WHEN A CARTOONIST TRIES REALISM

hey everybody it's Lavender Town and today's video is about what happens when a full-time cartoonist and comic book artist tries to draw realism and yes I've gone to art school and used to have to do this all the time but ever since I graduated it's been really hard so I've been doing this challenge annually to prevent my rendering skills from completely atrophying this first attempt I'm doing here is based on a reference picture I took of my own face um with some strong lighting and in black and white I have attempted to use my own face as a reference before uh taken with you know like an iPhone camera I think that this does help with getting more realism I find that there's a lot of issues with the reference pictures that I look up of other people a lot of the times there's filters there's sort of idealized lighting and as you can see in this picture I'm trying to pick a relatively harsh directional light and obviously leaving like all my freckles and skin texture and everything so that I have a good reference for that the problem with using your own face of course is that while it is copyright free and fine for you to use and everything the character is going to look like you even if you're trying to avoid it that's one of the first things that I didn't like about this first attempt and yes this one is going to have two attempts because I realized that one of the things that I was being held back by in my previous attempts at this challenge was just that I was jumping straight into trying realism again after you know months and months and months of only doing cartoon work and that lack of warming up I think was making me much worse so I'm going to take two cracks at this today and I'll talk about what I did differently between the two but in this first one I really wanted to focus on the structure again I don't really do a lot of painting So switching my mind from lines to planes and shapes is always something I find a little difficult I think that it was a good intentioned idea to look at my face in black and white it definitely did help me focus on like the tones and everything but something that I realized also that I didn't really love about my previous attempts was that after I think 2020 uh she started getting more and more in Shadow and it got really intense last year or I guess it was two years ago um in 2020 when I drew her and honestly like her eye is so in Shadow you can barely see it and it's just it's a little too intense I think I think I was using that as a way to really highlight the forms and make it more dramatic but I don't think it's actually a good like realistic depiction of the source um so I'm also going to try to sort of lean away from that uh you'll also see me using like sort of an overlay layer on top of my tonal sort of sculpted out painting and I find that while this is a quick way to get color into something that you've already done in black and white it does end up looking kind of Muddy and desaturated and strange I don't like it as much I feel like her skin in particular looks so dead it was nice to be able to just like sort of patch in all these colors you can see me here trying to fix the muddiness and the D dullness of the painting by splashing in some bright areas again with more overlay layers and digital effects when I flip it uh I definitely felt like her facial features were sort of in the wrong place I tried to kind of scooch them over but I really should have done this flip earlier before I had done so much um rendering around these facial features uh this is something that I have recommended recently in a short where you dash in the points where the nose eyes and mou mouth are going to land um before you do any more serious rendering of any kind even if you're doing cartoony work before you get into drawing like eyelashes and the iris and everything you really want to make sure that you have your placement perfect because otherwise it just makes it harder to move everything around to where it should be I do think that I shifted um some things in a positive way I think her face looks a little less um I don't know discombobulated but I think I didn't push it as far as I wanted to because I didn't want to have to redo so much of the shading around the nose and whatnot I came back to this at a second sitting um which again I don't usually do I definitely have a tendency more of a cartoonist tendency to draw a lot of drawings and not spend days and days on them I think that comes from beginning of my art Journey being really interested in comics I think animators are very much the same way and it's totally antithetical to the way that painters work you really need to have the patience and the time to get it right so here I wanted to change the eyes I felt like the whole painting was looking really dead and she looked really sad and I don't know it just it wasn't very Lively another big part about that is that she didn't have much of an expression and this is something that really bothers me as like a consumer of art or someone who you know likes to look at paintings I'm always bummed out when the characters are really not expressive but I get why that's so common because it's so much easier to draw a face that is not really emoting without having to work worry about how emotions sort of Bend and twist the face and the skin I thought that I could fix this just by changing the eyes and I tried this technique that I had seen another artist do where you draw like the whole eyeball and then draw the eyelids around it and that was a Monumental mistake um I honestly really creeped myself out while I was working on this and I think that she looks [Music] terrible and I thought it would be fixed once I put in the ey Lids um to sort of nestle those eyeballs into and create a frame um but it didn't end up looking right um everything was really unsettling looking and it was around this point that I realized that I didn't think that the underlying structure of this painting was good enough and I needed to start over completely from scratch with all of these things in mind I had a lot of faith that I could do a better job if I just started over for this next attempt I kind of loosely used a reference image of my face but I didn't stick it up on my screen necessarily it was something I sort of glanced at and I looked at much closer because I don't want this painting to look like myself one of the ways that I managed to avoid that was by using more of the specific detail in the eye the nose or the mouth rather than the entire structure of the face and that allowed me also to incorporate details that I wouldn't have thought of um without a reference while also being able to sort of sculpt and mold her face in completely different proportions and structure than my own I also really wanted to make sure that she had a bit of an expression this time I gave her a little smile and I turned her head a little bit just to make the whole painting a bit more Dynamic right off the bat I was enjoying this one a lot more though I did find it really challenging as I was moving on to things like her ear and trying to figure out what to do with her hair instead of working from black and white I decided to work more tonally but in this sort of like pinkish color so I was still working with limited colors so it was easier for me to focus on the tone but I wasn't creating these big blocks of black and gray that would dull down the colors and make it harder for me to make a um vibrant saturated image at the end I wanted to block in her clothes and this time I really wanted to make sure that the clothes looked like they had a different texture than her skin and hair uh so the way that I did that was pretty simple I took a dry gouache brush which automatically has some texture to it and I also made sure to use a pen tool to actually draw in sort of a grid on her clothes it's a very simple like not very difficult way to make it look like there are fibers um that are making up this piece of the illustration which makes it look more like fabric I noticed with this one that I was also sort of falling into this tendency of making her eye socket look way too dark I kept checking in with my reference image of myself and I kept noticing that I was making these Shadows really severe I intentionally took a new reference picture of myself with more uh muted and general lighting not so pointed um not so directional uh and I still was very tempted to make it look very directional so I had to ease up on that a little bit I also watched a tutorial on digital painting um sometimes I can feel sort of I don't know it's like shameful or embarrassing to look up tutorials when you're already someone who does this full-time um or somebody who makes tutorials yourself but this is something I've been getting over recently and it has helped my art uh Journey again so much I think it's easy to feel like you're not supposed to keep learning um at a certain point that you're now at a point where you shouldn't be referencing other artists but that is such a limiting mindset and it's something I really needed to let go of so one of the things that I really focused on was making sure to use a lot of blending through color picking and that made everything a lot softer and nicer and also using a lower opacity brush this allowed me to sort of touch up areas that I didn't think looked right without like erasing a huge chunk out of her face and here you can see I'm zooming into specific facial features and trying to put in very specific shape detail into each one of them now this I felt like was a better way for me personally to use references because again I really didn't want it to look like a self-portrait I wanted it to look like a convincing human who doesn't actually exist so this worked out pretty well for me and I do believe I could make something that's more hyperrealistic if I was drawing right off of someone's face I saw in my previous iteration of this video Someone suggested frankensteining together facial features from multiple different people to make sort of a Franken reference and while I do think that's a good idea I didn't try it out for this one just because I felt like my photoshopping skills weren't good enough to really make that work I felt like I actually had an easier time looking at my own features and then just adjusting them to be more accurate to Babs while still maintaining like the lighting and structure from the facial features while completely doing my own proportions if that makes sense so by the end of this I felt like she really looked like a Sim um which I'm not too mad about also when I put her up against all the previous iterations I feel like this one is my favorite which is a good sign because it is the most recent doing two in one video also really helps me realize that it's not necessarily about time it's about attempts and you can improve a lot more rapidly if you're practicing more so I'm going to try to do more facial studies um and I might be popping that onto my members page and patreon if you want to see that they probably won't be as in-depth as these but I think it will be good for me and I really hope you guys enjoyed watching me tackle this realism challenge thank you so much for watching till the end and watching all these years while I try to improve I hope that your art journey is going well and I will see you in the next one huge thank you to my wonderful patrons including twink on a SN raccoon Jam the Aiden verse Scott Wilson greius oia lydy Savior Brandon Stark CB Cosby F luiki Liv live salty Jack Rabbit Raven Crow zelot tle music jabber Dao cadarius deadly nightshade art astral fox art the expressive Poker Face suaki cutie pie ice cream pal JJ Jade and of course blah blah blah blah yeah

Channel: LavenderTowne

Views: 177,413

Keywords: art, lavender, towne, lavendertowne, digital, photoshop, cartoon, realism

Id: D66nO1rgYDE

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2024