So here are a few other bits. I played around a bit with different brushes, but a lot of the time I just constrained myself to the simple round brush and a chisel brush. I've tried to do a few digital drawings before, but it was always difficult. Especially dealing with brushes that I didn't really understand the function of, not to mention lacking a very good idea on how to apply them.
Here I used a bit of texture to play with some of the brushes I saw in the Gnomon video Barontieri did. I watched it several times during the semester, but had a hard time applying all of the brushes.
I felt like I could understand what I wanted to depict and how, but something wasn't working. At some point I figured it was that I simply didn't have enough experience with the basic idea of "painting" within Photoshop. I decided I needed to temporarily ditch the efforts to have tons of detail pop up really fast on its own. Because the truth is that the detail will never come up on its own because the brush is suddenly doing work for me. Experienced artists wield the brushes and settings in photoshop using their understanding of the fundamental ideas that are involved in art(light, form, color). I needed to focus on getting the big shit down right before I worried about the details in it. If I wanted details, there's no reason I can't do that with the basic brush. Then I also used the a chisel brush, to start getting myself accustomed to the various things that can be mapped to the pen tilt and stroke direction.
Occasionally I played with other little things here and there. But for the most part I made myself stick with the two simple brushes and just worry about trying to get used to some sort of work flow.
Work flow has been a big thing for me to figure out. It seems like everyone has dramatically varying methods. I decided at some point that drawing over an existing drawing doesn't seem to work as well for me. I usually did better if I only had a simple, relatively loose, sketch. Additionally, it seemed to help more as a reference to LOOK at, as opposed to photographing/scanning it and trying to color/paint over it. When I had a drawing already there, especially one I had worked into a bit, it seemed to get harder for me to get myself to just draw over it freely. I started to slow down and become overly meticulous.
The canyon bit above I did over a little doodle that I captured with my mac camera. I did a similar thing for the tibetan tower for perspective last year. The thing is, I feel like it's so quick to do so much digitally, doing things on paper is only really efficient(in terms of time/effort) for thumbnails and such. The time I spent on the tower, markering in value and such was not really very helpful. I ended up covering it anyway, and I could have done the value layout faster in PS.
I feel like it can definitely be helpful to have a drawing underneath(and all forms of reference make life so much better), but it's ultimately more beneficial to force myself to acquire a sufficient comfort with drawing straight into PS.
Just some thoughts.
Didn't really post these chronologically, the above doodle was done earlier on than some of the others I posted. Regardless, it was significant to me in my quest to become comfortable with going straight in with color/value and being more aggressive. Also, it was clearly done very fast, which I like
Anyway, this was my first life drawing I did with my tablet over the summer. At some point i finally felt brave enough that it may be ok to pull it out in the life drawing class and try to do a live figure.
