use volume lines to help you. Most noses you had wrong or too stylised and easy sketch of volume lines could help you avoid hiding your insecurities in “stylised” label.
You know your issues and you sound like very aware yet still avoiding through ugly phase. Can’t wait to see you overcome this ❤ you almost got it.
While I’m not aiming for realism, I’ve recently realized my rendering game upped significantly when I stopped thinking about lighting orientation like a beginner. Now that I had an idea of how the light looked I needed to think about how my ideal lighting effect would alter overall colors.
That was quite exciting to watch and I love the progress you made during your trial! I would like to reccomend an YT named istebrak, she has phenomenal videos about rendering the face; since she is an art teacher. She is very good at explaining the 'hows' and 'whys' and has many videoes about the eyes, lips and nose! Another is Marco Bucci, that man is a coloring god I shit you not. He has many wonderful videos about color and lightning theory and gives you quite the depth of understanding of its usages. He really knows his colors and his portaits are fantastic, so maybe they could give you some inspirations for using fun lightning and shadows for your own portaits :)
Question - i know you were struggling with what brushes to use, so what brushes finally started working for you towards the end? Need to know because I have the same struggle. Thank you!! Amazing growth btw💫
You’re rendering growth is impeccable. WOW. Absolutely stunning.
i found this video at the perfect time as I'm going through the same process of improving rendering right now! it's sooo hard and i wanna quit but I'm taking this as a sign :D
You've improved so much! This is awesome. I just discovered this channel and have been in an art block for months. You are inspiring me so much and I feel like I'm gonna come out of it real soon
I’m so happy your channel was suggested to me. Thank you! You’re amazing.
I like the black guys faces snd the last painting. But i really love that sinix was a reference video lol. Subscribed😊
Agh this is so helpful to watch you walk through this learning process, I’m going in a different direction and trying to learn landscapes (especially rendering them, and detailing without getting lost). I’ve been getting a bit tired but this is really reinvigorating :)
Great video! I appreciate how open you are with your shortcomings and insecurities in your art. I completely relate to the frustration of getting through the ugly stage. I know how I want it to look, but I just don't know how to get there.
It disheartens me how harsh you are on yourself, but your ability to spot mistakes has helped and will continue to help you develop your skills to be able to paint like the artists you admire. You chose some great artists to learn from, they're some of my favorites. Definitely subscribing, I hope to see you improve more!
Awesome video ! Thank you so much for posting it and showing the actual process and thought behind the pieces. Seeing the ones where you seemed to fail to actually work on your goals and fell back into your confort zone all the while actually making progress but not realizing it is very encouraging too. I'm glad you pushed through and ended up creating great pieces ! I also liked that you shared your thoughts when looking back on a piece that you made and updated it. I've never seen another artist do that and it's great to see I'm not the only one hating older pieces. Breaking the rules and reworking older pieces with what you learned along the way is something I'll definitely try instead of casting them aside.
Anyways, thanks for the video, I'm going to try the same challenge ! :D
Obviously you have incredible artistic skill in your paintings but I also want to compliment your editing style! Your transitions, comparisons, and jokes were awesome.
Really cool video, it’s nice to see how you learning and improving even though you already have your own style, this type of videos give a lot of motivation to keep practicing, so Thanks a lot for the video, and it’s amazing to see how much you improved at the end despite struggle in the beginning.
This was such a cool and helpful video! I loved that you included your detailed thought process going through the whole thing. I think I’ll try to mimic this process
Funny how this showed up on my TH-cam recommendations, almost like the algorithm knew what I needed to improve my art..... Thanks for this. Really helpful
getting so frustrated with finding the right brush is SO real!! And it's especially frustrating, because everyone always says the brush doesn't matter, but there's no damn way that's true 😭 Don't call your old work crappy though, you wouldn't be where you are without it!!
I really enjoy this video, I loved how you express all your thoughts and feelings on every single page, please please please bring us more videos like this, or at least with this long, it was really enjoyable thank youuu byee
I love that you're sharing your experience
I learn a lot with your challenge. I will try something like this with caricature.
As someone who does a lot of painting, I think brushes are overrated! Find one good big brush that can do soft and hard edges with pen pressure, and one good blending brush and you should be set!
It’s all about blocking everything in big and going from there
You artistically articulate people of color very well!
This is amazing Jackie!! Thank you for all you do! :D So informative and helpful!
I’m so glad I found this video. I’ve been drawing since I was a kid (hobbyist) and gotten pretty decent at it. However since adulthood the time I spend drawing has nosedived. I sketch 1-5x a year now, and everytime I do a piece I’m dissatisfied with it because I was consuming art from my favorite artists on IG and YT but not actually practicing, so my skill lagged way behind my standards.
I decided I wanted to try painting (I never really painted growing up) and it was SOOO frustrating. Like you, I’m a detail oriented artist, and I expected the piece to look perfect as I moved along without understanding that paintings require an “ugly” middle ground 🤣 during the pandemic I was FORCED to stay in and spend weeks painting, and I actually produced a few pieces I was proud of, but they were all just replicas of ghibli screenshots, so lots of flat colours.
I decided to try digital art with HORRIBLE results and again, expecting to be able to produce a great piece by only trying once or twice and focusing on details.
This video showed me that 1. I need to be way more patient with myself and have a lot more tries before I call it quits. I have a full time job so that’s hard, unfortunately. And 2, focusing on the bigger picture when it comes to painting is crucial for beginners. I’ve never been a big picture kinda gal 😅
It was great to see you actually improve and how you taught yourself to understand rendering and got closer to your goal. Pretty amazing what you did. That’s the great thing about art, it’s more about the process and the improvement than the finished piece. Off topic-and perhaps controversial- but it’s sad that a lot of AI art users won’t really get to experience that. Thanks so much for posting!
Thank you so much for this. Going back to the basics of values really helped me! I was able to produce something that doesn't look like utter trash because I trusted the process and kept pushing forward c: Now to get in some good practice and polich my style~
This was really insightful, esp in how you approached your studies of other artists!
Really appreciated hearing your struggles as I struggle too, especially as a self taught artist
Wow, what a progress! Truly inspiring video!
I think your next goal should be how not to be so negative. I wish I had your talent ❤. Treat yourself better, this is amazing.
watching these videos of yours is really helping me learn how to learn art, if that makes any sense. I really apprecieate the advice you put out here
My own feeling is that when do practice, starting with reference with more directional lighting might be easier. As directional lighting bring a more clear edge of light and shadow to help you define the shape. Although for portrait photos lighting are always kinda soft(and the change of value is very subtle and it is easy to get lost), but it might be good to bring that harsh edge of light and shadow back a bit, especially for highly stylized portrait.
I've been in a slump with the 100 head challenge. This gives me the motivation to keep going.
😮I was so surprised when I saw the same face I just drew and posted myself as a short several weeks ago!! Good job 👏🏻
Great video, I love to see how you study and analyse your references and studies from other artists. Only thing I would personally add would be a note where you found the reference from. Maybe you could link a pinterest board with your references for others to studie as well from them, or just to provide a place where people can find the original artist. Maybe I also missed links to the credit artists, since I was so inspired to start painting myself when I watched the video!
Great idea with the Pinterest board! All the artists credits and usernames are onscreen, I’ve linked a few in the description.
This is very encouraging and thanks for this. I have gotten some tips and mentorship on how to keep curious and open in the process via this video.
This video is like posing naked in front of the internet! Very humbling... you're already a pro. I salute you!
Sam is such a good artist to take referance.
Do with this what you will, but it seems like the two you ended up liking the best are also the ones in which you resisted the temptation to exaggerate certain features (big eyes, tiny upturned nose, etc).
When “stylization” means always exaggerating or otherwise altering the same features, same face syndrome becomes, not inevitable per se, but more likely.
For example, while I agree that version 1 wasn’t rendered well, I rather enjoyed that you gave Wednesday a hooked nose in the previous version. It at least, looked different from the red, upturned, shrunken nose that has become so ubiquitous in instagram art. But the new Wednesday painting is definitely rendered better, I will agree.
Regardless, I enjoyed watching how much you grew and experimented over the course of these 12 paintings.
Damn I’m early, thank you for the honesty btw, really appreciate artists that are real when it comes to improving and developing their skills
You did really well to improve, but another area of improvement I see is that you lean to far into warmer tones. Some of the reference images you used showed (at least to me) much more cooler or neutral tones and then in your rendition of them, it was a lot warmer than the reference. For example, in the second to last piece, she has really cool fare skin and then this stark peachy blush that just stands out from the rest of her skin. When you rendered it in your own style, it wasn't just the shapes of her features that makes the piece off from the reference, it's how much warmer and tanner her skin is comparatively.
This was a great step to make, I just think the next is not using warm skin tones as a crutch. Figure out how to paint skin tones that are cooler without making it looked washed out.
As far as stylized art goes, I've always loved comic book artist Joe maduiera
That's some amazing improvement in such a short time, I'll try this too!
Been keeping up with your portraits on ig! Love them!
I found kinship so fast. “Idk what to do with the noses. The shadows confuse me. Idk how to do eyes, it’s hard to find form. I’m pretty decent with lips though.”
This is going to be a fun video, I can already tell.
Hey! Great video! I'm currently studying 2D Animation and I'm struggling with my characters and my anatomy course. I like the cartoony - anime vibe of the characters and making realistic characters is being difficult for me, I haven't made a single drawing since I started the anatomy course in January but I think that a challenge like this one is going to help me! I was also checking your channel and it's amazing! I can learn many things from here!
Thank you so much for sharing your process of learning. Really inspire me
Nice one! Inspiring to see your diligence. Punch more blue into shadows i reckon!
Amei teu vídeo! No final, quando você fala da pintura número 12, me identifiquei muito. Tantos pensamentos que a gente cansa mais de pensar do que de desenhar 😅
Amei seu canal!