I apologise for the incoming wall of text, but it's pretty much a self reflection, sort of like a post activity review. I'm new to digital painting, and I got kinda bored of painting the spheres and cubes, so I went on pinterest and found something interesting to paint. It ended up taking me over 40 hours over the course of 7 days to finish. I tried my hardest to do an exact 1:1 copy, I think I did pretty good considering my previous attempt at the spheres and cube. Looking at the assignment submissions from others here, I think I should do shorter and lower fidelity paintings next. Seems like something that's less taxing. Doing longer studies can be good to train observation, but I think what I need now are quicker and shorter painting studies; I need the mileage of painting a variety of different materials and lighting scenarios and colours. I suppose the problem with me is that I find massive resistance against doing the studies of simple subjects. Maybe it's because of a fear that "it's so simple that you shouldn't be struggling with it or fail at it." And as a beginner, that's a high hurdle to clear. This self-imposed and unconscious expectation makes me cower from doing the simple but effective shorter studies. But with overly ambitious and complex subjects like the rock I painted, this mental barrier is removed and I no longer need to fear failure because I don't expect myself to succeed at something this difficult so easily. I suppose I need to define my winning / success conditions to my studies so that it I am optimally engaged with the right amount of challenge so that I won't get bored or look down and trivialise the study subject; it has to be challenging enough that I can allow myself to fail many many times before succeeding I also need to learn how to focus on executing the techniques and skills instead of letting the anxiety of not being able to paint a basic subject get in the way. In other words, I've to deal with the fear of failure and what failing at painting something simple would mean about my abilities as an artist (very scary) I think my fear stems from a perfectionist mindset. It's been quite toxic for me, I feel. Thus, I will focus on simply appreciating and enjoying the painting process and the joy in the feel of each stroke instead of the end result. I should aim to do art for it's own sake (because it's fun) and detach myself from the burdensome ambitions and desires to become better at art quickly.

I am now noticing that in the cylinders the perspective is a bit off and I still struggle a lot with choosing the right colors and carving forms

Had some issues with my computer not wanting to cooperate, so it was slow...but I got them done. The cube and square and the red ball I used the color picker on them; on the weird shapes, I zoomed in next to the color I wanted and physically matched the color to it.

Here are a few of my works this week. Top is the reference and bottom is my painting. I’m most proud of the last one with the reflections and refractions. Really pleased with how all of them turned out. Something I’ll work on in the coming week will be the amount of time I spend per painting. I get lost in the minor details and feel I’m overworking some bits without actually improving the piece as a whole. It’ll also preserve the painterly feel as photorealism shouldn’t be the objective at this stage I think

I can see myself improving, but I'm still struggling and taking a while to pick my colors to match. I think my values are strong but I find it tricky to keep lights-in-lights and shadows-in-shadows when one doesn't have a matte surface. I learned a lot about reflections and different textured surfaces. I'm still building the patience to do long studies, but I keep short sessions that I resume at later time. I'm not using underdrawings when they're not part of the assignment file which leads to me warping my shapes. I was pushing to start with the painting process immediately.

Used Procreate and focused on picking colors by eye instead of using the color picker... For the darker red ball I kept everything on one layer instead having two layers for the background and object, which was a good stretch for me. Any feedback and critiques welcome!

I feel like I can copy what I see pretty well, but it’s hard to imagine especially with metallic and translucent things like these being able to do this from imagination.

Hello, here is my approach. Last week I can't blend the borders of value very well, and this week I got the answer from course. But this week, I am struggling with material with color. I already tried my best. I appreciate any feedback.

Day. I'm still a bit unsure on when to use the blend tool vs trying to blend via the brush

Here's my week 2 assignment, I used Clip Studio Paint's blender tool to smooth-out transitions between values. ]

I used the eyedropper on the red ball and focused on realistic detail. Tried my hand at color picking myself on the other two!

I tried to push and exaggerate the colors a little bit on the "extra", which I did instead of the sphere since I had already done that in week 1. I also added some subtle gradients along the different surfaces of each for a little extra punch, though I've been a bit sloppy on the sphere and cube.

My submission for this week’s assignment. After studying the three, overall I think I still need to improve on the brushwork especially the red sphere. Somehow I could not get it right and not sure what I can do to improve it. Glad to have done this, open for critiques!

Hey everyone, here is my work for this asg. I know eyeballing is another skill to practice but decided focus in edges instead! So critique regarding that is welcomed (Eyeballing is going to be a regular practice for me now though)

Started eyeballing more considering the feedback I was given before. I eyeballed the color until it looked like the one in the image and then color picked to check my accuracy and correct myself by color picking the color I placed and adjusting it. Most of my accuracy mistakes seem to happen in the colored grays in the shadows but not by massive amounts. I only color picked a few colors in the refractive/translucent red sphere because i was struggling a lot on that one, tons of colors. Relying on eyeballing pushed me to simplify more in order to be faster, specially in the Dobby sculpture. Thought that the folds around the neck in the clothing would take me a lot of time but thinking in planes and laying a dark and light stroke + blending stroke allowed me to get them done quickly.

Here is my week two assignment. I found the glass sphere the easiest to do. Not what I expected at all!

The line guide, layers and the blender sure saved up a lot of time. These are 1 hour as well Trying to understand why the color/shadows are the way they are as I go, the 2nd image sure was a challenge. In the 3rd image, why is there a grayish shadow below the shapes? Something about the light bouncing? Can't figure it out. Anyway I'll do a couple more and then dobby is next.