Jeno's art stuffs

I finally decided that if I'm going to keep posting art stuff, I might as well stick it all in one thread. :P

I've been kicking around a painting for little while now, and I'm discovering that I have a real problem with lots of intricate details. I think I put so much effort into any little thing, that multiplying the number of little things becomes quite painful. Does anyone have any tips for adding random detail to your pieces without making it look like a 2-year-old scribbled across something you did?

To get an idea, here're two progress shots of the thing I'm work with.




It's obviously not finished yet, but unfortunately I just don't know how much more little detail I can add. A forest scene just doesn't seem right without all those little details, and its somewhat discouraging to know I've got a strong piece going when I'm not sure if I'll be able to kick out that last bit of polish.

Goddamn, that's wonderful Jeno. I don't know how you pulled off that horse so well, it's a very different style than my own. When it comes to detail, well that's about the only part of paintings I can do, it's hell for me to block out my colors, I just want to start detailed...and that doesn't work too well, and takes forever. Here's what I'm noticing in quite a few of your paintings: Tends to be blurry, not blurry like unrecognizable "I need glasses" blurry, but the colors look unusually blended, very very soft, when it normally wouldn't be so. More hard edges on things like shadows and the edges of trees/people/etc makes it seem more solid, in my opinion. When it comes to making the forest complete, I don't know if that's really necessary but if you're looking to make it look complete and finished, I'd use the base of the tree on the left side, the one with a detailed trunk. I'd just take a dark brush, one or two pixels, maybe three not sure and just draw those bits of detail real quickly over all the trees near the front. Some screwed up snow where the horse is standing and a darker more defined shadow for him ought to do wonders as well.

Real simple things that I think would make this painting shine even more.

amazing..so simple..yet "good"

I used to be a detail person, to be honest. However, I found that in everything I did there was no sense of unity. One part of the picture would look like it didn't belong with any other, things just would never fit together. The only way I found to get around that was to start with my canvas ultra-tiny so that even if I wanted to I would be unable to do detail. Then, after I got things looking good at that level, I could blow it up and start adding more details.

I can see how this method has probably led me to have the fuzziness you described. After staring at the thing for so long, I probably don't even notice some of the areas that haven't been crisped up enough yet. :\ It's definitely something I'll have to work on, but at least now I can. I hadn't really realized I was doing that until you mentioned it.

The color blending might also come from the way I pick my colors. I always pick a new color to use in comparison to the current color scheme of my painting (as in, dropper a common tone, and match any new color against that to keep it from glaring). I've noticed that after a while the tones start to blurr a little too much as the overlap of colors into my neutral tone starts to pull it all towards a common denominator. I guess I'll have to take extra effort to make sure I'm keeping those tones pure and not just letting everything mix together.

...on second thought, it might simply be over-compensation, since I used to have a huge problem with hyper-saturation and contrast together in one piece... which is a big no no. Either way, I'll have to see what I can do about that.

The hard edges are something I'll have to come in and add as one of the final stages of my painting, I think. Every time I enlarge it and start working in more detail, I do a lot of bluring (not with the blur tool of photoshop, but by manually picking up colors and painting it in with a low opacity brush) since there are edges everywhere there shouldn't be from the previous step. The giant brush-strokes I start with to block things in leave all kinds of odd edges that I have to painstakingly remove. Putting edges back in afterwards might be something I've taken for granted after all the blurring. It's good to know I should keep an eye out for that.

Thanks, PieXags! I'll see what I can do to incorporate your advice.

Not a problem, I just try to give as much criticism as possible, personally I hate it when I get no crits and just a lot of "omg yes" sort of responses, figured it might be the same on your end. I've been staring at this since you put it up, and something I just noticed is the snow on the trees. It might be too late to fix, but I think the way you have it on the trees is awkward. On the left side, the snow's coming and blown up against the left side of the tree. On the right, it looks as if it's come from the right as it's on the right side of the trunk, and about thirty feet behind that in the background trees, the snow seems to be coming from straight on, left, right, etc. In a section of forest as you've depicted, I'd think the snow would effect most all the trees in the same general way, as in, on the same side of most every tree trunk.

...I'm still baffled by the horse, though. I have no idea how you got so many shades of gray so accurately used there...damn.

You know how the old "truth is stranger than fiction" thing goes, and how an artist should never take a reference too much to heart, because somethings might not be believed even though that's the way they were? Yeah... um, I didn't listen to that very good advice when starting this thing out.

A photo I took when visiting the beloved north last Christmas:


It turns out to be the angle of the shot, that the snow is actually facing directly at the viewer, but the nearest trees end up looking like the snow came at them from the sides... opposite sides. I should have reworked it in my own piece to make it look less odd... but alas I sometimes have tunnel-vision and miss these simple things.

Horses have always been a sweet-spot for me. Way back in my childhood days it was a love of horses that got me into art in the first place, so I tend to be better at them than anything else. ...that and I've got a childhood's worth of horse calendars still floating around that I can use for random pieces of reference. I tend to like to mix and match, grabbing pieces from wherever I need 'em, but yeah. I've got no lack of reference material there.

Haha! You know I was hesitant to say that because I thought maybe you had used reference, you seemed so baffled at me not using reference in my thread I figured you probably had for yours...but pointed it out anyway, sometimes real life sucks. Heheh...that is pretty funny though, as a whole the painting looks wonderful, I honestly don't think I could pull off something that whole where I'm at right now. I know what you mean about real life being pretty unbelievable, ever seen toy story clouds in real life? Yeah, they don't look real but they are. The lightbulb I did in my sketch thread? I found a lightbulb a few moments ago to compare and see how close I got, and looking at the lightbulb from an above angle it looks like the bottom is detatched from the top. That's the problem with accuracy in 2D art...real life is much more complicated and confusing than we can possibly hope to predict.

Go figure, as a whole, great painting, I look forward to seeing more.

Quote: Originally Posted by Jenosavel You know how the old "truth is stranger than fiction" thing goes, and how an artist should never take a reference too much to heart, because somethings might not be believed even though that's the way they were? Yeah... um, I didn't listen to that very good advice when starting this thing out.

A photo I took when visiting the beloved north last Christmas:


It turns out to be the angle of the shot, that the snow is actually facing directly at the viewer, but the nearest trees end up looking like the snow came at them from the sides... opposite sides. I should have reworked it in my own piece to make it look less odd... but alas I sometimes have tunnel-vision and miss these simple things.

Horses have always been a sweet-spot for me. Way back in my childhood days it was a love of horses that got me into art in the first place, so I tend to be better at them than anything else. ...that and I've got a childhood's worth of horse calendars still floating around that I can use for random pieces of reference. I tend to like to mix and match, grabbing pieces from wherever I need 'em, but yeah. I've got no lack of reference material there.


The snow doesn't look like it came from opposite sides so much as the trees look bent enough to catch it comming straight down and make it look like an anomoly ;-). I like the shading and tail on the 2nd horse. I don't know why. I'm not a painter, so I can't offer any criticism, but if I had to say one thing, the lack of trees beyond the border of the clearing bothers me. Even if you just did some dark shadows where trees would be in the background, then it would look much better, methinks. I like the way you used blue and white throughout the whole thing, but still seem to have managed to keep it looking like a real life scene.

...w O A H...

Nicely done!!!!

Quote: Originally Posted by Sidra

Okay, an update. Keep the comments and crits coming.



And a closer up shot showing a bit more detail and a bit of a shine effect on the unicorn that I actually think I don't like.

Backgrounds FTW! I think it looks MUCH better now. The lighting does give the horse an odd effect... maybe even tone down the horn a bit so it's not completely a-glow. I like the footprints.

It looks really great very nice job.
to critizice a bit:
i find the horse to glow too much. Horses have hair right? so I feel that the horse overall should be less glowy (Im not sure thats a word...) since hair doesnt reflected light that much.
then again, since its not a real horse but a unicorn, maybe you want that glowing skin feeling.If yes, then I apologize for the stupid comment

It's a healthy, glossy sheen.

Quote: Originally Posted by kais It looks really great very nice job.
to critizice a bit:
i find the horse to glow too much. Horses have hair right? so I feel that the horse overall should be less glowy (Im not sure thats a word...) since hair doesnt reflected light that much.
then again, since its not a real horse but a unicorn, maybe you want that glowing skin feeling.If yes, then I apologize for the stupid comment The patterns of highlight vs shadow indicate that the animal has fur rather than skin. It's a nit-picky detail, but light does play off of different surfaces differently, and the patterns are consistent with fur rather than skin.

The "glow" you're speaking of is a result of the shininess of the individual hairs. While no real horse would have that much contrast (ie: hair that shiny), a horse with silver hair sure could. Too many people hear of a silver unicorn and picture a white horse; I had to try coming up with what a silver-haired horse might really look like. That's what I enjoy in art, taking the non-real and trying to make it real.

Edit: I forgot to mention. Hair actually tends to by much shinier than skin. It may not look it at times, because the light it's reflecting is being sent off at some odd angle and not into your eyes. That only means, though, that at the right angle you would catch that highlight. Horses, with their incredibly short hair, tend to display a multitude of these highlights from any angle, since short hair will follow the contours of the body more closely.

Quote: Originally Posted by Jenosavel The patterns of highlight vs shadow indicate that the animal has fur rather than skin. It's a nit-picky detail, but light does play off of different surfaces differently, and the patterns are consistent with fur rather than skin.

The "glow" you're speaking of is a result of the shininess of the individual hairs. While no real horse would have that much contrast (ie: hair that shiny), a horse with silver hair sure could. Too many people hear of a silver unicorn and picture a white horse; I had to try coming up with what a silver-haired horse might really look like. That's what I enjoy in art, taking the non-real and trying to make it real.

Edit: I forgot to mention. Hair actually tends to by much shinier than skin. It may not look it at times, because the light it's reflecting is being sent off at some odd angle and not into your eyes. That only means, though, that at the right angle you would catch that highlight. Horses, with their incredibly short hair, tend to display a multitude of these highlights from any angle, since short hair will follow the contours of the body more closely. thanks for the confirmation that I said something stupid no really, thanks for your answer about this, I ll think about that when I paint

Quote: Originally Posted by kais

And here's a couple of half-hourish sketches that I'm doing to avoid cleaning...

Kuunavang, 'cause even if he got stuck and boring after a while, he was still pretty nifty


part of the iMac sitting on my desk... ah, who needs the rest of the thing?

I started a new painting, this time going with no reference photos of any sort. I've got the colors generally blocked in, anyone have any comments on composition or that kind of early stage stuff?