Day 6.

I didn't quite finish the female portrait I was supposed to do today. It was of Emma Stone and I just really wanted to get this dragon world painting finished :P I think I'm calling it finished unless I hear any really strong critique on it that I'd be able to change without messing it up ha. Also a finished commission for Alluria Publishing.

So I decided to start doing some journal type entries on my blog to help myself summarize all that I learned today and what I need to focus on in the coming days...

First off, I feel much more confident with my ability to see value clearly, same goes for color. Both things have been a huge struggle for me for awhile but I feel like I'm finally starting to get a grasp on it, along with studying how light reacts on forms. The study of the figure below looks rushed, but I learned what I set out to learn which was what happens to the shadows and the light when two lightsources are showing on either side of this girl. The shadows lightened in areas where the two lights were closest and the saturation was surprisingly high (mainly a saturated orange or yellow but not fully saturated).

For the Dragonworld Art Order challenge piece (here's a link to the challenge if you want to know more: http://theartorder.com/dragon-world-artorder-challenge/?fb_source=pubv1 )... I'm not satisfied with the outcome. I've learned a lot since starting it and feel like it could use some improvements in some areas. My values have improved, however the value control in my pieces remains a complete mystery to me on how I go about it. One artist who I admire deeply for his value control and general skill is Brad Rigney (http://cryptcrawler.deviantart.com/). On the stream today I discussed with my buddy Sam Szymanski (http://samszym.deviantart.com/) how I really want to try and push my value control to a level of realness that Brad Rigney has reached. His art looks so realistic, I believe it's his use of theatrical lighting and shadow and knowledge of form (this is why I have been studying this so much recently). In an interview for Crimson Daggers Brad said how he did a lot of studies from films, this is why I've added film studies and still life studies to my schedule to be done everyday if I don't have client work. That way I can hopefully find a nice balance of realistic and theatrical lighting and try and apply it to my own work.

Anyway, those were some of my thoughts for today. Hopefully not too boring, I'll be posting tomorrow as well so see ya then ;)