[Jabo]

[basenotic]

[GordMacDonald]

w photorefs






_________________
Gord MacDonald: http://www.cg2020.com

[Mikko K]

Keep up the inspirational work guys. I check this thread a b'zillion times during every working day!

Idiocy of the day:
If anybody is like me and wondering what's the secret to getting better..
it's in not taking a shower in a few days, and busting your arse till it gets full of small red spots. I need to remind myself all the time.

[Matthew]

maybe limit yourself if you wanna be better../maybe all comes down to what is pleasing for your eye though, something we can call personal taste and the development of the same.
Honestly I find the illustrative rather boring nowadays, sometimes wish some of you guys would experiment more than you do.
Me teachers thinks I experiment too much though so maybe something in between would work fine? hmm
In order to paint a house you do not have to paint a house, oh well what do I know anyway, right?

to be or not to be is not the question.


gotta go

[Mikko K]

Matthew: Good points there.

Personally I think 90 percent of the CG stuff is really boring, and as relevant to art as Kevin Federline is to music. That said, if you want to make any money out of your work then it's difficult to be very experimental.

I'm trying to find ways to do something that's commercial enough to sell, but loose enough to be fun. I'd like to do some minimalistic landscapes (plein air), but I can't see that as an affordable job.

[lingy-0]

millo k,that's awesome.
xhui9,good to see u again,nice work.
Mitsui,thanks,great work.
Ranath,octavian,cool.



_________________
http://lingy000.com/

[retro]

mikko & matthew: i have been thinking about that a lot in the last time. i guess what you like & enjoy changes from time to time. i'm struggling to bring my school days to an end, lately realizing that i thought maybe a bit too much about the how than about what to paint. my stuff is definately lacking in depth and i dont mean perspective (but that too). i have trouble in putting a piece together that is not the usual clichee. i do not think that this is a question of the medium ("I think 90 percent of the CG stuff is really boring"), but this is only because digital is such a quick medium that many people (me included) are tempted not to bother thinking too much about what they paint, which is probably the problem.

considering what to sell, i have little experience in buissness, but i think its about doing what you enjoy and then find sb who will buy. i guess this is especially difficult with digital, because most customers (who are not into art) do not like a glossy print as much as an original oil or watercolor. you might sell posters to make a living, but i guess thats difficult as you have to promote yourself pretty well or be already widely known. imho spooge would make a quick and easy buck if he finally started to sell his artwork printed for a reasonable price on his website.

just my 2 cents, this might all be bullshit.

btw: matthew i share your teachers opinion. do you paint the figure/landscape in traditional media?

mikko: would you like to exchange some highres mainboard scans ?

[Mikko K]

EDIT: Lingy-0, Thanks. That tree looks very nice!

Hey what's wrong with mainboards?

What I meant by selling isn't selling prints which doesn't easily replace a dayjob to be fair. I mean getting a job as a games artist or freelancing (and actually being employed) instead of just being artsy fartsy over the forums.

My idea of boring CG has little to do with speedpaintings by the way. I just loathe the magazine cover -type stuff that has some over rendered chick's face with scales or sci-fi goth make up. The kind of stuff which quality is determined by the amount of detail, or the resolution of the image posted. It does have its place in the world, but that's K-Fed and I prefer Motorhead that doesn't try to please so much.

[Ranath]

to add my shit to the discussion, I think most CG stuff is boring, too. That's mainly because most of CG stuff involves elfs and angsty females in dresses painted Linda Bergkvist style, and those images often have 12 pages of story description (which is necessary for they only painted the character and forgot to tell the story in the image). Traditional painting is in worse state in my opinion though, I think Andrew Loomis said that "Much of the art exhibited today would not buy a sack of potatoes". These pieces of artwork that contain just white canvas with one black square that are sold for +3000$ is pretty horrible crap in my humble opinion, and it makes even the worst CG works seem almost acceptable.

Anyway, I think the stuff you see for example here and CA.org and cgtalk is brilliant, for multiple reasons. First reason being the technical excellence (starting from basics like composition), that alone can make a piece good. Secondly there's a lot of good ideas going on, not as much as you could hope but good amount anyway. Thirdly, you can sometimes see really really good storytelling in CG works, and that absolutely rocks.

The bad thing I see is (when it comes to being experimental and creative), while I study in an art school, I don't get to experiment with stuff. They tell what they want and we have to do exactly that, in a way that it could be sold to a client. And they keep us too busy to really start messing around with our own stuff. It kind of sucks if that's the way it's everywhere, that you're just taught to do the same thing that everyone else's doing because that's what clients want at the moment.

[octavian]

[Chruser]

[Ranath]

[ax--hv]

Come on, paint already!

[Cpt.Obvious]

[basenotic]

[GordMacDonald]

Chruser - thanks

w photoref



Gord
_________________
Gord MacDonald: http://www.cg2020.com

[Mitsui]

mikko amazing
lingy nice as usual!


_________________
Goro Fujita: www.area-56.de

[Ranath]

[octavian]

playing with some Sozaijitten photos

[M@.]

Cool to see some talking here :p used to be a lot more talking before, and for a long while now it's just some "amazing" comments only much more fun with some discussion and cool pics at the same time

lingy, mikko: amazing ! ( )

I think the key is just to have fun and try to experiment enough, and observe new things so you don't turn in circles. Trying new mediums and giving yourself constraints is cool too. Makes you think in other ways that in return lightens what you already are used to do.

Finally got something out of my tablet that I'm not too ashamed of, after a long month of almost no painting.



[/img]
_________________
http://mv.cgcommunity.com/

[Pringle]

Nice stuff M@, Mikko and Lingy. What M@ said makes sense...


_________________
http://pringleart.com

[octavian]

[Joe84]

hey mikko, nice painting. i think the tower 3 o clock from the ship just above the spot light i think could blend in more. it looks as though it cuts off at the light.

but other than that, kickass

[Naeem]

octavian, m@, mikko, pringle, lingy-0, matthew> BEAUTIFUL work! keep it up. totally enjoying every minute of it.


Great discussion going on. My 2 cents; i have been pondering the same thing. And more and more, I am trying to push myself to think outside the box, more toward the What rather then the HOW. But my question is this; isn't the HOW equally important? How can you fully execute the WHAT if you are not skilled with the HOW. I understand that you should experiment as matthew said, but that still falls under the 'how' rather then the what. I think the 'how' is technique, and the 'what' is the idea; am i wrong? Without a well-developed technique, the idea cannot come be executed well, right?

But I think I also see what the others are saying; that those with a well-developed technique just keep showing off technique, and forget about the idea. That's what i've been fighting with. It's easy to get lost in the technicality of things, and bury yourself away from an innovative idea.

Suggestion: Perhaps there should be a new activity here on sijun that tries to induce the what. We all paint ideas, and try to improve on that; unlike me, where i only post studies of things, just like I'm about to right now hahaha. I suck.

Speaking for myself, I tend to 'fear' venturing out into the world of exploration of ideas and such. I think otehrs may have the same problem.

My other question is; does it have to do with creativity? I have ideas, but not many ideas when it comes to certain things. On the other hand, I have a friend who can rave on and on about different ideas, and the only thing she likes is a well-honed technique, which is the 'how'; although she does have a decent technique to put it down on paper with. Is there a way to instill this sense of...'creativity'? I've been sketching more and more from the mind, but I still tend to be trapped inside the box. I think it is my knowledge that I am very far indeed from even coming close to getting good at the 'how' of things, such as perspective, composition, etc.

Just my 2 cents. now rip me apart for desecrating this thread with my acrylic STUDY of a prismacolor pencil; muahahahahah


and a quick study of the mountainous view from PCC

_________________
http://www.annisnaeem.blogspot.com/

[ax--hv]

Here's an illustration to what have been said. As one of the most unimaginative fellows here I show off my thechnique once again :)


Mikko > master stuff!
lingy-0, octavian, M@., Pringle > quite masterly either :)
Annis, nice studies

[robair]

Hi all
to many name and too many great images in here.
Keep rocking.

[retro]

annisahmed: what i actually meant was the problem of bringing it together: idea and the proper technique to make it a good illustration. problem is if you start illustrating a novel or a poem illustration does not necessarily mean that you draw/paint what is described in the text.

often it takes away from the imagination of the reader. for example if the author describes a young dark haired girl (we all like that dont we), there will probably as many ideas of her look as there are readers, it is not necessarily advisable to hire an illustrator to paint her portrait. but this point is rather a point of view thing, we could argue about that all day.

what is more important (and less arguable) is to understand that you as an illustrator have the possibility (if the client lets you) to add your own feeling/opinion/point of view to the story as you choose the pictures you add to the text. i have trouble describing that, as im struggling with it myself. let me use some cheap examples: with a text describing the birth of a child you could add a picture not of the child but of a sun rising (or of a cloudy day if everything is going down the drain after that). if the text describes the hardships of physical labour you dont have to show some guy digging a hole or harvesting in the sun, maybe you could make some illustrations of ants carrying loads multiple times bigger than themselves. ... this only scratches the surface, there are great solutions for how to illustrate in any nearby bookstore or library, just look for text/picture relationship, not refined technique. now what you where asking about: this thing has to be trained like drawing or painting. you may be "talented" with creative ideas, meaning you come up with them more easily than others, but still you have to work on it. i recently started to have a sketchbook with me all times, less for drawings than for ideas, microcompositions, ideas about texts a read etc. i can recommend doing that.

i lately realized a lot of my fellow students couldnt draw the slightest portrait of anybody or understand how light makes a surface have volume, but have astonished me by having *great* ideas for communicating their ideas/feelings on the text. all i come up with is glossy bullshit.


i think the activity thing is a great idea. how about choosing a short story or poem (difficult), not about who posts the most rendered pic but a bit of talking about ideas etc??? i would be in.

--- enough talking, just tell me to shut up and i will.


the pencil study is very nice. you captured the light effects. maybe sharpen
and crop?


paint to post

[Matthew]

retro, I believe I have become too abstract for my own good, whether it is good -bad or not I cannot tell but it's giving me a hard time doing the painting that I do, the decorative painting.
Not much landscape nor figures and I bet u saw anatomy issues in my latest , I am doing decorative, oak, different kinds of marbles ornamental and such... this in traditional and it does really gives you tecnique with different brushes and such, gotta have a badger brush.

If you guys ask me though a personal style should go first, above all. My thoughts are probably lag, Signac himself wrote a book about bringing abstract shapes into a portrative piece. This at the same time as Turner, he probably used a similar tecnique when he painted. I wrote an essay about this. That's another discussion. what I am trying to say is that most things and thoughts have already been done and delt with.

Mikko, wasn't this the same that spooge was struggling with? making it more loose and fun to work with?
This is one of the problems though, maybe two. Both the modern and illustrative are way to conservative. On one hand you have the modern thinking -thinking that everything made with a good tecnique is bad, and on the other u have the illustrative that seems to me to be just the opposite. It's hard to be somewhere in between.

ok no corrective reading, me gotta run.

sry if I not replied all

annis, keep going and you will find out what is best for you, maybe look at different directions in the painting. Me myself have just recently starting to adore the salvador dali painting and the stuff he did, I didn't used to like his work, now I do. Maybe takes time for the brain to understand different approaches and others work.

keep up everyone

[DavidSmit]

yeaaah! Sijun is discussing again! I like the commenting/discussing sijun 10times better than the 'i like, heres mine' sijun

So i figured this would be a good time to sign up and start posting.


I thinks it's hard to have both great original idea's and great technique at the same time, since your ideas are based on the things that occupy your mind, and if that�s technique your idea's tend to follow that. If combining things to create a �new� idea is on your mind you technique tends to become more flexible to achieve those idea's.

But there�s nothing wrong with a very skillfully drawn image that�s a clich�, neither is there anything wrong with a great idea that�s not so skillfully drawn (as long as the idea comes across off course).
There just 2 separate things.

I sometimes use the �throw a lot of shit at the canvas until something comes out� technique. But found out that that�s not the holy grail of idea development. Since you still only see the patterns in those �random shapes� that you know. Off course it can help

But I think in order to have a lot of creative original idea�s you need to expand your horizon as much as possible. (off course by doing so you won�t have a lot of time left to improve you skills, bringing us back to the start and makes my reply utterly useless� sigh).

I can't even remeber the exact point i was replying to.... hmmm not a good sign.


And to post an image with it:
A speedie from last night.