I Want More Style and Less Realism
3yr
Tony
So here is my latest portrait, this time of Evil Ed from Fright Night. I think the likeness came out accurately enough, but I’m not happy with the style. It almost looks like I took the photo and just added some smudges and effects. I don’t want so realistic a look, but I don’t want to lose the likeness, so how and where can I add more style and personal preference?
As far as personal preference, I already changed the composition, made it greyscale, changed the brightness, contrast, and gamma. I made some adjustments to a couple of areas, blurred some areas to not distract from the focal point, and added some of my own detail in the eyes. After all that, it still ends up looking like I could have just photoshopped the actual photo and saved myself hours of rendering. Any general feedback or tips to overcome these specific issues would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! 🤓
Hey there! Nice work, I honestly like the smudgy look a bit :)
The thing you are talking about really sounds like post-realism to me which was covered by @Sinix in one of his newer videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UozmOJajIgo I definitely recommend checking it out.
It is actually something I also struggle with. What really worked for me was that I started to show the structure of the body much more and started using more geometrical shapes. While it's much more abstract, it is still realistic enough.
You might also want to check out @Marco Bucci 's stuff, he balances this idea really well.
I hope I could help. Keep up the good work! :)
I think the most common approach or answer would be to learn from artists who's styles you admire by doing some master studies of their work. I believe Stan and Marshal did a video about this, calling them art parents or something.
But really, another way of going about it is to just play, experiment, and try new things, even new mediums. You may have a particular medium you want to use, but you may learn something playing with something else you could carry back over into your preferred medium. But you have to give yourself some time to just mess around and push yourself. So I guess my advice is to play and try new things. :)
Hey, Levi! This seems to be the general consensus, so I’m definitely going to be doing everything you’ve mentioned. I think it basically comes down to switching my priorities from spending most of my time working on finishing pieces to show to people, to spending most of it sketching, experimenting, and studying from other artists. Thanks for the helpful advice! 😁
Hey Tony!
The best way to inject style is to adopt "art parents" as Stan and Martial recommend. Pick artists who's style you want to emulate, wether its in their shape design and calligraphy, composition, colors, etc. Work on studying and copying there work, and you will start to intuitively inject a lot of that style into your work. Eventually it will morph into something of your own as you start to understand why these different artists made these style choices, and you start to create your own style!
Hey Hisham! It’s funny that you and Aline both mentioned the art parents thing. I totally agree and will be focusing my efforts in that area until something comes of it. Thanks for the suggestion! 😁
Only you can answer that question. You need to find your own style that makes your work uniquely yours. Very nice work though!
Thanks, James! The plan for now is to get comfortable with other brushes and adopt some art parents to study from, so hopefully that gets me familiar with some other styles and techniques. Also, I checked out your YouTube channel and really enjoyed what I watched so far, especially that montage of like 50 different pieces. They looked amazing! 🤓
I suggest you study Proko's videos on shading, which teach a solid understanding of light and shadow, instead of just copying photos. He exaggerates the core shadow, and you may or may not like it, but it is a good example of a somewhat stylized approach, with a solid foundation.
Hey, Izak! Thanks for the tip! I know there are a lot of stylized ways to shade something, so hopefully as I get better I’ll be able to play around with that in more ways.
Hey Tony,
I'd say find some art parents, as Marshall likes to call them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxJOjvsj3j0 :
People whose style you like and will inspire you to start making your own stylization too. You can even study an artist by trying to do a new painting in their style (not copying one of their painting but working on a new subject and doing your best to make it look like their work). This, obviously, is for studying purpose only, as you don't really want to become a clone of any one artist. Doing this exercise multiple times with a good variety of artists will lead you to think and come up with your own mix of stylistic choices.
Hey Aline, thanks for the advice! I do remember that episode and told myself I’d eventually do that, but I think I’ve been too confused by art I like, in terms of how it’s made. I see the brush work and I have no idea what brush to use to recreate that style and I end up postponing the whole thing. I will be experimenting with new brushes and messing with brush settings this week, so hopefully I can find or create something that matches a style I like and then I can finally do a study of some artists whose style I enjoy. I also like the idea of eventually doing their style with a different subject. Sounds like a fun way to learn so I hope to get to that as well. Thanks! 😁
Hi Tony,
I would advise you to use a different type of brush, not one with a round tip, and not to worry too much about blending.
Experiment a bit with different brushes and see which one gives you the result you like best.
I struggled with it for years because I couldn't get rid of the "plastic" style until I started using only two or three brushes for everything, a marker from a Kyle T. set. Webster's set, one of his gradients and, above all, the default star brush of Photoshop, which I had snubbed up to that moment considering them useless.
Using these three unlikely brushes I was able to replicate the effect I was getting when I was colouring with pencils and watercolours.
Thank you, Serena! I’m definitely going to be testing out new brushes this week and doing a lot of experimenting. I’m also glad you said plastic, because that’s a great way to describe what I don’t like about this piece and some of my other ones. I’m on Procreate and a bunch of the default brushes have cool edges and textures, but they don’t behave in ways that I like, so I guess I’ll start messing with the brush settings. I have to get familiar with them at some point, so I might as well get started on that. Thanks again for the helpful advice! 😁
im sorry that i don't have any helpful advice and i hope that some one will help you with this because its such a beautiful piece i love it! .
keep up the awesome work i love were your going Tony. 😁👌
btwz i have not been posting because im working on my technic and ive been doing a lot of wood carving and it just so happens that i cut right into my thumb to night 😂👍 lol i wont be doing very much now other than drawing and watching TV lol maybe its not so bad after all 😉👌✌🤞
yeah it was pretty bad it was bleeding quit a bit but it healed up already though and it could have been way worst. thank god. 👌😁 & that's why you should always use gloves 😂 lol
Ouch! I hope it wasn’t too bad of a cut. Wood carving sounds cool though. Thanks for the kind words! 😊
