Hi Wibly! I totally agree with Luigi Manese on keeping a keen eye on the structure of your paintings. I've also made a similar transition from pure lineart to painting. But to this day, I still rely on a well-structured drawing that is underlying my paintings. Looking at your painting studies, I can see that you are blocking in the greater shapes with sharp brush strokes and then adding in the details once the scene is roughly established. I think it's a great way to study and avoids going into the details prematurely. But looking at your amazingly clean drawings on your instagram, I would suggest to not entirely abandon drawing in your painting quest. Drawing and painting are not separate, they work together best. So similarly to your cell shading process: - First, draw your subject where you are only concerned with the proportions, the anatomy, the perspective, the composition and the flow of the subject matter. - Secondly, make your underpainting (like your attached paintings) underneath the well structured drawing to establish the color palette and the atmosphere. -Thirdly, when this sort of "imprimatura" layer is ready, you can start creating the overpainting, working out your edges and details, the lines are slowly disappearing beneath your brush strokes until you arrive at a purely painted image (of course you can also leave some lineart visible if it fits the piece). This layered process assures, that you are not overwhelmed with having to work out mood, structure, edges and flow in one step, but to slowly build up your forms from skeleton to skin in a reliable manner. Hope it can help, Joël

Hey there! Wonderful work! I really like your shapes. I think you should start learning a bit more figure drawing and gesture, I reckon that would be the most drastic way to improve your art :)

Hi @Wibly, these are great pieces. I feel like the transition from graphic to painterly is a hard one, because we start to move closer to realism. As a result, smaller mistakes become more apparent to the viewer. From looking at your pieces, I think your use of color when observing from life is quite strong (I'm assuming the color pieces with the dog and the cabinet are from life). Additionally, I think your use of value is pretty solid as well. Often times when we start painting however, we start to struggle to balance so many different aspects of painting, and some of our fundamentals begin to fall through. I think the biggest thing to watch out for is to not forget your drawing fundamentals! I attached an example from one of your pieces (it looks like a comp from imagination). If you wanted to take this piece to another level of finish, then you want to make sure the drawing is mostly resolved, especially for the focal areas. Additionally, if you're ready to tackle another subject, I would say to work on a bit of edge variation. We can use a variety of edges to either represent form, materials, or to create/pull back our focal areas. I attached a brief paint over for one of your value paintings where I varied up the edge work to give it a bit more believability. This was honestly one of the last fundamentals I even started to focus on (I'm still currently working on it now) so you could choose to keep that piece of advice in the back burner while you try to juggle all the other parts of painting. Awesome work, and would love to see more of what you create as you progress. Let me know if I can help out in any more ways!