PAINTOVER PALS: Episode 15

[Music] hey everyone cynics here and it is time for another episode of paint over pals this is of course my paint over series where i try to improve some of my patreon supporters art as always critiques are a vital part of the artistic journey so i recommend you practice critiquing along at home there are many different aspects of art to focus on but i try to focus on whichever idea seems most relevant to me in each piece i'll be limiting myself to keep each paint over under one hour and hoping i pick a good path in that time but let's just get started first up is this environment by josephine wolk the values in color range both look nice so i think i might focus more on composition when i squint my eyes the focal points that my brain tends to pick up are these three here our triangle of focus certainly skews to the right side of the canvas so it might be fine to simply crop the canvas to fit them better but instead i'll try to address that in my paint over the other thing that jumps out in my design brain is the consistency of some of the sizes of shapes in the tree roots around the door i'm going to try to find a more organic hierarchy of shapes in that area and while i'm at it i think everything could look a bit less perfectly structured so we can get more personality if something like the door isn't perfectly flush with the door frame maybe showing some light leaking out around the edges the moss and plants can also be a little bit more chaotic in where they appear the biggest change i'll be making will be in the background though if you want to have the sky that dark and full of stars i think we should just lose the sunset altogether like i mentioned earlier i'll try to restructure this paint over so the third focal point is a little bit further toward the left side of the canvas and what should that focal point be well one very important aspect of designing is making sure you have hints of your main ideas being used in more than just one spot so if we have a big tree for instance maybe we want to have some more trees in the background and certainly if we have some bright blue mushrooms in just one spot it would be nice to see them used a little bit in a second spot so that is what i'll be using to balance out the composition a bit of those glowy blue mushrooms further back and on the left they can of course be much simpler and out of focus but i think it's nice to have them lastly i'll just keep going around and making things look a little bit less pristine those walkway stones were a bit too perfect so adding a couple unrelated smaller stones in the area can make it feel more natural and the same thing goes for the grass and the moss and the weeds and whatnot the end result is certainly a heavy change but i'm pretty happy with how that came out it looks good next up i have a character illustration by paint over pal regular kela the anatomy and rendering might still be a bit of a work in progress but i will offer my opinion on where to take things a lot of the muscles could definitely flow in and out of the anatomy just a bit more so i think it will be easier for me to tackle that if i lower the skin contrast a bunch and then just build things back up i also like to have a much more reddish undertone anytime i paint darker skin tones so after adjusting everything it was mostly a matter of making it feel like different forms were actually weaving into the surrounding forms a little bit of a cool highlight a little bit of deeper shadows and some tiny punches of ambient occlusion and the crevices can really help a lot i believe the surrounding graphic element is meant to be water so in order to sell that i'm going to crank it all the way up to a white foam mist on some of the edges choppy water can really refract a lot of light off all the little droplets and whatnot so it should look good with that high contrast thrown in water can be a fun place to add some glow as well so i'll be doing that i'll also try to fix up those unfinished hands a bit without spending too much time and then i'll spend some extra time on the face it's not bad or anything but i can probably throw in a little bit more subtle hue shifts and blending while also exaggerating some of the planes a bit more i'm pretty happy with that and i can probably just leave things here but i was curious to see how some rim light effects might look on this one it's probably fine either way but anyway i hope seeing that before and after helps and i feel pretty good about those changes up next let's try this character art by limox this might be a bit tricky most of the ideas that come to mind are possibly too subtle but i'll start by writing some thoughts the color scheme feels a bit packed with different shades of purple as well as black and brown which you know sometimes don't work together but i might mostly just keep it how it is also those ears and hair form a pretty direct x shape which i'm also not sure about lastly there are a lot of inorganic curves going on in some spots and as a quick refresher an inorganic curve is a curve that is symmetrical with its apex directly in the center kind of like a circle whereas organic curves have their apex more weighted to one side or the other we generally want more organic curves especially when adding curved lines to characters or creatures anyway aside from that i'm just going to go around and experiment with random changes generally in design if you use a pattern it's nice to find a little secondary place to repeat it so maybe i can use that honeycomb pattern from the helmet on the tights i also decided to just break up the symmetry of the hair and ears i'm not wildly thrilled about any of my changes though so at the very least i can focus on the line drawing for a bit and maybe touch that up the anatomy was getting a little too rigid in the hands and legs so i think i can just redraw those in a slightly more dynamic way now i didn't make my lines overly clean this time but hopefully you can still get what i'm going for after fiddling around with that second hand for a bit i realized that the whole arm is just very awkwardly placed for a pose so might as well just make it more fun and natural changing the pose of the arm actually helped it feel a lot more lively to me anyway there are some minor adjustments to be made in the torso anatomy but i think that's pretty much everything i'm still not overly thrilled with my character design changes but i like the illustration pose changes at least so hopefully it helps regardless moving along to this painting by laylee i actually really like the aesthetic choices in this piece the white silhouetted plant the background the gold thread it all works out quite nicely one anatomy issue did stick out though and that was in the next the clavicles should link up with the sternocleidomastoids and form a more natural resolution to those shapes at the base of the neck aside from that i think for my main focus on this paint over i'm really just going to be working on making the dark skin tone look more natural first off it might have been my imagination but the face was feeling slightly skewed so i did liquefy it a bit but onto the skin as i mentioned earlier with dark skin tones i really try to avoid having them be in the orange issues because that creates a slightly greenish undertone for me so i like to go a lot more reddish with those undertones and i think that helps a lot the trickiest thing about dark skin tones for a lot of people is that you can't just paint them as a darker version of a light skin tone darker tones just interact with the light spectrum differently and you really need to switch your mindset from thinking about shadows being used to define the form to instead using highlights and bounced environmental lights to really define the form so it might take a little bit of work but it can really lead to some good results if you start to practice with that mindset you can see how along the cheeks forehead and nose i'm really letting the highlights define those forms you also get to have the added fun of bringing some cool and warm lights into those reflections depending on the surrounding light you want to imply i applied that same idea to the lips and eyes and i think it worked out really well other than that i considered trying to lessen the even amount of detail in her hair braids but it kind of works better than any quick paint over probably would so after some other various finishing touches i think i'm done with this one the skin changes are pretty dramatic but i'm really happy with how it came out so it was fun alright let's jump over to luffy next luvi has this portrait here and it looks pretty good to be honest i think any feedback i have is going to be somewhat minor because the face looks great a quick squint test does make it feel like those shapes of all the bright glowing elements might be a little bit too chaotic though we want to make sure that our graphic elements help frame and complement the face without distracting from it and speaking of framing the face that glow on the neck just flows a little bit too much with the chin so i'm going to cut that out to further enhance the framing there's certainly a lot of hair shapes going on and for the sake of tangents i feel like the hair on the left side is mirroring the angles of the ear a little bit too much i'll just cut that a bit differently so that's not an issue and that should help things a little bit like i said we want to use our graphic elements of hair and the glowy parts to complement the face shapes as much as possible there's a thousand ways to do it so i don't know if my changes will be ideal but i do want to make them flow perpendicular across the character anatomy just a bit the easiest fix was in the neck because things were once again flowing into the neck a little bit so if we just make it break across the planes of the neck it should feel a little bit better but the rest is really up to interpretation i want to find some sense of shape hierarchy and rhythm but i don't think i quite nailed it on the hair i do feel pretty good about changing some of the hair shapes in the top left but the right side probably could have worked out better regardless hopefully some of those changes help you see further things to look for when you're using these graphic elements you definitely don't have to be as angular as i made it though let's keep going here is an environment painting by lord vashi my first thought right away is that there are a lot of spots fighting for attention we have so many potential focal points but none of them really jump out ahead of the others you should always aim for a clear hierarchy and focal points as this will lead to a better composition so let's try to make that happen first off i'm going to add a foreground element to the bridge not only to give us more depth in the image but also it's a sneaky way to lessen the focal interest of the bottom left fire i've decided to make the fiery area on the bottom right the primary focal point so i'm going to raise it up a little closer off the bottom of the canvas and let it bleed into the nearby areas after a little more diminishing of the other focal points it's now starting to have more of a hierarchy so we can take that even further by adding some strong glowing effects i also want to create a bit of a smoky haze from all of the heat coming out of these spots which will allow me to control the focus even more next i really just need to push all the other areas into darker and lower contrast values definitely some vignetting along the top as well to keep the eye on the page after some minor touch-ups here and there the last thing i really need to do is add some little embers in the air to create movement and i think that's done all of the changes i made were relatively minor but the impact they have on the composition definitely made a huge difference so yay for that okay the next piece is a portrait by patrick they specifically asked for advice on how to render this so i guess i'll be just taking this one into a different more rendered style the initial flat color style isn't bad i do have a couple quick notes on it though i personally want to lower that ear just a bit and i think the hair could use a bit more graphic design qualities but i don't think i'll have time to change that too much and still do all the rendering so never mind i will however change the crown up top because it wasn't too bad or anything but i personally didn't like how it aligned so perfectly with the top of the canvas on to rendering i think it's great to just start with added gradation on top of things it will keep the rendering from feeling too lifeless and it's just kind of fun to add you can do this with color or value or ideally a little bit of both this rendering is all about just knowing the planes of the face you can be super subtle with the actual value changes but you do need to be somewhat deliberate with the actual plane changes this means we can definitely add a lot of form around the eyes and mouth and once again a couple pops of ambient occlusion will really go a long way mostly though i'm just doing the same types of basic techniques you might recognize from my anatomy quick tips videos i did want to render the hair a bit more but i was starting to run low on time i tried to make sure i could at least have a couple stronger value shapes though and you know i really just relied on some quick energetic lines and key parts to hint at the texture of hair overall i think i did show a pretty quick example of what this would look like if it was rendered out in a different style so i think you will enjoy that next up is this painting by ward i don't know if it's a monitor issue but this image looks incredibly washed out to begin with so let me just bump up the contrast and levels a bit i'm not entirely sure what the overall significance is of a lot of the features in this piece but i'll try to see what i can do to keep everything intact i assume those are supposed to be horns coming out of the dogs so i'll try to position them in a little bit more of a natural horn-like spot overall i feel like the focal points of this image are placed extremely tight around the center of the canvas which i don't know can sometimes lead to a slight awkwardness as we move further away from them but that might be a bit hard to change i can put the skull maybe a little bit further out to help with it but i don't know it's pretty hard to fix unless i redid everything personally i like to work out my renderings by going overboard with ambient occlusion shapes and then just working them back into the rendering a little bit seems to help me there was certainly more room to add texture in the grass you know really getting into some tiny grass details on the breaks between light and shadow but i think one thing i really want to at least mention is the importance of not getting into too many tiny and thin brush strokes in the background i'll use this tree as an example it looks a bit too busy with its brush economy and i would really kind of prefer to just focus on simple light area and simple shadow area with a little bit of texture along the border i find that usually works a lot better there's probably room for a lot more changes like that all around the background but time wasn't on my side adding the skull back in i don't feel like i did a great job with it but that's my fault if only i would do an anatomy quick tips on skulls that would certainly help in the end i made some changes that might help but i feel like i could have found more impactful ways to approach this paint over i think it tripped me up a bit but oh well the final image for today comes from richard hayes and it is an abstract piece okay well that's certainly a strange one to end on my general thoughts on abstract stuff like this is to go back to my compositional theories and see how they hold up i feel like we have three pretty distinct focal points and they're spread pretty wide across the canvas maybe a little too close to the edges but i think my main issue might be that the central focal point is a bit too centered on the canvas it's almost equally in between the other two as well i tried to fiddle around with it as best as i could but it feels very difficult to maintain the integrity of the original piece while adjusting things i guess abstract art's a little harder to do paint overs on so maybe i can have hints of whatever i'm trying to do but i'm not sure how to have a proper abstract paint over another possible failure on my part but then again maybe i'm just interpreting things wrong maybe this actually isn't meant to be as abstract as i thought the whole time i was looking at this piece to be honest i couldn't shake the strong feeling that i was looking at some sort of cartoon dog its fluffy tail its triangular body and that fun little face it just has to be a dog right i can't be the only one that sees it and i could render it out more like a dog you know give it some anatomy and whatnot but in many ways the original shapes created a much more appealing dog than my version actually i think i just missed the cartoony head shape a bit with my version so maybe it could have worked i don't know but i could just be way off again those shapes in the background they keep speaking to me like a dream the planet arrakis a giant worm rising from the desert is this the true meaning of this art the impending release of the dune movie perhaps who knows i guess only richard's subconscious will ever truly know that answer the only thing i can truly know is that this video is done so thank you all so much for watching hopefully you learned something exciting and new in this episode maybe you just like watching the various observations i make on each piece as i progress on my journey to become a fully sentient triangle regardless i had fun and i appreciate you supporting this content speaking of support of course i need to close things out with a big huge thank you to all of my patreon supporters you are all wonderful see you everyone

Channel: Sinix Design

Views: 194,568

Keywords: paintovers, digital painting, tutorial, commentary, how to, paint, coloring, photoshop, corel painter, skin tones, lighting, improve, art school, free lesson, paintover, critique

Id: GlrbNcDlBgQ

Length: 19min 13sec (1153 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 19 2021