The Glade 4.0

Pugs! Pugs everywhere!

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Yep. I have definitely lost control of my life.



I regret nothing!

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I feel very sorry for the small dogs of your artwork.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There are no brakes on the pony art train!

Flutterducky, you're the one!



I'm trying to push myself into more versatility. This is a totally different style for me. For me, the emphasis of this one was texture. Water, reflections, shiny and/or wet surfaces are all things I've been avoiding. I also tend to rely on the soft round brush as my mainstay, which leads to really boring, lifeless texture. For this piece, I stuck to a hard-edged square brush for everything except the details of the bubbles on the far left.

I'm pretty pleased with the outcome, given that I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm especially happy with Flutterducky's mane. At least to my eyes, it certainly conveys "wet rubber duck". I think the gloss of the bathtub turned out pretty well, too. I'm even proud of that rear wall. Sure, it's the opposite of exciting in any other context, but it's a huge improvement for me in the texture department. It's just a run-of-the-mills wall, but I can imagine what it would feel like to run my hand over it.

I'm a little less sure what to think about the water. I like the reflections and sub-surface rendering up close to the duck, but I'm a little ambivalent about the ones farther away.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I like the water. It gives me the impression that the toy is in a bubble bath and there is a small child out of view playing with it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

i have zero artistic skill (when it comes to drawing/painting, etc...). I could never conjur up anything even close to that, so I'm a bit hesitant to act as a critic...

I like the image. It has a playful feel to it. the only thing that stands out to me as 'odd' is the shadow under the tail seems a bit.. off.. too dark? not sure...

Also, I don't know why, but my eye is drawn to the things chest.... it also seems a bit off, but I can't place why...

/shrug

...

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Wierdo...

Of all of the people on this board, you are the last one I would expect to call that out :p

I fixed up a slight perspective problem with her right (our left) eye. I also revised her tail a little. The shadow was a little flat in terms of value range, but I think the bigger issue was the shape of the tail that it implied. It has a little more foof to it now.



I'm not really sure what to tell you about her chest. Maybe it has something to do with how this all started. Someone drew Fluttershy and another user commented in their critique that her chest was puffed a little too far outward, "like she's almost got a rubber ducky kind of shape". It was that S-curve line of action which really defined the duckyness.



I can't claim to be a good enough artist to have put much deliberate emphasis on that element, but maybe something of that intent leaked into the drawing on its own. I think, if anything, I could probably stand to have pushed that line action even further.

...or maybe you just want to stare at Fluttershy's chest.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Stathol this thread is a great example of being able to learn anything if you put enough effort into it. Your progression, subject matter not withstanding, is pretty astounding.

What tablet are you using?

I guess that's kinda convenient? Just root for whichever one sucks less?

oooof....

wrong thread :/

Thank you. The learning process is an amusing rollercoaster. You feel pretty awesome when you first discover that, hey, I can draw pretty well. Then you realize that realistically rendering a thing that sits right in front of you is an important skill, but only just that. It's craftsmanship; it's not art. Suddenly, you aren't awesome anymore. In fact, you're terrible. You can't art at all! But maybe you get over yourself and try to art anyway, even if it's going to be bad. Sometimes it is, but a lot of times you surprise yourself. It's still not where you want to be, but you made progress. You did better than you thought you could. Eventually, you get pretty good at this new thing and you feel great. Then you look around and discover that you're still really bad at a dozen others, and the cycle begins all over again.

There's a really good quote by Ira Glass that sums it up:



The only innate abilities required to get really good at art is the ability to tell when other people's art is better than yours (hint: there's always someone better), and the willingness to keep trying. Being afraid to stick your neck out and try something that you think you're going to fail at is absolutely crippling -- especially so if you're going for the whole self-taught thing and don't have anyone to force you to attempt things that you're bad at.



I'm using the Monoprice 6814 (10" x 6.25" UC-Logic tablet). I've been pleased with it so far. Easily the best $50 I've spent in a while. Certainly it's gotten me a lot more bang for my buck than I think I would have gotten out of a Wacom Bamboo. As for an Intuos, I'm not sure what to think. My tablet is inbetween the medium and large Intuos 5 size, so I'd be looking at $350-500. Their reputation precedes them, but without being able to actually get my hands on one to try out for a week or two, I don't know if/what I'm really missing out on. If I were doing this professionally or pursuing it in school for an actual degree I'd probably buy one just on general principle. As a hobbyist, though, I feel like the quality would really need to be 7-10x better to justify 7-10x the cost. I have a similar feeling about SAI vs. Photoshop.

Maybe I'll put it on the wish list for next Christmas. I didn't feel like it this time around, especially since I've kind of been doing nothing but pony fan art for the last 6 months. As far as my RL friends and family are concerned, it probably looks like I've lost interest in art. Nope, it's ponies!

While I've got your ear, do you have any suggestions on how I could improve the Applejack or Flutterducky paintings? It's easier for me to see what works than it is to see what didn't.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

The only thing that immediately jumps out at me about the Flutterducky painting is the inside of her hair swoosh. It's light on the inside, getting darker toward the outside, when it should be the other way around. Otherwise I don't have many critiques, the style is pretty consistent.

My thoughts on the Applejack painting are similar. The only thing I'm bugged by is the apples, they seem flat compared to everything else. If you could try to work in some of the fur strokes into them so they look more ingrained, instead of looking like stickers on top of the fur, that'd be nice. Looking at it a little more critically right now, her front leg also makes me think of a praying mantis.

Great work though.

Yeah, that was the very last detail I added. I messed around with several renditions of them trying to work the "grain" into them. The distortion always turned them into indistinct blobs. Eventually I just concluded that butt stamps don't really make a whole lot of physical sense and gave up. I'll have to look around and see how other people have resolved that problem.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Comparing Wacom to Monoprice there are definitely some differences but I'm not sure how crucial they are. Wacom comes with a lot more pen tip variation and also doesn't require a battery. The Wacom tablet itself has a lot of button customization (~24 custom buttons vs 16 pre-programmed) plus the scroll wheel which can be useful, but honestly I'm a big keyboard user so I could probably live without it. Usually have one hand on the keyboard and one hand using the tablet. I've seen a lot of people use solely the tablet when in Photoshop, but I never got used to that.

Can't spot much else different. Maybe I'll pick up one of Monoprice's $50 10x6" offerings to compare with my $300 4x6" Intuos4.

Have you tried using Photoshop instead of GIMP? I'm not sure how much pen support GIMP has, but tablets work great with PS.

Speaking of PS, I remember a week or three ago, Adobe was giving away PS CS2 for freeziez. I'll see if I can dig up a link.

That wasn't so hard.

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

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Holy shitsnacks!

That's pretty much how I've been operating. I've got programmable buttons on this thing, but I've never really bothered to use them. I just bind useful things to left-hand-accessible keys on the keyboard. In part, I may have developed that habit because the tablet keys don't seem to be all that responsive compared to keyboard input. I don't think the problem is with the tablet itself, but rather the driver. The little on-screen overlay that informs you of what button you pressed seems to introduce a significant delay if you're trying to repeatedly press the same button. For some things that doesn't matter, but I found it annoying for zoom in/out or view rotation.


I'll caution you that multi-monitor support is pretty hit-or-miss with the Monoprice. UC-Logic has a multiscreen version of the drivers, but a lot of people seem to have trouble getting them to work right. Or at all.


I know that GIMP supports pressure sensitivity and at least two barrel buttons. Not sure what it does with the eraser on a Wacom pen. I don't know if it supports Wacom tilt sensors either, but I imagine most people don't really even use that feature unless they do a lot of airbrush work. I quit GIMP for Paint Tool SAI a while back. I only use it occasionally for those things that SAI just doesn't support (namely text).

I haven't used Photoshop with a tablet. I hear it's great, but most of the compelling features are only in the big honking $700 version.


Yeah, thing is, they aren't giving it away for free. That's just their work-around for existing customers because they finally shut down the key verification servers for CS2. In other words, you aren't going to be legally licensed, so you might as well just go pirate CS6.

In other news, I cleaned up the linework, colored, and shaded that pug drawing from the other day.



Pugs for the pug god!

I haven't done a lineart drawing in a long time.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Flutterducky was in today's Drawfriend Stuff on EQD (#41)

Drawfriend Stuff #694

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I lie your art quote; it could go in my train thread pretty well too, because it's very applicable there as well, even though the model train falls more under craftsmanship than art.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

If you're creating your own layouts, it could certainly qualify as composition. Aspects of it could be considered a form of sculpture, too. In any case, art, craftsmanship (artisanship), and technology (artifice) were all once considered to be part of the same whole.

Unrelated, I can rotate ponies WITH MY MIND!



Or at least, I kind of can. I need to practice this kind of thing more often.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

That's true, although in screwing around with plans for an eventual next layout, I have quickly discovered that what might be interesting is seriously limited by things like grade, curve radius and (ARRRRGGGHHH) the need to make sure track is either on the same level when crossing, or clear the track below it by at least 3.5 inches! Thank goodness I have at least 5 years to design the next layout, and I took 2 years of drafting in high school!

Sorry, not wanting to sidetrack your art thread with train stuff. More ponies, by all means!

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Last one on the right is the only one that seems off. There shouldn't be any foreshortening at that angle. The back should be dominant instead of the haunch.

FTFY hehe

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Holy shitsnacks!

Ah. I need more work on perspective. I read "Perspective Made Easy" about a week ago. It's a decent primer, but far from a complete tome on formal perspective. Either way, I still have a hard time seeing exactly what should be "dominant", as you say, in some cases dealing with amorphous or organic forms. Toss in an inclined plane like her back, and ... yeah.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.