This is still a QUEST blog, after all

I have a new purpose for this blog, since the original "draw and analyze daily" is now achieved.
There's something very powerful I discovered, and I'm teaching myself to control it: habit.

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You'd think this is related to the post. It's not. It's actually a bad, quick custom brush test.

You're welcome.

GOAL 1:
Rediscover what I'm actually passionate about. Which subjects I'm actually interested in. Draw them because my personal art should be personal and free.
Status: I'm horribly influenced in my choice of subjects by what is mainstream (avoid at all costs!) and what is unpopular to the masses (I'll be ignored!). For so much time I failed to realize it's impossibile to feel the drive to draw for myself, if I'm incapable of focusing on what I like to draw.
I'm so wrapped up in this "but all I produce must be appetible because I have to make a name for myself!!" state of mind, that I literally can't understand what I love and what is induced by external pressure anymore.

GOAL 2:
Pick up some healthy habits and report results here:
- Make some physical exercise everyday. I live on the edge of a huge park, I have an exercise bike in my bedroom and my mom is a physiotherapist. I defintely have what I need
- Go to sleep at 12:00 am and set alarm clock at 9:00
- Stretch and make posture exercises everyday for my back and muscles
Status: I've been travelling every week this summer, but during a 10 days stay at home I've already started an experiment. It went great: I could manage all of this, although starting gradually, and be productive with art and meet with friends too. Now I just need to regain my routine.
I'm a very dynamic person and I love sports, so this isn't a huge sacrifice; I'm actually only worried about time management. I'll make adjustments if needed.

Ugh

Currently fighting with school stuff - have a quick cloud painting practice.

Analysis will come later, as soon as I manage to breathe :v

Ski season

Why do I crave snow so much?
Speed painting from reference of Ovindoli, a mountain place I miss very much.

All together now:

- one brush

- no color picking

- no lineart

• This took very little - between 10 and 15 minutes
• Contrast looks a little better-managed than usual 

• Those clouds suck, no matter how stylized they ended up looking
• I'm not happy with the general feel of the textures. Time to make some good brushes

Experience gained: 2 points!

- I feel I need a "multiple strokes" brush. Scribbling with a single tip is fun and all, but I feel it doesn't simulate the effect I'm after well enough. I also need brushes that are better suited to painting environments - more texture, less control
- I realized I have little to no experience with rendering clouds. Practice needed!

Cutout

I found the reference for this on Pinterest by typing "prostitute". Whut.

Limitations: just one brush, no color picker (not so daunting when you have a greyscale ref :P), no preliminary skecth.

Let see here - at some point I used the cutout filter on the refence: it simplifies the image by reducing the number of colors and making more or less complex adjacent patches out of them. You have control on edge fidelty and color complexity. I looked for something that could help me envision the values in definite areas.

• I used the filter midway during the exercise and my patches of grey were quite close to what happened to the reference picture after the cutout. I wasn't expecting that!
• I don't mind a rectangular, minimal background like that - I feel I'm getting a little more used to this kind of thing

• I don't like the face. There's something wrong with the values and the patches of grey don't really deliver a good sense of  volume

Experience gained: 2 points!

- I need to practice more on painting faces and getting the volumes down in a few strokes. Speedpainting of faces from reference pics with a time limit should work - perhaps I could make 6 per day, 5 minutes each?
- The cutout filter is a valuable tool. I'll definitely use it again to get a better grasp on synthesis

Overused

Tigers are an easy choice when it comes to animal portraits but what can I say - they are such scenographic subjects.

Same as last times: one brush, no color picker, no outlines. Analyzer mode: ON!

• It seems that I'm moving towards more decorative solutions - the rough parallel scribbling in the background was spontaneous and doesn't look bad; those almost rectangular patches of fur seem to work nice; I think I'm improving with framing and cuts too - negative space foliage and fur look good, I'm gonna try that again with other subjects

• Still struggling with contrast
• I feel it's too soon to start tweaking colors - no trippy interpretations for now
• I wanted it to look fine with bigger blotches of color and less detail

Experience gained: 2 points!

- I need to improve on synthesis. I should try shrinking and blurring the original reference picture, so as to be unable to go into details and forced to stick to the general impression
- I'd love to get better at managing negative space and making it a part of my style

Standing on nothing

Another speedpainting I did back in July. 

Oh deer, you don't seem to be standing on very solid ground!

Limitations:
- no color picking
- only use one hard brush
- no lineart, sketching and such; apply color directly

• Messy erasing on the edges looks interesting
• The background is very rough and painterly but does look like forest. A bit
• I managed to keep myself from touching up the background
• I actually didn't use the picker at all this time around!
• I can see I'd do much better now - this was from last July

• I couldn't keep myself from touching up the damn deer
• Speaking of which, it looks stiff and the neck is especially off
• The deer looks really bad exactly where I went back with a smaller brush to "fix it"...
• ...and it doesn't seem to be stading on the ground. The problem was that bunch of branches/stray that cover its feet: in the picture it's actually a lot closer to the viewer and out of focus, so the deer's shadow wasn't visible and I couldn't really deliver a sense of distance
•  The colors aren't fresh and bright as they're supposed to

Experience gained: X points!

- Work work work on freshness and brightness of colors, perhaps even pushing values and saturation a bit

- Do NOT zoom in and go small brush on speedpainting like these - I need to work with large solid blotches of color and get better at being expressive with few strokes 

- Do NOT go for details if the base stucture is wrong 

Brush test

Back in August I started working on some more personal custom Brushes. I was looking for something with texture, shape dynamics and a "dry brush strokes" feel. Or something chalky.

Here's a random furry creature I made while testing the brush. I named it Beebo. The brush, not the beast.
Analysis:

•  This Beebo brush looks okay. Not too texturized, still reliable for sketching and blocking out flat colors, with a hint of silky texture. I'm using it a lot
• Beebo feels especially good for scribbling and hair tufts
• The values are decent
• I like the result of cutting out parts of the creature in a nonconventional way

• Beebo needs some more work
• As this was not character design practice, the creaure turned out random and uninspired... but unlike other times where I just draw without planning, I haven't created any particularly interesting body parts/markings 
• Anatomy and perspective fail here and there

Experience gained: 3 points!

- Painting something as a custom brush test instead of just scribbling around is a good opportunity to produce and practice more

- Sketches emerging from a brush test SHOULD be checked and fixed if anatomy and perspective suck, no matter how little planning there was behind :D

- I'll experiment more on weird cuts and framing

Pearboobs

Meet pearboobs.
This lady was my first practice digital speedpainting from reference.

Limitations:
- no color picking
- only use one hard brush
- no lineart, sketching and such; apply color directly

So...

• I finally found a comfortable solid brush for speedpainting - hard, flat, sliiigthly texturized. Check out the next post, "Brush test" 
• The limitations are helping a lot in learning how to get colors right and honing proportions
• I started noticing I don't like the framing and those edges being so randomly chopped off

•  The framing is bad - I stuck to the reference picture, but I need to find a better solution
• Low contrast, again
• Many traits and proportions aren't as accurate as hey should be
• I did use the picker a couple times, but I swear I've dropped it completely since this speedpainting D:

Experience gained: 3 points!

- Still need to work on smiles and expression lines 

- No more color picker. Never again! 

- Framing and composition need some planning - I could try to cut off some parts of the background and only paint patches of it in a relatively small spot behind the character, so as to contextualize it without extending the background completely

Outdoors speedpainting

Grabbed my laptop, sat under a tree and speedpainted what I saw. This was my first excercise of this kind and I improved a lot since then.

I'm still not happy with my landscapes and similar things, but this first attempt sucks big time compared to the latest crap :D
Let's break it down:

• Although I couldn't use any form of color picking, the colors came out quite faithful
• The building looks more solid than I expected, for someting I painted with a soft brush with a lot of Transfer

• Soft brushes: they are BAD for this kind of things. In my experience, that is
• Those tiles are horrible - that soft brush didn't help
•  I'm seriously bad at stylizing foliage

Experience gained: 4 points!

- I'll avoid soft brushes for environments and speedpainting in general; solid ones help block out volumes fast and find new graphic solutions
- I need to create some good brushes with which to paint foliage effectively...
- ... AND practice on drawing and painting foliage without them!
- My environments need more contrast - something to keep in mind during next painting sessions

Mustang

This came galloping on a lonely Photoshop blank canvas in a few seconds.

It's not good, it's not accurate, it's just a few brush strokes. But it's fast and spontaneous and I think this kind of random outbursts can give out a lot about our inclinations and what we need to improve on.
Analysis!

• More dynamic and fresh than my usual stuff
• Values seem decent for a very loose sketch
• Took very little time

• Anatomy is off here and there. I wanted to keep this one as it came out, but if I were to pick up from here I should really grab some references and fix neck, legs and whatnot

Experience gained: 4 points! 

- I should start doing (very)speed sketching from reference and concentrate on communicating values with just a few quick spots of color. This should boost my skill with perspective, volumes and synthesis
- When planning an illustration I should let loose more often and produce a wide arrange of spontaneous dynamic sketches, hoping to be able to keep everythng fresh while progressing...
- ...then prepare a nice set of reference pics and fix what doesn't work
- Using a heavily texturized brush helps keeping some elements out of control and favors happy accidents